blog

The team has been hard at work on Community Server 2007. Our goal has been to make customizing the site’s look-and-feel easier. I posted about it the other day here.

We’ve made a lot of progress on the developer level features, cutting down dramatically on the number of files required change a site’s theme. But we’ve also been working on some of the new built-in WYSIWYG tools. I thought I’d post a few previews of where we’re at (below). Another awesome capability we’ll support is an import/export feature to make sharing themes, and applying new ones really simple.

Lastly, if you want to read more about Community Server we also just published a 45+ page Community Server Evaluation Guide.

Choose layout:
Both at the site and blog level you can control how you want the site presented.

Set site colors:
Control all site colors as well as images.

Pick a site color:

New HTML + JavaScript Color Selector allows you to choose from 32 million colors.

Change fonts:
Control font faces and sizes easily.

Select blog theme:
Simple and clean tools for selecting the theme for your blog or site.

I’m a huge BlackBerry fan. But there is one thing that has bugged me forever: I’m calling it the BlackBerry “smiley bug”.

Our Exchange Server is hosted and we run the BlackBerry Enterprise Mail Server on it too, which I believe is where this bug has decided to take up residence. When you receive an email or send an email from a BlackBerry and there is a smiley 🙂 the BlackBerry server software converts it to an upper-case J.

So you say something sarcastic, like ‘That’s a really silly idea :)’. But what you really sent was ‘That’s a really silly idea J’. Which doesn’t exactly have the same intended meaning!

Has anyone else experienced this?

About 6 months ago we began the initial discussion of a new business in partnership with Shane Henderson, who previously worked at the Match.com the premier match making site for singles. The result of that business partnership was the formation of a new company whose first product launches as a “Beta” in just a few more days: JobBurner.com:

JobBurner.com is a marketplace for job seekers and employers. JobBurner.com takes an innovative new approach for helping employers and job seekers find each other as well as building and sharing jobs through a highly targeted affiliate network.

We’re days away from launch, so stay tuned!

If you’re in college and looking for an internship this summer, drop me a line: rhoward@telligent.com. We’d like to bring in 3-5 interns to our office here in Dallas this summer.

We don’t want to disclose what our plans are yet, but suffice to say that you’ll be working on fun project(s) and you’ll get real experience. In fact, if you’ve got ideas for things that you want to work on we’re open to that too!

Either way it will be a fun experience working at a company that builds and sells software that millions of people use every day.

This weekend I woke up to a phone call at 6:30 AM from the property management for our building. Apparently our suite had been broken into early Sunday morning (~1AM). Amazingly all that was stolen was one of our Xbox 360s and a Nintendo GameCube. The thieves obviously weren’t too bright since they left all the other equipment (guitars, cameras, flat panel screens and tvs, computers, laptops, etc.).

How did they get in? Well, after attempting to pry open one of our doors unsuccessfully they used a fire extinguisher to bash through the glass in our front door. How they managed to get into the building, how they knew exactly what they wanted (360), etc. is a whole other discussion…

Now here is the interesting part. Our 360 is setup with an Xbox live account so theoretically if that Xbox live account signs in there should be a log file somewhere that would allow us to get an IP address and (again in theory) the ability to get the ISP to give us a physical address. I doubt we’ll actually take the time to do that, but we could and that’s kind of cool (or big brother-ish). With electronics being so connected now I would almost expect to start seeing asset management companies taking advantage of this, e.g. laptop stolen no problem, just wait for someone to plug it into a network.

So this chain-mail is going around the web and I’ve been tagged (and pestered) several times to add to it. So here it goes…

Five things you didn’t (or maybe did) know about me…

1. Software wasn’t my first choice. My first computer was a Commodore 128 and I remember loading programs off of a tape drive which dates me almost as bad as having said “punch cards’, which is truly old school. So while I definitely had an aptitude for computers at a young age my passion was to become a pilot. My dad was a fighter pilot in WWII (yes he is old) and later flew commercially for a now defunct airline. I had every intention of trying to go to the Air Force and getting my wings. Thankfully my dad talked me out of becoming a pilot. In his opinion, a commercial airline pilot was a glorified bus driver (ouch! …not my words) and that he thought this software thing was a good idea (thanks Dad!). Keep in mind this was late 80s.

2. I’m an avid ice hockey player. I’ve played since I was about 11 and still play here in Dallas. Ice Hockey is HUGE in Dallas incidentally. Maybe someday I can share the ice with Guy Kawasaki who I have read and followed for a long time. I played roller hockey in college and we went to the finals in college. I used to wind surf (I still have 3 boards in my garage) as well as rock climb (~5.12 level) and someday hope to get some time for those sports again.

3. My first business. The first business I started (with my college roommate) was called Campus Consulting. It was essentially “Geek Squad” but for the college students at Baylor University. We did exceptionally well, and had I known then what I know now I would have franchised it! The business did well enough to put me through college, with some support from my parents. I hated debt even back then!

4. Getting a job at Microsoft was a big gamble. I didn’t get hired by Microsoft. Instead I moved to Redmond and took the first job that was offered (an 8 week contract job). 5 months later I was a full time employee. However, I knew that working at Microsoft was the key to my longer term plans for starting a business (again) after learning from the best.

5. I love to read. I read a lot, both magazines and books. While Scott and I share a lot of the same interests in books, I really enjoy science fiction and biographies; usually I let Scott vet the good business books since it seems that is all he reads. Currently I’m reading Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell, not exactly my usual style but it came highly recommended from a friend.

Ben Tiedt, one of the developer’s on the Community Server team, shares some details on the next version of Community Server version 3.0.

Our focus for the 3.0 release is simplifying the platform and making it easier for people to theme the application.

From a technical point of view the current Community Server theme engine is incredibly robust. There are several other applications available that base their theme engine off of a similar technique. The design yields great UI flexibility coupled with some under-the-hood tricks to ensure that ASP.NET compiles the theme (instead of runtime loading on each request). It’s been a very, very proven system.

The challenge we had with the theme engine is that we took a developer’s approach to building UI, i.e. implementing concepts such as inheritance and abstraction to ensure we had tons of flexibility. Unfortunately flexibility usually has a side affect called complexity. For example, a blog theme in Community Server 2.1 has about 55 files associated with it. Each distinct area of a page, such as the search area, would have its own file.

For Community Server 3.0 our goal has been to keep the high level of flexibility so that a Community Server site could have full fidelity with what the design team envisioned, but to also simplify the entire system. So far we’ve made a lot of progress:

Blog Themes (85% reduction)

2.1 Blog Theme: 55 Files

3.0 Blog Theme: 8 Files

Site Theme (58% reduction)

2.1 Site Theme: 164 Files

3.0 Site Theme: 70 Files

In addition to simplifying the theme system we’ll also be introducing something new: dynamic themes. More on that later…

If you want more information on what else is being done, follow Ben’s blog.

After losing a hard drive about a month ago I had to rebuild my machine and of course re-install all the drivers. Apparently when I installed the drivers for my HP printer/fax/scanner I also picked up some additional “functionality” in the form of a survey.

Now don’t get me wrong, I have no problem with surveys. What I don’t like is weeks after I installed the software I magically get a pop-up asking me to complete a survey while I’m working on something else. The amusing part is the completely botched job on the layout of what appears to be a rather simple application:

A friend of mine forwarded me this article from eWeek. In summary it basically summarizes findings from Evans Data that states:

"As expected, developers are finally leaving VB6 and earlier versions; they’re also leaving VB.NET; which is down by 26 percent. This means Java now holds the market penetration lead at 45 percent, followed by C/C++ at 40 percent, and C# at 32 percent."

Now granted that I am extremely biased, but I find these results pretty surprising. My own personal market experience tells me that both Java and C++ are declining in use. I’m also not certain a sampling of 430 people is enough to make these kinds of statements (but I’m no statistician either).

Get the code here from my ASP.NET 2.0 Tips & Tricks talk:

http://communityserver.org/files/folders/robs_files/entry555811.aspx