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you are not your livejournal

Ignite Portland 2 was a blast!

The video from my talk is up. I'm disappointed that they didn't show my slides in the video, but man did I rock! I think that was the best speech I've given yet. I hope that talking about the Portland State Aerospace Society in front of 750 Portlanders will lure people to a PSAS meeting.

(Yes, 750 people. They hit the fire code limit and had to start turning people away.)

I met some cool people at Ignite Portland. I saw some women I had previously met at a pdx geekchix lunch. One of them told me to check out Code 'n Splode, a group of (mostly women) programmers who get together to talk about whatever they're working on. I met a guy (Justin maybe?) who told me about beer and blog, a newly formed group that meets every Friday at the Lucky Lab to talk about blogging.

I've been thinking that maybe I've outgrown livejournal. I'd just rather have control over my blog style, Ads, and content than let livejournal handle that. I love my LJ friends, but I'm not connecting with the local Portland geek community. Justin argued that it's better to join a social networking site and host your own blog than let the blog site decide your audience. I would probably host my blog on Jamey's domain (http://thesharps.us) and have an RSS feed for it.

Speaking of blogs, PSAS needs one! I had someone say, "Oh, yeah, I'll check out the website, maybe subscribe to the RSS feed if it has one." I think we talked about having a news page with an RSS feed, but it was never implemented. It would be cool to have each team have a blog, and have it feed into the news page. It would be cooler if we could have a git post-hook for automatically sending out an email to the teams list when the blog is updated. I know it would be helpful for me! Half the time I don't know what the airframe team is up to.

Justin also said that he might be able to make the PSAS wiki look prettier. It's just ugly. Plus our front page looks stale. *sigh*

Comments

That's a neato idea!

Is it possible to have an RSS feed on it of your friends page updates? Or is that the one you were talking about having anyway?
You can get an RSS feed for any livejournal. I read all my friends LJs with my RSS reader, akregator. It's much easier than checking all their webpages. Here's a link to directions for what URL to use: http://www.ezoons.com/2004/07/28/livejournal_rss_celebration.html

Potentially, PSAS could have an RSS feed so people could keep track of what we're doing, and maybe read articles about making a rocket. At the very least, there should be an RSS feed for the PSAS picture gallery so people can see our pretty pictures.
Or you might find the LJ faq on RSS feeds more readable:
http://www.livejournal.com/support/faqbrowse.bml?faqid=149
For me, LJ is still the best solution because the most people are on it and I can allow groups of people to read certain posts. That's for personal blogging though. Also LJ *is* my RSS aggregator. I read everything on my friends list.

If you go off-site be sure to post about it so I can create a syndication link for your feed. I probably won't comment though if it requires a login (there's still no good identity solution for this in 2008...)
Oh yeah, with a paid account you can customize yr style however you want, but it's not exactly easy.
Getting a paid account would solve the customization problem, but I really want to control my own data. It turns out that a couple friends of ours are starting a co-location co-op, and that would be sweet for hosting my site and pictures. If you want a space on half a server rack at a Portland co-location center, send me mail.
Tempting for one of my upcoming projects, but I already have a VPS that covers my needs for now. Too bad it runs CentOS...
That was an awesome talk and thanks a lot for sharing. I'm going to have to look into your group, cause I want to get a rocket to the moon. And I figure orbit's the hard part.
You are so cute, I miss you so much!
How is married life?
It's great! Jamey and I haven't been spending much time being together lately, even though we're in the same room with each other. We've both been really busy with work. This week things finally calmed down, so I think we'll be able to have more "couple time".

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