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.

btv

BTV is the airport code for Burlington, Vermont (where we are located). This tag is pretty heavily used on Twitter to represent our city, but it seems to have other meanings on the other social media sites.

btvsmb

A local event, the Burlington Social Media Breakfast took place a few weeks ago.

acmedia09

Next month in Portland, Oregon is the Alliance for Community Media’s International Conference and Exhibition. The activity so far has all been on Twitter. If it’s anything like acmne09 then I won’t be surprised to see lots of photos, blog posts, videos, and bookmarks once the conference gets started.

tek09

php|tek 2009 was a PHP Conference that took place last month in Chicago, Illinois. While tagnabit actually launched after the conference was finished, it was an example tag that I used to explain the idea behind tagnabit to several people in the PHP community. There’s lots of great content tagged with tek09. Tagnabit is built using PHP and Zend Framework in case you’re wondering what the connection is.

cxage

Leadership in a Connected Age conference – also a local event.

champ400

The tag for the Celebrate Champlain Quadricentennial events taking place here this summer (sensing a local trend?). There will be lots of happenings so hopefully there is a good amount of participation in tagging content around the events. Vermont Public Radio is encourage people to tag content about Champlain 400 as well, so that should help.

On a more serious note, another tag worth mentioning (although I don’t think anyone’s used tagnabit for this yet) is the iranelection tag. There is a constant stream of tweets, photos, blog posts, videos, and bookmarks using this tag. Our thoughts are with the Iranian people.

Tell us how you’ve been using tagnabit. Do you plan on using it for an upcoming event? Are you mainly using it to follow tags or are you also posting content? We’ve got lots of ideas for improving tagnabit but would love to hear your thoughts! You can either comment here or use the tagnabit tag to give us feedback through Twitter, Flickr, Technorati, YouTube or Delicious.

The functionality behind tagnabit was built using Zend Framework (MVC components, Zend_Feed, Zend_Service_Flickr, and Zend_Cache). The client side is all semantic XHTML (with a few Microformats), CSS, and a few JavaScript enhancements (using jQuery). We’ve got plans for some new features – but we’re curious to see how people use the site first. If you’ve got feedback, please send it our way via Twitter, Flickr, Technorati, YouTube or Delicious by tagging your content with tagnabit (#tagnabit on Twitter).