Minnestar
- I got the privilege of kicking off and introducing Ben and Luke this morning at MinneBar 6. About 1,000 people!
- MinneBar 6 is going down as the best MinneBar yet in my book. Awesome everyone!
- Leading a Minnebar talk on geeky tools to a room of geeks takes guts. Hats off.
- MinneBar Unix Geek
cat foo.txt | awk '{print $3}' | sort | uniq -c. - MinneBar Unix Geeks check out Cool, but obscure unix tools.
- What a great event! Pano shot from the stage at the start of Minnebar.
- At Intro to iPhone Development session.
- At Screw You, LAMP presentation from Dan Grigsby.
- At WordPress as a CMS session.
One of my Minnebar 8 sessions: Build and Deploy Ridiculously Advanced MediaWiki Websites.
My Running a VPS with Confidence session from Minnebar just got online.
Minnebar 6
The new Minnedemo demo room is huge, which is great. Nice to have a place to sit. My buddy Ira grabbed a photo of me with my spiffy MacBook Air.
View from the balcony of Minnedemo!
Minnebar 5
Another record breaking attendance for Minnebar! It’s great that even in year 5 Minnebar is drawing a large group of new people still. What a vibrant community! The group in this one session is as big as the entire group from the first Minnebar.
At the JavaScript session at Minnebar. Full house.
Checking out GPU accelerated development on the iPad session at Minnebar. This is a good reminder why mathematical thinking matters when coding.
At Intro to Git session at Minnebar. The story of git’s creation by Linus always reminds me of a story from the Bible.
See also Minnebar collection.
Great Minnedemo tonight! Way to go everyone that demoed!
For fun, here are my photos from the first Minnebar in 2006. The whole group looks like one of todays sessions.
Add photos that were previously on Flickr.
Minnedemo on May 7th, 2009
The next Minnedemo is now scheduled for May 7, 2009 at 6:00pm. It is free (as always), but registration is required so get signed up. There are 324 open tickets left at this point.
I’m a big fan of Minnedemo and find it a great place to connect with people and hear about some of the products and cool projects everyone is working on. Hope to see you there!
The next Minnedemo is now scheduled for February 6, 2009 at 7:00pm. It is free (as always), but registration is required so go there and get signed up. There are about 260 open tickets left at this point.
Even though it is free that doesn’t mean you can leave your wallet at home. Intermedia Arts is the host for Minnedemo and they have fallen on some difficult times. There will be an opportunity to donate Intermedia Arts (read more about them) and I think the Minnedemo/Minnebar community should show its support with some donations.
I really enjoyed the last Minnedemo (at the same venue). It is a great chance to connect with a great group of local developers, entrepreneurs and a wide variety of other people – each of them very interesting!
Hope to see you there!
Update (January 25th)
I didn’t do a good enough job looking through my calendar. It turns out we are going to be heading out of town on the morning on February 6th for a ski weekend up north. I’m going to miss this Minnedemo. Bummer. Hope everyone else has a great time!
Minnebar 3
See also Minnebar collection.
Nearly done with tomorrows (errr, todays) Minnebar session materials.
Wow – 50 sets of handouts in full color is $170. Black & White of same, on 100% recycled paper, $27. Pass on color.
Power WordPress Presentation Materials
I’m doing my Power WordPress presentation at Minnebar today. I decided to do the presentation today without any slides but instead give everyone handouts with the relevant tips & tricks. To share the wealth here are links to the PDF files for the three sections I’m covering, Performance, Plugin Review and SEO Basics.
Power WordPress Session at Minnebar
Minnebar is approaching this weekend, May 10th! I’m really excited and I just couldn’t stand to not be presenting this year so I decided to put my name up and do a session on Power WordPress usage. I plan to hit on must-have plugins that can save you a ton of time as well as some great SEO tactics for driving more traffic to your site. It should be a lot of fun!
I also hope to get some feedback and talk a bit about doing a WordCamp in the fall.
Minnedemo 3 a Wrap
Does anyone know where the reference to Mo’ started? Like, we got our mo’ in the second half. Our products really selling, we’ve got mo’. Hiring is a breeze because we have mo’! If your not following here mo’ is momentum. After leaving Minnedemo 3 a couple weeks ago, it was clear that the Minneapolis technology community is building mo'.
I’m a bit late in writing about Minnedemo 2. Graeme Thickens did a thorough job in his post. Minnedemo continued it’s template of 15-minute demo’s from a variety of people working on interesting things. Notable this time was the CrashPlan demo from Matthew Dornquast at Code42. I’ve seen CrashPlan several times and have followed it’s progression from the sidelines. The product has really expanded and I think that Code42’s recent additions focused on businesses (using the E word, enterprises) is really smart and smartly built. Fanchatter also had a cool demo, although I’d tweak the product here and there. I don’t think they are going to hit that uber-viral point as is. There were also demos from SOTAcomm, Wonderfile, Pokeware and Adaptive Avenue. I missed much of the last half chatting with people I ran into at Minnedemo.
There were approximately 300 people at Minnedemo and it was great to see so many familiar faces. Having at O’Garas Garage was great to accommodate the size of the crowd, but people need to be a bit more polite to the speakers. Shhhh…
I was surprised to hear an announcement of a Christmas Edition (December 6th! Mark your calendar!) of Minnedemo coming in just a couple of months. Yeah! See you all there!
See Minnedemo 2.
Minnedemo
On my way to Minnedemo!
Open WiFi at O’Gara’s! Yeah!
Crashplan demo at Minnedemo!
FanChatter demo.
Leaving Minnedemo. Great night!
OpenID Makes Identity Easy
I’ve been using OpenID for a couple of weeks now, and I’m really impressed. I created an OpenID identity on MyOpenID a few months ago, but there was nothing to use it with so it just sat. In these few months though, there has been a lot of progress! Recently David Hansson was blogging about OpenID which peaked my interest again (I asked him about it in the interview with him at Minnebar –fast forward to 44:13 minutes). There are now a decent number of web properties that are using OpenID to manage authentication. What is OpenID?
I’m not going to write this when others have done it so well. Excerpt from ReadWriteWeb:
OpenID is an open, decentralized, free framework for user-centric digital identity. It is aimed at solving the problem of Web single sign-on. How does the problem of web single sign-on affect you? Well, if you struggle with keeping track of different usernames and passwords at different websites where you have an account, OpenID can help you. With OpenID you will be assigned a standard username (typically a URL or an i-name, similar to an email address) that you can use on all sites that support OpenID.
There is a wealth of information at the OpenID “How it works” page as well. If you insist on not wanting to read anything (and you likely wouldn’t have made it this far in this post if that were the case), Simon Willison did a nice screencast on using OpenID that is worth watching.
Where is the momentum?
OpenID is getting a surprising amount of support. There are now over one hundred sites, including some fairly large ones, that allow OpenID authentication. The list is growing daily with sites like Digg announcing they will be using OpenID. Microsoft is working to make OpenID and CardSpace work together. AOL has adopted OpenID and every AOL account now has OpenID capability (all 63 million of them!). Sun has announced support of OpenID. Mozilla has also announced that Firefox 3.0 will support OpenID. I’m a bit mystified at Google’s complete silence on this topic.
That is a lot of activity, and much more momentum than was ever enjoyed by passed failed attempts at single-sign-on on the web like Microsoft Passport (now Windows LiveID). The fact that OpenID is decentralized, free and open-source gives it a very good chance at making it.
Cool OpenID Stuff
Once you have an OpenID account using OpenID-enabled sites is a breeze. Here is my OpenID. I can go to any OpenID-enabled site and type in http://thingles.myopenid.com/ and I’m in. I could even make that my own website URL, but I haven’t found a need. Passwords become a thing of the past.
Having a centralized identity also opens up new capabilities. Jyte is a website that makes little sense without OpenID. Jyte is like Everybody Votes for Wii built on OpenID using the Web. See my Jyte page. What makes Jyte compelling is that identity is shared across OpenID sites. So, if I gave permission, another website could query Jyte, using my OpenID URI, and retrieve my information from Jyte to personalize my experience at the new site. Very cool! (And a little scary.)
ClaimID is another interesting idea around identity management. It uses the centralized identity of OpenID to allow you to claim ownership of URL’s. See my ClaimID page. It combines OpenID federation, with the MicroID (get the Wordpress plugin!) microformat (a topic worthy of another post) to allow you to verify ownership of URL’s and centralize this in one federated OpenID-enabled identity.
Hopes
I hope that OpenID continues to get adoption. Identity management is a big problem on the web, and everyone has a myriad of passwords. Additionally, it gets really annoying to have to retype your name, email, address, etc. OpenID has a great framework for selectively controlling the distribution of that information. It removes so much of the friction from both signing up for a new service, and returning to use it in the future.