Personally, I’d like to encourage submissions on the following topics:

• More talks related to free/open source software (PHP, Ruby, Python, etc.)
• Arduino and/or other hardware programming
• Software development patterns and practices
• Web analytics and metrics
• Front-end web development (JavaScript, CSS, etc.)
• Node.js and other emerging technologies
• Mobile application development
• Anything you’re passionate about!

Propose a session or two now—you know you want to!

We’re a new startup with some venture backing. We’re looking to add an experienced developer to help us out for the next five weeks (and possibly more). Qualifications are:

• experienced PHP hacker (5+ years)
• full understanding of MVC frameworks (codeignitor, cake, symfony, zend, kohana or the like)
• comfortable with the LAMP stack
• understanding of git
• able to plug into a new project and start coding in under a day

You’ll be working with a team of 6 developers in downtown Burlington.

Kohort was featured in TechCrunch the other day for raising a “seed” round of $3 million. If you’re interested, contact Steve Blood. You can find Steve’s email address in this thread, or let me know and I can put you in touch with him.

Update (11/19/2010): I forget to mention that the original slides and code examples are available on GitHub.

Yesterday I had the opportunity to see Barbershop Punk, a documentary by Georgia Sugimura Archer and Kristin Armfield, at the Vermont International Film Festival (there will be two more screenings this week at the festival). The film contemplates the future of the American Internet and surrounding issues. Following the screening was a panel discussion with Georgia Sugimura Archer (Film Director), Casey Rae-Hunter (Future of Music Coalition), Josh Levy (Free Press), and moderator Jon Stout (Free Speech TV). The panelists discussed the past, present, and future of the Internet as an open platform (video available on CCTV Center for Media & Democracy’s website).

The film follows the story of barbershop quartet baritone Robb Topolski. In 2007 Robb proved that Comcast was blocking peer-to-peer uploads. What makes this an engaging film isn’t the Internet technology and policies illustrated in it, but the human story that weaves theses issues together. I won’t spoil the film with the details, but Robb’s parallel personal story is a large part of what makes this film work.

The film faced a challenge in the fluid nature of the topics it covers. In December of 2009 Comcast and NBC Universal announced plans for a merger. In January of 2010 the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Citizens United v Federal Election Commission that corporations have a First Amendment right to fund independent political broadcasts in candidate elections. In April of 2010 the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia ruled that the FCC overstepped its bounds when they tried to regulate how Comcast could mange its network. The directors attempted to address these recent events with an updated cut of the film.

Barbershop Punk is a great primer on network neutrality issues. While the film clearly has a bias in favor of network neutrality, we hear from many different voices and perspectives throughout the film. I highly recommend that you watch it if you get a chance.

Update (11/5/2010): The Vermont International Film Festival has posted a video of the Network Neutrality Panel.

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).

There will be four rooms with sessions on .NET, PHP, Ruby, Python, Java, and more. Two of the rooms will have .NET topics and another will have sessions on free/open source software. There will be a fourth room where developers will be introduced to various technologies that they may not use every day. For example, are you a .NET developer? Come and learn about PHP, Ruby, Python, or Java. A Ruby developer? Learn about .NET, PHP, Python, or Java. You get the idea.

Vermont Code Camp is a great way to bring together technology user groups from around Vermont. The Vermont.NET User Group is the primary organizer of the event but we hope to see others from the Burlington, VT PHP Users Group (which I organize), the Vermont Ruby On Rails User Group, the Vermont Area Group of Unix Enthusiasts (VAGUE), the Green Mountain Oracle Users Group, the New England Adobe User Group, and the VT SQL Server Users Group there. Do you know of any other Vermont technology user groups? Please let me know so that we can invite them!

1. Network and make new connections
2. Learn from your peers
3. Share your expertise and knowledge
4. Meet experts
5. Find job opportunities
6. Get solutions to problems