Category Archives: community

community, plurk , , , , ,

How to Plurk

I’ll keep updating this as I find new things!

All that's fit to plurk! - Plurk.com
Uploaded with plasq‘s Skitch!

Peat has already mentioned his newfound love of Plurk, a quirky new social networking site that I’ve been playing with. Now that Leo Laporte has endorsed it, they’ve experienced their first Twitter-style growth!

What I like most about Plurk is that it takes the great feeling of chatter you get in a lively IRC channel, and combines it with awesome threading – something that Twitter users have complained about for a long time. Hash-tagging has solved some of the problem, but I have to say that I enjoy a return to real threading.

So far, using plurk is immersive, silly and very fun. The service is still young (periodic 500 errors!), and there are a couple UI issues (too much clicking!). But, using it last night was fast and easy. There’s a definite difference between Plurk and Twitter in terms of attention-demand. I liked @brampitoyo’s plurk about it being “high-maintenance.” I totally agree, but it encourages for short bursts of creative conversation. There’s an intense, good intimacy created with the threads that I don’t see as often with Twitter.

In the first 24-hours, here are a few tips I’ve gleaned for getting the most out of plurk:

  • Check out the Mobile edition: http://www.plurk.com/m
  • Use Plurk with IM: Go to My Account, and then Instant Messaging to set up Plurk with your favorite IM client
  • Follow ‘amix‘ for updates on changes to Plurk’s interface
  • Create ‘cliques’ to only share your plurks with certain people. Then choose that clique when posting your plurk. Create a clique by going to ‘My Friends’, and then the Cliques tab. If you want me to add you to my #postgresql clique, let me know!
  • Find people by their Twitter handle, by just typing it in at http://www.plurk.com/users/[handle]
  • Respond to other’s plurks in the thread! You can do this on your main timeline page by clicking on the plurk, or you can go to the webpage for each plurk and submit a comment there — example: http://www.plurk.com/p/3bu0
  • Check out the Plurk karma trends: plurk.ryanlim.com
  • Read the Plurk FAQ: http://www.plurk.com/faq
  • Check out ryanlim’s FAQ: http://plurk.ryanlim.com/help/index.php (includes a comprehensive emoticon dictionary :D)
  • Got a suggestion for Plurk? Contact them!
  • Of course, there’s already a Plurktionary!
  • A Share On Plurk bookmarklet

A few features I wish Plurk had:

  • A way to ‘favorite’ plurks I enjoy
  • A way to ‘pin’ plurks on higher my timeline to give them more visual priority when they are updated
  • A way to give feedback directly to Plurk.com through the plurk interface — why can’t I just plurk @plurk or @feedback to let them know what I think?
  • More ways to post between services – although @shiny already has a drupal-powered twitter/plurk gateway!

Have fun, and feel free to Plurk me!

community, conference, oscon, pdxpug, pgconference, portland, postgres, postgresql , , , , , ,

Call for proposals for PDXPUG PgDay, due June 20, 2008

pgday 2007
(Photo from PgDay 2007)

Please submit a talk! The call will be open for 2 weeks and proposals are due June 20th. Follow the link for details on submitting.

http://pugs.postgresql.org/node/400

PDXPUG PgDay will be on July 20, 2008. This is a one-day conference happening the day before OSCON at the Oregon Convention Center.

We are inviting anyone who has something interesting to share about PostgreSQL to send us a proposal!

We’d like to have at least one 1.5 hour tutorial and up to five 45-minute talks.

We welcome talks in any of the following areas:

* Case studies involving interesting and innovative uses of PostgreSQL from an application developer, PostgreSQL developer or administrative user perspective
* Converting from other databases to PostgreSQL
* Howtos for database administration tasks (partitioning, backups, replication, writing stored procedures)
* Practical advice on configuration, monitoring and database management

community, conference, postgres, postgresql, user groups , , , , 1 Comment

PgCon 2008 – big announcements, community conversations

PgCon was a very exciting conference, with a lot of people from Europe, Asia, Australia and South America traveling to be part of it. I read that 175 people attended, and based on how crowded both parties were, it’s not hard to believe!

The biggest announcement for me was that the PostgreSQL Europe is finally a non-profit organization! I made a slide for my lightning talk with Magnus, Gabriele, Jean-Paul and Andreas on it:

PgEU announced

I got a ton of great feedback about the User Groupalooza slides. I also enjoyed meeting Jean-Paul Argudo, a fellow Drupaler.

There were a bunch of community-focused conversations, some focused inward on developers, some looking out to the rest of the world from inside Pg, and others from the outside looking in:

All the talks were recorded, so I look forward to listening to them again – without the distraction of Twitter! 🙂

A couple talks I thought were really great for web developers were:

  • Magnus Hagander’s search.postgresql.org talk gave some great examples and code showing how to use PostgreSQL’s tsearch capabilities with a PHP-based website.
  • Clark Evan’s talk on HTSQL, a REST-ful web inteface application. It looks pretty cool and I’m interested in trying it out. They are using it for medical records report generation and have even given the ability to generate queries to the end users.

Thanks so much to Dan who got me to the conference this year! I learned a lot, and really enjoyed meeting so many people that I’ve only communicated with over email for the past three years.

conference, open source, pgconference, postgres, postgresql, user groups , , , , , 2 Comments

PgCon Lightning talk: User Groupalooza

I gave a Lightning talk today about PostgreSQL User Groups. I wasn’t able to get through ALL my slides – but I only had to rush through the last three. (click on the cat below to download – 5MB)

splash for user group talk

Lightning talks are some of my favorite sessions. I got to announce the incorporation of PostgreSQL-EU! We had a talk about DBIx::Cache (which you should all check out!), a cool open source lab in Japan that Hiroshi Saito works for (only for Japanese, but very cool), Gavin Roy talked about Staplr and a new benchmarking tool called Playr that was just released on Thursday, and six more talks! We hope to publish the rest of the slides shortly.

conference, pgconference, postgres, postgresql, user groups , , , 1 Comment

PgCon in Ottawa – following people on twitter

I’m in Ottawa at PgCon and listening to Bruce Momjian give the keynote.

We have a few people who’ve joined Twitter in the last couple months and are posting their thoughts through the conference. Try following @crad, @fuzzychef, @franciscojunior and @selenamarie (me) for our up-to-the-minute updates!

I’ll be giving a lightning talk this afternoon around 5:30pm about user groups and PostgreSQL.

conference, postgres, postgresql , , , , , ,

Bar Camp Portland: what a weekend!

I’m inspired.

I’m still buzzing from BarCampPortland. I loved every minute of it, and managed to learn a ton from all the amazing people in Portland. I met a ton of new people, and started several more projects 🙂

Over the course of two days, I ran two sessions. The first was about PostgreSQL:

We had a fantastic discussion, totally filled the room up with people curious about what PostgreSQL can do. We had several requests for MySQL -> PostgreSQL “rosetta stone” documentation.

The second session was How to raise or eat chickens sustainably:

We had an incredible conversation – ranging from getting and raising chickens for the first time, to digging up your lawn and planting food, to gentrification, to obsessive local eating.

I also attended these others: DSLR, Bikes and Geeks Collide, Project Management, My Other Thing, Women in Tech, and a session at WordCamp.

I think it’s finally time to go to sleep. Check out a ton of pictures. Thanks so much everyone who attended, led sessions and volunteered this weekend!

conference, postgres, postgresql, USPA

Roadtrip to LinuxFest NW with PostgreSQL!

lfnw

PDXPUG and USPgA are headed to LinuxFest NW in Bellingham, WA this weekend. We have a booth we’ll be staffing 9:30AM-5:00PM Saturday and 9:30AM-4:00PM Sunday. Mark Wong will be presenting ptop Saturday April 26th, at 10am in room Haskell-111. Don’t miss it!

Seems like a great lineup this year – tons of Drupal, how to use open source in your business, and ROBOTS!

Come meet us and find out more about PostgreSQL.