Brown Bag by Jeffrey Beall, on Flickr

Working at a small company (Found Line), there aren’t as many opportunities to talk with and learn from a diverse set of co-workers as there might be at a larger organization. This is part of the reason why I organize our local PHP Users Group and am involved with other community events (VAGUE, Vermont Code Camp, Burlington Web Application Group, etc.). These are all technically-focused groups—I’d like to try something new.

Found Line would like to start hosting brown bag lunches. Each lunch will feature one speaker from the local community and will be about an hour long. The talk itself can be up to 30 minutes long, but can be as short as 10 minutes (we want to reserve at least half of the time for discussion). We will provide the monitor or projector, if needed. As the name suggests, BYOL. If you’ve been to our studio, then you’ll know that it isn’t very big. This means that space will be limited, but I think a smaller group has its benefits.

We’d really like the first speaker to be someone from outside of Found Line. If you’re here in the Burlington, Vermont area and have a topic you’d like to talk about for anywhere from 10 to 30 minutes with a small group of colleagues, then please let me know. The only requirements are that your talk isn’t a sales pitch and that it’s on a topic that you’re passionate about.

Update (4/4/2011): Please fill out this form if you’d like to speak at an upcoming brown bag lunch.

Atom Syndication Format

Most of VPR’s web content is currently stored in a proprietary content management system (CMS). The first step was publishing the needed content from the CMS out into an open format. VPR’s Dan Allen published from the CMS Atom feeds of the various content we would need for the new homepage.

PHP and Zend Framework

Once we had the needed Atom feeds, we created a Zend Framework web application to import these feeds. Components such as Zend_Feed_Reader made the job easier. The weather data comes from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA) National Weather Service’s National Digital Forecast Database XML/REST Service. The market data comes from the Google Finance API.

CouchDB

All of the data (except for weather, which is pulled directly with a bit of caching) is stored in CouchDB. Since we’re storing documents with varying metadata (i.e. Atom entries) choosing a document-oriented database made a lot of sense. CouchDB’s map/reduce views make for very efficient queries. Its RESTful HTTP API provides a lot of options for scaling and caching. We’re caching documents within the Zend Framework application and conditionally requesting these documents from CouchDB with ETags when a cache is available. The current cache is simply file-based but we’re considering using Memcached for even better performance. On a related note, the homepage itself also supports conditional HTTP requests.

Apache and nginx

We had the pleasure of working with another great Vermont company, ClearBearing, on this project. ClearBearing handles the infrastructure layer for VPR.net. The current website was (and still is) served up by Apache. ClearBearing already had nginx in place as a reverse proxy to handle caching. Since we weren’t replacing the entire CMS we needed a way for the existing CMS and this new application to coexist. We decided to host the new application separately (still administered by ClearBearing) and reverse proxy requests for certain URIs (primarily the homepage) to the new application. This provides a clean separation between the new application and the existing CMS while still allowing for them to be hosted on the same domain from an end-user perspective.

Licensing

You’ll notice that all of the standards used are open standards and all of the technologies used are free and open source software. Additionally, all of the code we have written for VPR is licensed to them under the permissive New BSD License. This means that VPR is free to use this code however they want, study and modify the code, and redistribute the code as-is or modified. They can do all of this without paying additional licensing fees.

Design

While this post is primarily about the technology behind VPR’s new homepage, I should mention that Found Line’s Jason Pelletier designed the new homepage and implemented all of its HTML and CSS. We worked closely with Jonathan Butler and John Van Hoesen, Vice President for News & Programming, to make sure the new design meets the needs of website visitors and the organization.

Next Steps

The launch of this new homepage was just one iteration with many more to come. As Jonathan Butler mentioned in his blog post, VPR has plans to further improve online services for their listeners. Look for a redesigned VPR Classical page soon. There are also plans for better mobile access to VPR and VPR Classical programming. Fortunately much of the work that has been done can be leveraged to create additional online services for VPR’s listeners.

A special thanks for the support of VPR’s listeners—you made this new homepage possible! If you have questions, comments, complaints, or suggestions about the new homepage then please contact VPR directly with your feedback (although you’re welcome to comment here as well).

As a Functional Analyst & Quality Assurance Specialist at Found Line, you will have three primary responsibilities. First, you will communicate with outside clients and subject matter experts to develop the functional specification for each iteration of various web applications. Second, you will translate functional specifications into tickets that a software developer will complete. Third, you will perform acceptance testing on each iteration of these web applications to assure that the functional specification you originally outlined has been met. Future responsibilities may include implementing and coordinating usability testing plans. Some client support and training may be necessary as well but this will not be a primary focus of your job.

You will be participating in a process based on both agile and more traditional software development methods. While you will write and test against functional specifications, these specifications will be for narrowly defined scopes of work (i.e. iterations). This is a fast-paced environment with each iteration usually being only a few days in length. We are small but very busy, and need someone who is a self-starter, an excellent communicator, and can work independently. Experience with DocBook, XMLmind XML Editor (XXE), Subversion (SVN), and Trac a plus, but not required. This is an on-site position, full-time or part-time. No contractors or recruiters, please.

Send your resume and cover letter to jobs@foundline.com (no phone calls).

Burlington, VT PHP Users Group

2009 was the second full year of the Burlington, VT PHP Users Group. We had some fun meetings and presentations including:

January

Jason Pelletier gave a presentation on CSS for Developers.

CSS for Developers

View more documents from jason.pelletier.

February

Aaron Carlino demonstrated SilverStripe, an open source CMS/framework built in PHP.

March

Special guest Paul Reinheimer gave a presentation called “Easy Problems are the Hard Problems” taking an in-depth look at the easy/hard parts of building web applications.

April

Rob Riggen gave a talk on website performance optimization.

May

Rene Churchill gave a presentation on MySQL database optimization.

July

Matthew Weier O’Phinney gave his Play-Doh: Modelling Your Objects presentation.

Play-Doh: Modelling Your Objects

View more presentations from Matthew Weier O’Phinney.

August

Matthew Weier O’Phinney presented again in August, this time giving a hands-on unit testing crash course [ODP].

September

September’s meeting was a casual get-together instead of a formal meeting and presentation—a change of pace from the typical meeting format.

October

I gave a talk geared towards PHP beginners.

November

November’s meeting fell on one of Zend Framework’s Bug Hunt Days. Held monthly, Bug Hunt Days are designed to encourage the community to help triage and resolve issues in the framework. Matthew Weier O’Phinney guided us through effective bug reporting and taught us how to contribute patches. As part of Bug Hunt Days, my first Zend Framework patch was accepted, a small addition to the documentation.

December

December marked the second birthday of our local PHP Users Group and that month’s meeting turned out to be a fun social event.

Our users group also won a free pass to ZendCon ’09, and Jase Roberts was the lucky recipient. He joined fellow Vermonters Matthew Weier O’Phinney, John Valance, and me at the annual PHP conference.

The Browser

Jonathan Butler started a program on our local community radio station called The Browser. It’s “a show about the people who bring the world wide web to [Burlington, VT].” Jason and I were on the show twice—once in February and again in August.

Town Meeting Day Vermont, ACM-NE, and Tagnabit

The first Tuesday of March was Town Meeting Day here in Vermont. Citizens throughout Vermont gathered together to elect local officers and vote on budgets. As an experiment we put together a website, tmdvt.net/09, to aggregate content from social media sites around Town Meeting Day Vermont ’09. If you used the appropriate tags in your tweets, Flickr uploads, blog posts (if indexed by Technorati), YouTube uploads, and bookmarks on Delicious, then your content showed up on the website. I wrote a post recapping some things we learned from the experiment.

As a result of that project, Bill Simmon and Seth Mobley from Vermont Community Access Media (VCAM) approached us about doing something similar for the Alliance for Community Media Northeast Region (ACM-NE) conference they were organizing here in Burlington, VT. We built acmne.net/09 for the conference and it was a big hit. I spoke on a social media panel (which Liz Schlegel moderated) and helped with a social media workshop at the conference. Colin Rhinesmith, who was on the panel with me and also helped with the workshop, posted a good summary of the conference on his blog.

We then took the idea from Town Meeting Day Vermont and ACM-NE a step further, creating Tagnabit—aggregating tweets, photos, blog posts, videos, and bookmarks for any arbitrary tag. Bill Simmon wrote a good blog post on how Tagnabit could be used.

Jelly/Coworking

I was excited to see Jen Mincar open up a coworking space, Office Squared (o²), here in Burlington, VT in 2009. I think it will help bring more cohesiveness to the local technology community since many of her customers work in technology-related industries. As a precursor to its opening, we hosted a Jelly at Found Line in July, inviting entrepreneurs and freelancers to work in our studio for an afternoon. Here are some photos from the Jelly and another one at the Burlington Free Press.

Vermont Code Camp

September saw the first ever Vermont Code Camp, bringing together people from local technology communities around .NET, PHP, Ruby, and Python. The event was a huge success with 85 attendees and 19 sessions. I had a small part in organizing the event but the real credit goes to Rob Hale, Julie Lerman, and everyone else who organized, volunteered, and presented. I also gave a presentation on Resource-Oriented Web Services as part of the code camp.

ZendCon

ZendCon is the biggest conference of the PHP community, and this year’s event was my second ZendCon. What can I say? The talks were excellent. The people were even better. I ended up co-presenting at the UnCon with Michelangelo van Dam and Anna Filina on the role of a PHP user group.

Moving On

2009 seemed to be the year for people in the PHP community to change jobs. Following that trend, I made the move to Found Line full time last month, leaving Vermont Oxford Network. As I said before I’m very happy to have more time to focus on our clients’ projects and to work with free/open source software and open standards full time.

Work

2009 was a busy year. Some of the work included:

• helping ThinkFlood launch their RedEye product by building their website and eCommerce application (see the Rackspace Cloud blog post on the launch);
• building a news article management tool for NEHP‘s website;
• creating Vermont Public Radio’s Artist Mug Gallery, Champlain 400, School Closings, Search, and States of Marriage pages;
• launching Common Good Vermont; and
• developing and maintaining a line of business web application for the University of Vermont.

Phew—a lot to say! I hope you had a good 2009, and have an even better 2010.

Vermont (pop. 621,000) is a small, tightly knit rural state proud of its independent spirit and high levels of civic engagement. Vermont’s independent sector (3000+ organizations, $4 billion annual revenue) plays a primary role in the delivery of human and cultural services and in the preservation of the state’s cherished natural resources. Most social services—food, shelter, healthcare and education—are delivered within local and regional community settings.

Often separated by geography (mountains, rivers, lakes), Vermont’s 251 towns and 14 counties are increasingly knit together by broadband “build-out”. Common Good Vermont leverages these electronic networks to bridge the barriers of Vermont’s geography and the “beaten paths” of its hyper-local networks. New human and electronic networking activities will support the delivery of information and innovation to the state’s community builders: project volunteers and professionals who, by virtue of their civic and nonprofit roles and responsibilities, are the lifeblood of the “green mountain state”. Common Good’s place-based and community virtual events are designed to improve the capacity of so many “small networks” that, improve Vermont’s unique “quality of life”.

Common Good Vermont aggregates content for (and from) Vermont independents and nonprofits by pulling in RSS and Atom feeds including blogs, news sources, social bookmarks, and event calendars. The goal is to serve as an information hub encouraging knowledge sharing and increasing cross-organization communication. Content is currently organized by a combination of taxonomy (categories defined by Common Good Vermont staff) and folksonomy (tags from the feeds themselves). Our goal is to eventually remove the taxonomy layer and have all content organized completely by broad and, to a lesser extent, narrow folksonomy. However, the taxonomy layer is there for now to allow a certain amount of curation while we seek out, connect, and aggregate additional sources of information.

Common Good Vermont is built using Zend Framework and hosted on Rackspace Cloud Sites. Components from Zend Framework used include its MVC system, Zend_Application, Zend_Feed_Reader, Zend_Tag_Cloud, Zend_Search_Lucene, Zend_Paginator, Zend_Db, Zend_Date, Zend_Auth, Zend_Acl, and Zend_Form. Stay tuned for future iterations to the website!

Jason and I started Found Line almost five years ago and I’m looking forward to helping him and Liz continue to grow the business. We’ve got some really great clients and I’m very happy to have more time to focus on their projects. I’m also excited about the opportunity to work with free/open source software and open standards full time. So, time to go catch up on some work!

The latest iteration of the website includes eCommerce functionality allowing ThinkFlood to sell their RedEye device directly to consumers. The eCommerce section includes a shopping cart and an easy-to-use two page checkout process. While the checkout process is simple for end users, there’s quite a lot happening behind the scenes with the integration of multiple APIs. The website is built using Zend Framework and thanks to Rackspace Cloud Sites everything has remained running smoothly even with all of the press coverage and associated traffic.

With around 500 submissions and 15,000 ratings this “share your peak experience” aspect of their website allowed Peak Organic to learn about the people who drank their beer. Even better, it allowed their customers to learn a little bit about each other. It also gave people an opportunity to contribute, quite literally, to the Peak Organic brand with the chance of having their photographs and experiences incorporated into the product’s packaging and displayed on store shelves throughout the country. I liked to call this “user-generated brand,” a form of user-generated content. All brands are influenced by their users but this was user-driven brand evolution made tangible. This content was also a factor in helping them reach the number one position on Google for the search term “organic beer” — sorry Vermont’s own Wolaver’s!

In addition to Peak Organic’s website, we also created their brand identity, developed materials for their event marketing, designed their packaging, made point of sale materials, and created sell sheets. We worked with Peak Organic for several years but we no longer work with them today. I’d like to explore some things we’d do differently today knowing what we know now four years later and with the tools available today. I wouldn’t suggest anyone simply try the same things we did with Peak Organic. This worked because it fit in with their brand. However, there are some things you may be able to learn from our experience (no pun intended).

First, I would “unlock” the user generated content from the website. This could be done simply through a feed of recent “peak experiences” with links back to individual experiences. This would allow people to easily access this content from outside the website. If they’re engaging with the brand, why does it matter if it they’re on the brand’s website or not?

An alternative approach would be to have users submit their “peak experiences” to Flickr and aggregate these photographs with a tag and possibly a group (Flickr was still in beta when we first launched the Peak Organic website). The website would then consume these aggregated photos like anyone else would and could even add a metadata layer on top for implementing the rating system. This would potentially give the community more control of this content and give Peak Organic the possibility of tapping into existing communities on Flickr.

When we first launched the Peak Organic website online photo sharing was still relatively new. Since then sites like Flickr have grown exponentially and many people are at least familiar with sites like Flickr, if not sharing photos online themselves. Today, microblogging (e.g. Twitter) is relatively new but growing very quickly. This leads to the second thing I’d do differently today — experiment with tagging beyond Flickr. I’d try tweeting from various events using an event hashtag and/or a brand-specific hashtag. Relatively speaking, not many people are on Twitter yet. However, the momentum is there and mixed in with the all those tweets must be a few “peak experiences” ready to be shared. Coincidentally, the maximum length for a “peak experience” description was 150 characters, 10 more than Twitter’s 140 character limit.