iPhone Quest 2007: Success!

My buddy David went down to San Antonio Thursday night to queue up for Apple’s new iPhone. His patience was rewarded not only with successful acquisition of one of the coveted devices, but also with the chance to enjoy his 15 minutes of fame. He received coverage on:

  • My San Antonio: There was also a superb photo of him on their home page last night, but it has subsequently vanished. I hope David got a copy of it!
  • KSAT News: watch the video for a few seconds of interview. David is surprisingly lucid for someone who has been camping out on a sidewalk all night!
  • His own site: also includes links to an auction for the extra iPhone he picked up. Go buy it and help fund David’s upcoming wedding!

Congratulations, David! I’m looking forward to dropping by and playing with the new gadget.

UPDATE: Enjoy Crazy Apple Rumors’ coverage of iPhone night, which doesn’t feature David at all, right here.

Moving to WordPress

This weblog has always been run on Conversant, an excellent groupware, weblogging and publishing tool created by Macrobyte Resources. I worked for the company back in 2000, and enjoyed that time immensely, thanks both to the superb people I was surrounded by and the great projects we got to work on together. It was a remarkable place, cranking out some cutting-edge communication software with a completely distributed workforce, spread across several states, countries, and time zones. Alas, we eventually all moved in different directions, though Conversant lived on and continued to grow and to be improved.

And while Conversant has served me personally long and well, I’m finally moving the website off of it and on to WordPress, a nifty open-source publishing system that lacks some of the really amazing features that Conversant boasts, but which is easier for me to tweak for myself and which has a large and active community of people doing interesting things with it. This is a tough decision, as I’ve invested a lot into Conversant, and am reluctant to let it go, but after dithering about it for a year, finally feel like the time has come for this site. (I’m still using Conversant for some of the applications I’ve developed for our church, and have no plans to move those any time soon.)

I’ve moved a bit of the old content over already, and will be bringing over more as I’m able to get it exported from the old site. The look and feel will likely change regularly for a while as I experiment and settle in to the new digs, so please be patient if you turn up one day and it suddenly looks like MySpace (eww). This too shall pass.

New Texas State Homepage

The last 3 months of work at the office finally comes to fruition: we’ve launched the new Texas State University site! The old one was some pretty sloppy work, so I’m particularly excited by the quality of this new design.

Especially sexy bits for the technical folks:

  • XHTML Strict.
  • CSS-based design; not a table in sight.
  • Automatically generated headline text images.
  • All content managed through Magnolia, making it easily maintainable.
  • Unobtrusive Javascript, thanks to Prototype, which we all now adore.
  • Microformat output for events.
  • Rising Stars content managed in Magnolia, output to XML, rendered through Flash.
  • All URLs rewritten on the fly by Javascript to enable link tracking.
  • High performance custom caching architecture.

Next projects: give a similar treatment to the other managed sites and get a decent campus-wide events calendar up, going, and integrated with everything else.

Boring RSS Housekeeping

Hi folks,

For those of you subscribed to this weblog via RSS, please update your readers to the new feed address:

http://feeds.feedburner.com/mcmains/ruminations

The old address will continue to work for the time being, but may break at some point in the future. Thanks!

UPDATE: For some reason, this particular post attracts comment spammers like moths to a flamethrower. Thus, I’m turning comments off for this page. Sorry about that, real humans!