Category: Community

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Community

IBM Champion Hat Trick

This week I found out that for the 3rd time I was selected to the IBM Champion program.

I just want to say thanks to those who nominated me.  I’m glad you like the contributions I’ve helped to create.  I also want to thank IBM for their efforts in this program.

A bunch of new Champions were added and I was especially happy to see my good friend, Marky Roden make the list.  He’s the text book definition of a Champion.

I was sorry to see a couple of people drop off the list.  But to me, “Once a Champion, always a Champion”!

My philosophy has always been, Champion or not, I’m going to keep doing what I do.  So expect more NotesIn9’s soon.  I have a couple  cool shows lined up.

Also I am working on a new little surprise that will hopefully be useful.

 

Thanks again!

 

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Community

Announcing TreeOnATruck.com

Ok, I’m going to go off the reservation here and do something that mixes home life with “work” life.

Every year over the Christmas season we play a game.  We count the number of Christmas Trees we see on vehicles. And by count I mean the first person to shout “TREE!” gets a point. While the game makes me happy, it does cause stress as gosh darn it I also want to win.

My wife has infected a bunch of her friends with the game and here’s a snippet of what she posted this morning:

****** TREE ON A TRUCK SEASON IS FINALLY HERE!!!*********
Woo hoo!! By far one of my favorite days of the year is rapidly approaching!!! The first day of Tree on a Truck season!! How do you play? By spotting Christmas trees strapped to the top of trucks/cars and even motorcycles this holiday season. Last year, we saw a pickup truck with a fully decorated AND lit tree driving around. And a tree in a grocery cart. And yes, both count.

===

So where does the “work” part come in?  We’ll early this week I had a crazy thought.  Why not have a little “App” that we can use to help keep track of who has how many trees? I could “whip something up and then use it for NotesIn9”.

Ya know what happens when you “whip something up”? It becomes a mixed together mess.

Anyway – I did do it.  I made a quick and dirty web application using XPages and Mobile Controls.  I wanted to see the mobile controls in Domino 9.0.1.  There was good and bad.  I’ve never actually targeted a phone before so that seemed interesting. And believe it or not I’ve not done a lot with validation, cookies, and some other things yet and this would give me a good playground.  Some things like cookies and “splash screens” I’ll be needing for the day job sooner rather then later.

So anyway – if you want to play the Christmas Tree game at home – feel free to go to TreeOnATruck.com and track your trees.

No it’s not a great site yet.  Not even a good one.  But it seems to functionally work.  I plan on building the app for NotesIn9 and hopefully highlighting improvements as I go etc.  So if you’re just interested in that great.  I did use Java so there will be some “getting started” material involved. I’ve already learned a bunch of new things from working on the app.

Not exactly sure when it’ll hit NotesIn9.  Certainly not on Black Friday.  That’s the best weekend of the year for Tree Spotting!

Note: the website is designed for Smart Phones and does not work in IE.

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Community Notes In 9

NotesIn9 appearance on the Social biz User Group

I was recently interviewed my Celia Hamilton from the Social Big User Group.

We talked about Application modernization, NotesIn9 and where you might want to start in learning about XPages.

Check it out here if interested.

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Community Notes In 9 Podcast

NotesIn9 129: #ThanksBruce

In this show I take a few moments to thank Bruce Elgort for everything he’s done, not only for me personally, but for the Domino Community as a whole.

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Community

Public Service Announcement for IBM Connect

Ok so I’m starting to think about IBM Connect.  I’m not yet sure I will be attending. Assuming I do attend I’m 99% sure I will not be submitting any abstracts*. I’ve yet to officially ask at my “Day Job”.

But in order to ask for something like this you kinda need to know how much it will cost. Right?  I’m not crazy here am I?  Sadly that’s not as easy to find out all the costs any more.

One of the reasons why it’s difficult to know the costs is that the registration site is NOT giving you the hotel prices until AFTER you actually register. As we might say in PA Dutch County, “that’s fricken stupid if you ask me”.

So anyway, how do you find out the hotel prices so you can actually put in a request to your personal ‘powers that be’?  Well the great Andy Donaldson went through the process, kept the link and posted it on Twitter.

So to see the hotel prices and available go here:

http://registration3.experientevent.com/showibm144/default.aspx?AccessCode=1200

So save you some trouble, assuming, I’m doing this correct, it appears the prices are:

Host Hotels

Dolphin: $288

Swan: $288

Walkable Hotels

Beach Club: $239

Yacht Club: $239

Need a bus Hotels

Animal Kingdom: $239

All Star: $88

 

Of course, check the prices out yourself.  Maybe they’ll change. I’ve no idea.

 

Last year IBM Connect had a LOT of great XPages content.  I’m hoping that will continue.

 

Note: You might find cheaper hotel prices on hotels.com (Dolphin is $272 I hear) or with a AAA discount.

 

* SpeedGeeking is not included.  I could see myself trying to speak there maybe.

 

Categories
Community Notes In 9

NotesIn9 4 Year Anniversary

The very first NotesIn9  was published way back on July 11 2009.  I usually miss the actual date because I forget and only remember it was in the “summer” sometime.  I should probably set a reminder or something.  Anyway…

After 4 years, NotesIn9 has now produced 120 episodes from 31 amazing contributors for almost 35 hours of mostly XPages educational content.

Between my libsyn.com account and Youtube, the show has been viewed or downloaded 200,524 times!  Not too shabby at all I think.

My best show continues to be the 73 minute “Introduction to XPages” with over 15,000 views/downloads just for that episode.

The cheatsheets continue to be downloaded and some people seem to like the new show map.

In case you didn’t know it, NotesIn9 is available from the iTunes store here: https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/notes-in-9/id342514883?mt=2. There’s also an RSS feed in the sidebar of the website.

I’m hoping for some big changes in the next year, we’ll see. In the meantime there are more shows coming.  A great one by Keith Strickland is up next and I’ve got some I’d like to get out.  I’ve also talked to some potential new contributors recently and need to get back to that.  So all in all should be some more content coming.

I want to thank Chris Miller of SpikedStudios and Jeremy Hodge of Zeta One for some key support at some crucial times.  I want to thank Jesse Gallagher for some key support moving forward.

I also really wanted to take a minute to thank all the contributors for donating your time and talent to the show.  I and others really appreciate it. Thanks also to everyone who watches and leaves comments and feedback as that’s really nice also.

Dave

I’ll leave you with a little story.

Probably the most common question I get asked is “What does the 9 mean”?  Well back when I started out, YouTube had a 10 minute limit for uploaded shows. I thought NotesIn9 had a much better ring to it then “NotesIn10”.  That worked for a while till I just needed more time for longer topics.  So I moved from YouTube for the most part to a private host – libsyn.com.  That let me get longer shows and also an RSS feed for the Apple iTunes store. So the 9 originally meant that the show would be 9 minutes-ish.  Now it has less meaning as some shows have been lengthy. Not quite sure what to do about that. haha.

So that’s my story. More to come.  Stay tuned.

 

 

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Community Learning XPages Notes In 9 XPages

The NotesIn9 Guide Map to Learning XPages has been updated.

There’s been a bunch of new NotesIn9 shows recently with more on the way.  I’m really close to getting through my contributor backlog.  I even have a several of my own shows I’d like to do.

Since there’s been these new shows I took a couple of minutes to update the Mind Map that should hopefully have links to all of them. The goal is to make things easier to find.

Check it out here.

I hope this is a helpful means of finding other shows and getting into XPages.  I’ve not really spent much time on the organization of this map but if anyone has any suggestions, or if there are any problems with any of the links please let me know.

Dave

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Community Learning XPages XPages

XPages Forum has been updated!

I know of 2 main resources to try and get specific help on XPages issues.  StackOverFlow.com and the XPages Forum.

While StackOverFlow (SO) is clearly the best place to go with a specific question, it’s not the best place for every situation.  SO is geared more to very specific questions.  It’s not a place for higher level discussions.

This is where the XPages Forum comes in.  It’s a specific site on developerWorks for XPages focused questions and talk.  I was very excited to see this tweet come up on my screen yesterday from Craig Lordan telling us that the Forum template code has been updated:

forumtweet

 

The forum now has a new UI look and feel and as best as I can tell 1 or 2 minor functionality changes.

While I try to visit there as often as I can, there are a bunch of TRUE experts who try to answer questions. I know XPages Xpert Paul Calhoun, tries to answer many questions and I’ve even noticed more IBM’ers hanging out there more.  Including members from the elusive XPages Development Team!  That’s a big win for the community.

For various reasons the XPages Forum is near and dear to my heart.  I think it’s important to have a complement to StackOverFlow.  I’ve even had some private discussions with some great IBMers on trying to improve / add some more features to the forum to make it more workable.  They seemed interested in the ideas, so I’m REALLY hopeful that with this update to bring it up to speed some needed feature improvements will be coming soon.

If you’ve not visited the XPages Forum in a while I strongly suggest you checking it out.  If you don’t have a question try and answer one, or share an experience of something you’ve learned. There’s a great XPages Community out there but you do need to Join in The Conversation to make the most of it.

Who knows – you might even make some friends.  I did!

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Community Learning XPages XPages

Live XPages Webinar today at 10 am EST on OpenNTF

Today Marky Roden and I will be doing a Getting started with XPages Webinar for OpenNTF.

This is a rare event because I typically don’t do many webinars do to lack of time.  But one does not simply pass on the chance to speak with Mark Roden.

This session is geared for the person new to XPages or thinking about jumping into XPages.  We assume you know something about Notes Client or Domino Web development.  It really is true beginner / getting started focus but there might be some things for a slightly more advanced XPager.

We have a ton of content and likely won’t get through it all – but the webinar will be recorded, the slides will be available, and a “directors cut” of the demo at least, will be coming to NotesIn9 very soon.

It’s Free. Please join us if you have time.  There will be questions at the end.

http://webinars.openntf.org/

 

UPDATE:  The replay can be found here:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZbR9e8WWgwM

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Community

NotesIn9 Live coming to the OpenNTF Webinar Series!

One June 4th I will be participating in a Webinar from OpenNTF.org called “Getting Started with XPages”.  I’m really excited to be presenting with Dr. Marky Roden.  It’s always nice to be able to present with good friends. In addition to being an outstanding developer Marky also happens to be a stellar presenter. So it should be a fun time.

I love doing what I can to support OpenNTF.  It’s a great community run website that is one of the best resources available to the XPages developer.  I don’t do too many webinar’s just because my schedule usually conflicts with hard dated commitments, but when Bruce and Niklas asked if we could do something for OpenNTF, well, how do you say no to that? They’ve both done a ton for the community.

Now – here’s your chance to influence the presentation.  This presentation is geared for the new XPager but we want to try to sneak in things that maybe the intermediate developer might have missed.  So in addition to looking at some getting started type code we want to have things like common mistakes to watch out for, tools you need, and more.

So if you have any suggestions for what you might want to see, or had a problem as you started learning and think it should be mentioned, or any other advice for a new and intermediate XPager  – well I’d love to hear it.  Either leave a comment here or send me an email.  My email address is on every single show. If I can’t get it into the presentation then who knows, it might just make a future NotesIn9.

Thanks so much and I hope you’ll be at the webinar.