Commanding Chaos for Coworking, Open Source and Creative Communities

April 2007 Posts

Off to London until 4/30

Tue, 04/17/2007 - 17:39 -- rprice

By the time most of you read this, I will likely be on my way to the airport. I'm flying out on NorthWest (for the frequent flyer miles). Never flown with them internationally, we'll see. I am pulling out my passport at this very moment...right.

If you have friends in London, send them here to the blog and the comments on this post or the contact form, or MySpace.

If you're on Flickr, add me, I hope to be posting photos all along the way.

If you're on Twitter, I'm going to see what I can do about that... I can at least post from the flat, but I might get my girlfriend to loan me her phone so I can text updates.

Skype will help, too. If you want to leave a message for me, it will be easier to call (321) 441-3964, which is my Skype voicemail.

Getting late and I have to take in my MacBook tomorrow! Later!

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Florida Creatives Happy Hour 4/16

Sun, 04/15/2007 - 11:43 -- rprice

Event Page & RSVP
Monday, April 16, 2007

6:00 PM - 9:00 PM

crooked bayou
50 E Central Blvd # D
Orlando, Florida 32801

All creative individuals are invited to the 5th meeting of a monthly networking event by FloridaCreatives.com - entrepreneurs, filmmakers, thespians, bloggers and podcasters, artists, designers, architects - all are welcome at this event.

The goal for this moth is to come up with some ideas for taking our community's message and reaching out to other groups in the state, like preparing for our booth at the Orlando Fringe Festival.

Coordinator Ryan Price is also putting together a podcast with members of Florida Creatives; check the website for more info. Bring a stack of business cards and your listening ears.

The eventual goal of this group is to hold a state-wide annual unConference where the community gets together to learn from each other, though the Happy Hour is not a recruitment event for people to work on the conference. This event exists simply for us to get together and be social.

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Grandma Party!!

Sun, 04/15/2007 - 09:20 -- rprice

Here in Orlando we have some very playful and active hipsters. A little over 2 years ago they started getting together in the parking lot of the hippest place in town, the Stardust Video & Coffee house. The parking lot turns into a flea-market / craft show atmosphere, with live music in one corner, a gigantic rummage sale, designer haircuts, short shorts and brightly-colored outfits.

I recently made a post over at Florida Creatives about my booth and making buttons.

Jason and Meagan from SOLMI put together a video about Grandma Party - these kids are really talented, and I hope we get to work together soon. Check it out:

I get in a plug for the Florida Creatives too. Pretty nice.

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marc. with a c. tonight @ stardust

Fri, 04/13/2007 - 04:26 -- rprice
Ryan at the Holiday Show

Hey script kiddies, if you're in Orlando and you like hoity-toity beer, GREAT atmosphere and rock music, you MUST come to Stardust tonight to watch marc and I rock the hell out of an otherwise pretentious little coffee house in Southern Winter Park. 1842 Winter Park Rd, just off Corrine Dr, in between Leu Gardens and Baldwin Park. 9PM or thereabouts, until maybe 11:00/11:30.

This will be my last show with marc for a while, as I'm going to London next week, doing Blogging Fringe next month, helping with Petentials all the while and trying to figure out how to eat and keep a roof over my head in the process. I'm not out of the band, each of us just needs to get things done.

Edit: I'm not in the band anymore. This post apparently had something to do with it...

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BlogOrlando: September 28-29, 2007

Thu, 04/12/2007 - 18:31 -- rprice

EDIT: I jumped the gun. If you read Josh's post, you'll know this is a "penciled in" date.

Chances are if you participate in Social Media (especially in Orlando), you have heard of Josh Hallet. Or read a blog he consulted for, designed, even influenced in some way. Last year Josh put together a fantastic UnConference called BlogOrlando. Rollins College was a great space for this event, with two rooms and tons of useful sessions. This year will only be bigger and better from what I understand.

Josh just made announced the date over on the BlogOrlando site. Last year I went to the Thursday night dinner and some of the stuff on Friday, but I had the Printing4Pros job and a marc with a c concert on Friday, so I made it to as much as I could. I did manage to grab a podcast at Dexter's, but only the one.

Listen to my interview with Wendy Kurtz and Vlad Mazek

Considering that it was a blogging con, I think podcasting was well represented. I am hoping to speak about community or podcasting this year - so many people were so very interested in process during Vlad's talk about video blogging, I think there will be an audience for it.

The best part about BlogOrlando (and I would guess most UnConferences) was the people. I made some good connections and really started to realize there was a media community in Orlando that could be tapped into. In my trifecta of events that led me to start Florida Creatives, BlogOrlando is third, with Grandma Party and the Fringe Festival before it.

Speaking of Grandma Party - it happens this Saturday!! It happens at Stardust all day. I will have a Florida Creatives / Blogging Fringe / Orlando Scene TV booth going to do some schmoozing. If you want to stop by, I will have melon and lemonade, chairs and shade, microphones, a camera and lots of love to spread around. If you don't believe me that love will permeate the Grandma Party, you just need to see it for yourself.

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Howto: Include Wordpress Widgets in Post or Page Body

Sun, 04/08/2007 - 11:50 -- rprice

I recently had a desire to make the homepage of a blog feel more like a portal - include a search box, updates coming in from around the web, a list of recent posts and links to other parts of the site that give more description than a simple blogroll. I ended up using Wordpress Widgets, runPHP and a little elbow grease to get it done. To see an example of this working live, visit Blogging Fringe - everything below the search box is a widget. I definitely recommend including widgets on a Page as opposed to a Post, but your needs may dictate otherwise.

  1. The first thing we need is to install and set up Wordpress Widgets. I won't cover this, as the official tutorials and dozens of other places on the web do a great job of describing this process.
  2. Next we need the ability to run PHP code inside of a post. Coincidentally, we will be using a plugin called runPHP to accomplish this. There are other plugins to run code available, but this one worked for me. All you need to do is activate the plugin and check a box when you're editing the page. This works for any PHP code, but we're going to use it for calling a dynamic_sidebar in the body of a page.
  3. Before we can call the sidebar, we need to register a new one with Wordpress. I think this adds records to the database, but mainly it exposes a new box on the Widget options interface for you to drag widgets to. This thread on the Wordpress Support forums addresses the issue of adding multiple sidebars - particularly the comment by johnnyspade. You need to add some code to your functions.php file (in your theme directory) that looks a bit like this:
    if ( function_exists('register_sidebar') )
        register_sidebar(array(
    		'name'=>'sidebar1',
    		'before_widget' => '<li id="%1$s" class="widget %2$s"><div>',
    		'after_widget' => "</div></li>\n",
    		'before_title' => '<h2>',
    		'after_title' => "</h2>\n",
        ));
    
    if ( function_exists('register_sidebar') )
        register_sidebar(array(
    		'name'=>'sidebar2',
    		'before_widget' => '<li id="%1$s" class="widget %2$s"><div>',
    		'after_widget' => "</div></li>\n",
    		'before_title' => '<h2>',
    		'after_title' => "</h2>\n",
        ));


    When I did this, my original unnamed sidebar disappeared and I had to repopulate the list. Still, naming the sidebars is very important, because we need to be able to invoke them later in our page.

  4. Now that we're all ready to run code, all we have to do is make a simple function call. With the multitude of widgets available, you can do most anything. Here's the line I included in my post:
    <?php dynamic_sidebar('sidebar2'); ?>

Now I actually have a dynamic homepage that introduces my users to my blog and the related feeds, content, etc, while hopefully remaining useful and fresh all the while.

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New Server

Sun, 04/08/2007 - 05:46 -- rprice

Earlier this week, I lost 3 months worth of email, to a problem as-of-yet undiagnosed. I had been meaning to get things moved over to our CervoSites hosting (it is our hosting reseller plan), but I was worried the transition wouldn't be smooth... like maybe I would lose all my email!

I am now on the new server and email is running again, but if you sent any important email to < rprice AT ryanpricemedia.com > you'll have to send it again, I don't have it.

Moving over the wordpress and upgrading from 2.0.7 to 2.1.3 couldn't have been easier, and now links and posts share taxonomy - very efficient.

I also made the switch (and redesign) for Blogging Fringe, mostly because we were on Detroit Creative's servers, and their PHP version is old. Also, I've been getting free hosting for Liberatr podcasts with Jake for a year now, and it is time to renegotiate the sponsorship.

We've been hosting the Cervo Systems website on our own servers for months now, and a few weeks I will make that look all pretty and make podcasting/media the focus of the site, but I have too many contracts open right now to get to work on my own sites. However, I was told the other day to consider myself one of the people in Florida who knows more about Drupal forms and theming than just about anybody in the state (Kia would argue the SouthEast, but I have nothing to back that up). You can see for yourself once we start opening up Petentials a bit more... right now only about 50 people have access to the site. If you want to get on the beta list, email me and tell me why.

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