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Tons of Notes, BlogOrlando Aftermath 3 October 1, 2008

Posted by Ryan in : Tech, Orlando, Coworking, Trends, floridacreatives, photos, OrlandoScene, BarCamp, BlogOrlando, Twitter, Social Media Events, Tampa, Programming, Doterati , add a comment


Party, originally uploaded by funkeemunkeeland.

Folks, I’ve got things to tell you, and things I want your input on. First of all, huge thanks to Tim Welch for his excellent BlogOrlando3 “Best of” post.

Next, I want you to stop reading this post. STOP! Go to the Florida Creatives forum and contribute to this discussion, or start a new discussion about something for which you are passionate.

If you’re still reading, I’ll remind you we have TWO BarCamps coming up. Count them.

BarCamp Tampa Bay is going down in less than two weeks. If you were at the Orlando BarCamp in April, this will seem familiar to you - Tech Day, Media Day. Held at USF’s Business school, Saturday and Sunday, October 11th and 12th. I believe there is a party-bus or a caravan of some kind headed down that way. Check the Twittersphere (92 followers, natch!) or Doterati? for more details.

BarCampChaos held on Monday October 13th, the first night of CreateChaos08 at the Mariott down by Disney World. It’s 10 conferences in one, and one unconference, and bunches of parties, like a certain Internet Marketing and Tech association I know of, and an Advertising and Design Alliance I know of, and a Create Awards, and a Job Fair, and an Expo, and lots more, including $200 off registration if you register for BarCampChaos.

The Florida Creatives website now has 4 feeds for you to pay attention to:

  1. Podcast Feed (original)
  2. Site-Wide Feed (includes groups, events, blogs, forums)
  3. Event Feed (mashed up from all over town)
  4. Comments Feed (in case you don’t prefer emails)

Those of you already subscribed in iTunes will continue to receive podcasts.

Those of you who used feedburner email subscription should keep getting your emails (of the site-wide feed).

The events feed is pulled from the Florida Creatives group on Upcoming.Y!, the Calendar feeds of The Daily City blog, Doterati and the newly-formed Advertising and Design Alliance (I don’t even know where to link for it yet).

The old Florida Creatives Google Groups is going away. I have already closed out new people from joining. With a forum, email subscriptions for feeds and all the other stuff, it should be easy to stay informed.

If you haven’t checked out the Florida Drupal Group yet, please do. Classes are third Saturdays at 1PM in Maitland, and completely worth it. We are talking about putting together a DrupalCamp early next year, so get involved now.

Did you realize that Café Scientifique was today? I sure didn’t, but I’ve been an extremely busy man of late. Chad is organizing some awesome talks down at Stardust, these are not to be missed.

The 2nd Annual ELLA Music Fest is this weekend. Crazy that a year has gone by already. Orlando Scene TV has some vids from last year if you want to know what you’re missing out on.

BarCampOrlando Downtown April 5th and 6th, 10AM - 6PM April 1, 2008

Posted by Ryan in : Tech, Podcasts, Orlando, SEO, Music, Links, Events, Video, Coworking, Trends, Standards, floridacreatives, mashups, Graphics, OrlandoScene, Teaching, open source, BarCamp, PodCamp, Storytelling, phone, Web Services, Social Media Events, Social Networking, Programming , add a comment

BarCamp Orlando is a weekend for all types of creative folks to come together and share with each other. The event is dubbed an “unconference”, a format which derives power from the people instead of the event organizers or the presenters. Everyone has an equal opportunity to get on stage and speak, teach or lead a discussion, playing off of the idea that at any given conference, the people in the audience have more knowledge collectively than the presenter(s) on stage.

This second installment of BarCamp will be held over 2 days, Saturday and Sunday, April 5th and 6th, in downtown Orlando at the Wall Street complex, from 10AM - 6PM each day. Registration is free, and a registration promises a shirt and lunch on the sponsors of BarCamp, businesses who are passionate about the technology and media communities of Central Florida.

Saturday is the designated “Dev Day”, playing host to everything from web programming to robot building and video game development and everything in between. iPhone hackers, guys with soldering irons, the latest technologies, and plenty that haven’t been realized yet. Every 30 minutes, both venues will have a different talk going on, so if you’re feeling lost in the jargon, apply the “rule of 2 feet” and check out what’s happening in the other room!

Sunday is dubbed “Media Day”, and is the place for storytellers, journalists, writers, designers, filmmakers, musicians, 2D and 3D artists, podcasters, bloggers and social networkers to show off their work, share their tricks or talk about the state of the industry. From 12 to 1 we will be talking about the “Past, Present and Future of Media in Central Florida”, hoping to give our community a sense of our story, and where we’re headed.

Registration is free, and the event runs from 10AM - 6PM both days with a lunch break at 1PM. The event will be housed in Slingapour’s and One-Eyed-Jack’s, with Wall St Cantina acting as our “hallway”. There will be projectors and microphones, chairs and a space to speak. All you have to do is write your name on the whiteboard and you get 20-25 minutes to share your passions with a group of energetic, engaged geeks and creatives. I would not use the words “captive audience” to describe the BarCamp crowd, because they all want to get involved.

Visit www.barcamporlando.org today and register for Dev Day, Media Day or both days. Wall Street Plaza is at 18 Wall Street Plaza, Orlando, FL 32801 - barcamporlando.org/where has a map to the venue and information about parking.

Coworking Tuesdays Photoset March 19, 2008

Posted by Ryan in : Tech, Orlando, Links, Events, Coworking, Trends, floridacreatives, photos , add a comment

I went on my lunch break today, and those 30 minutes were actually quite fantastic.

Not only Coworking Tuesdays at Stardust, but also Cup-O-Code, the Orlando Coworking article from the Sentinel (about), and Alex on Cow-orking at BarCamp Orlando 2007. End very short slideshow.

There is a reason the slideshow is so short. Outside of Likemind (which has tons of coworking connotations in this town), there haven’t really been many documented coworking sessions here. That’s what Coworking Tuesdays are all about - adding folks to the mailing list, taking pictures, recording podcasts, making videos, setting up a web site and keeping the wiki up-to-date… and more.

There’s lots of almost-happening coworking stuff in downtown Orlando, check out the mailing list for updates about that. This is going to happen before Memorial Day at the current rate, and I’m likely jinxing it by saying anything, but we want interested parties!

Would you pay for some space at a table if someone had their name(s) on the lease and other folks were paying for some desk space too?

jQuery broken in Internet Explorer? Put your $(document).ready at the bottom!

Posted by Ryan in : Tech, HowTo, Coworking, Web Sites, Programming, javascript, jquery , add a comment

Tonight at Cup-O-Code, David, Gabe and myself were troubleshooting a little issue with the product page javascript that Gabe uses to update the price as customers select various options. The code wasn’t working in Internet Explorer, but since jQuery should be browser agnostic, we had to go back to the drawing board. After David re-wrote my first draft of the code we’ve got there, we got the function back to a working state in Firefox, but IE was still eluding us, but not really.

We were actually trying to make the script work on two instances of an online store, Futon Planet (FP) and Futons, Etc. (FE). The first site’s product page was giving us no Internet Explorer trouble, but the second was behaving very strangely. Then we noticed that FE’s javascript wasn’t finding returning anything at all.

We used this code to help us debug and see if jQuery could find the value in question:
alert($("adjustedPrice").length());

Which returned a blank pop-up, when it should have been returning “$0.00″ instead. The script didn’t seem to be finding the value, and when the alert showed up, it was actually drawing the alert before you could actually see the rest of the page.

Apparently IE6 executes $(document).ready() at a different time or in a different fashion than Firefox, and once the javascript faults out it just stops everything.

We moved our $(document).ready() action to the bottom of the page, and everything was just fine after that.

Mission accomplished.

Coworking London, any takers? November 8, 2007

Posted by Ryan in : Tech, Music, Coworking, Trends, Travel, London, Friends, Arts , 1 comment so far

If anyone has Google Alerts set for CoworkingLondon, they’ll come across this blog post and reply soon.

I am currently staying in Northern London, and I’m now an expert at the tubes and trains here, so I can get to anyplace I like. I have a day off tomorrow until around 1600 (that’s 4PM for you non-Europeans), and I’d like to co-work somewhere in town.

The easiest way to be in touch is by email < rprice AT ryanpricemedia.com >. I also have a phone, but I don’t have the number handy. I’m hoping to get a response from Noel, because I know he’s been here on a coworking expedition before.

This has been a fun trip, the other day we rode a boat down to Greenwich (as in Greenwich, Mean Time or GMT) where all time begins and saw the “Painted Hall”. Been to some other random places in town, and went to an awesome french horn concert the other night, followed by a “buttoned down” concert with period instruments and guys wearing trainers (sneakers). It was really neat, an event called The Night Shift, wherein the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment gets on stage for just such a no-collars-required concert every so-often. You can bring your wine and beer in the hall, get up during the performance, and actually hear a bit of talkback from the conductor and the host instead of having to read it all off the program (or have your girlfriend whisper it in your ear).

Jessica Clark almost gets Coworking October 3, 2007

Posted by Ryan in : Tech, Links, Quotes, Coworking, Trends, Web Sites, Facebook, BarCamp , add a comment

Jessica Clark recently wrote a web-only article for The American Prospect, “an authoritative magazine of liberal ideas” about our new friends at Independent’s Hall called Coworkers of the World, Unite! She gets all of the factual information correct:

Co-working goes hand-in-hand with the volatile startup lifestyle, offering a haven between gigs and a spot to generate new projects and connections. The trend started in the capital of what business writer Daniel Pink has dubbed the “free agent nation” — San Francisco. There, Chris Messina, 26, and Tara Hunt, 34, run Citizen Agency, a marketing and design firm that advises clients on how to develop brand communities, and Citizen Space, a co-working office.

Fine piece of journalism, really. I think this could help a newbie understand coworking. I disagree with the last 3 paragraphs. I left a comment, but it feels like I didn’t think it all the way through.

Am I too whiny? I felt like a kid defending his Ninja Turtles:

How can you say “for Hunt and others, these new ties are just as valid as the old connections of blood, proximity and race.” and then include these comments?

“no number of Facebook friendships will serve as a safety net if you go bankrupt”

“Incubate their startups so that they can cash in and move on to other projects.”

You have a theoretical knowledge of what all these buzzwords mean - social interaction, barcamp, coworking - but would you have written that if you knew what it was like? The bonds you make because of these common goals are far stronger than those you make with an everyday working relationship. To quote Chris Heuer from an unconference this week, “Business is personal again”. I won’t hire anyone I wouldn’t invite into my home, or go on a weekend camping trip with.

The people I’ve met because of my interest in coworking are getting invited to my wedding. I mean that.

She goes through several thousand words building up Coworking, BarCamp and other such geeky topics as new ways of holding a community together, and then accuses us of being hollow, shallow capitalists in the same breath.

Jessica, I charge you to go work at Indy Hall for a month and read your article to yourself; then we’ll talk.

What a Week! August 31, 2007

Posted by Ryan in : Tech, Site News, Career, Blogging, Podcasts, Orlando, Cervo, Links, Drupal, Events, Coworking, Wikipedia, Trends, Earth, Liberatr, Web Sites, floridacreatives, Entrepreneurship, Teaching , add a comment

Exciting stuff, and I’m sure there’s more, like new podcasts with awesome interviews and awesome Internet TV too. There must be more getting tangled up in all the excitement. If you’d like to hear more about any of these endeavors, I’d be happy to chat. There are a dozen ways to contact me mentioned on my blog, so just pick one.

Dries Buytaert on Drupal | on the luck of seven August 27, 2007

Posted by Ryan in : Tech, Blogging, Podcasts, Links, Drupal, Video, Coworking, Trends, Standards, Earth, Travel, Web Sites, Charity , 1 comment so far

Noel Hidalgo is running around the world sleeping on couches, twittering, docu-vlogging and digging up a layer of the new open-source Earth bedrock. By the way, he’s accepting donations (I’ve donated), in the spirit of the movement, just to help him get where he’s going. His most recent video introduces us to the accidental general of a powerful army of Drupal fanboys - and I’m one of them. (link)


Video thumbnail. Click to play
Click To Play

Recoded: 26 July 2007

Locations: Antwerp, Belgium

Tags: drupal, open source, linus torvalds, angela byron, history of drupal, kernel trap, inspiration, empowerment

Music: ana (captain planet remix), vieux farka touré and captainplanet

About: after much wrangling and rescheduling, dries and i finally caught up to talk about the history of drupal, his inspiration, and most importantly the empowerment of community.

important links to note…

- drupal.org

- groups.drupal.org

- buytaert.net

- kernaltrap.org

- slashdot.com

- amnesty.org

- greenpeace.org

on a side note, thank you OpenCraft for giving me a home to edit this video!

also, i’d like to thank dries and karlijn on their new boy and omar for his hospitality in cairo.

Coworking Video June 29, 2007

Posted by Ryan in : Tech, Orlando, Video, Coworking, Trends, Web Sites, floridacreatives, Entrepreneurship, mashups , add a comment

Original Post: Accelerating serendipity with coworking « Coworking Community Blog

Coworking Orlando
Coworking Orlando Discussion List

Florida Creatives Happy Hour 6/18 June 15, 2007

Posted by Ryan in : Tech, Site News, Markteting, Podcasts, Orlando, Events, Beer, Coworking, Coffee, Trends, MySpace, Liberatr, floridacreatives, Likemind.orl, Facebook, Virb , add a comment

Third week of the month, the two events we host come around, and I blog/email/post the hell out of it! First of all is likemind.orl at Lake Eola Panera Bread, that happened already this morning, but it happens every month. Alex Rudloff and Ryan Price (that’s me) host this event for… well… anyone in Orlando! The likemind.us fellas in New York got a very nice company named Anomaly to send us some coffee/bagel money, so come for free coffee and good conversation.

Now, for the big news - Florida Creatives Happy Hour is turning 7 months old! Officially our baby is 27 weeks along in its development (but been drinking since day 1? ouch!). I’m really hoping we will be able to get some presence in the local schools once the next year gets started, so I’d like to have a short directed discussion about that, maybe record it, when we feel like we’ve got “quorum” (enough people to make decisions). John Rife is supposed to be returning from his trip this week, so I’m sure he’ll have stories to share. I’ve also spent the last 2 months on a big recruiting push, and just sent a couple of fresh emails today to local illustrators/podcasters. Not to mention the social networking groups and doing lots of outreach there too. If you’re on Upcoming (meaning you have a Yahoo ID), Facebook, VIRB or MySpace, join the groups. Don’t forget the mailing list.

Event Page & RSVP
Monday, June 18, 2007
6:00 PM - 9:00 PM
crooked bayou
50 E Central Blvd # D
Orlando, Florida 32801

If you’ve never been to a happy hour, all you need to know is BE YOURSELF. We have a very casual atmosphere at Florida Creatives, and we are mostly made up of people who want to make some friends who are passionate about the same things they are. In addition to likeminded friends, we are most of us interested in learning about other disciplines, so we are here to learn as well. Last but not least, there are some of us who want to see this community thrive, and what we can accomplish by getting organized. Admission is free, business cards are plentiful, discussion is honest and friendly. Check us out.