Slashcode

Man, I haven't posted to this journal since March? Well, I've been working steadily on new Slash-based stuff, and I may be getting close to the point where CTDATA's Slash work converges with the leading edge. Hope springs eternal, I guess.

The third CTDATA-related Slash site is the Atlantic District Officiating Program web site, otherwise known as AAHArefs.org. It debuted in July, with major functionality improvements in August, September, and November. This is a site with over 2,000 registered users. If you're wondering how we pulled that off, we integrated an existing membership database with Slash 0.4, and made the membership of the officiating program de-facto Slash users.

This effort began because I found that I needed a lot of the user services, page rendering, and administration contained in the classic (ancient) version of Slash that I keep maintaining.

Of course, the site has taken on a life of its own, and it doesn't even matter whether we have a lot of activity on the home page anymore. A lot of the sought after info is in the membership database itself, behind a gate that is not readily apparent to unregistered users.

AAHArefs is working well, and I can't wait to upgrade it to 2.2.6. From the looks of things, I'll have a hard time doing this before March or so.

I got a review of the book "Running Weblogs with Slash" published on Slashdot the other day. I hope my friends who read Slashcode enjoyed reading the review as much as I did. It would be nice if you found it useful as well, but I think the book is aimed at people who have less experience with Slash than the typical reader of this site.

It was a blast to get a review published on Slashdot, and I hope to write a couple of additional book reviews soon.

I received an email today that indicated that Amazon.com has shipped my copy of "Running Weblogs with Slash" to me. I posted a story on CTDATA.com to draw further attention to the fact that the book is now available.

Looks like I am in the process of winding up a three month engagement at a large financial services firm in Northern New Jersey. So, I may be looking for a new consulting project fairly soon.

BTW, I'm trying to post something to my journal on this site occasionally, if only to demonstrate my on-going commitment to the project. You can find out more about what I'm doing at CTDATA.com.

For those of you who do not know, Kathleen Kuykendall and I got married on July 7 in Philadelphia. We spent three weeks in Europe on our honeymoon, and I did not get on the Internet once during the trip.

For the last few weeks before we got married, I was very hesitant to begin any new work or get involved in any technical issues, because I didn't want to leave any loose ends. I hope that my small contribution to the community wasn't missed too much....

Now that we are back, life is complicated by the fact that the new CTDATA office (upstairs from our new home) does not have a broadband connection yet. It's surprisingly hard for me to deal with 28.8 access as my primary connection. This is a problem that may not get better immediately. According to our new provider, we may not get installed for another two weeks.