I graduated from the U in ’06. People have always complained that a disproportionate amount of money goes to the research side of the University of Minnesota. While I am definitely a fan of checks and balances, I think everyone can stand back for a second and praise this news from yesterday:
At work last week we launched a “share story” tool. It is a tool to allow you to share a story with up to 25 each of mutual friends on the site, your groups, and e-mails. I worked on the original version for Netscape.com as well as the new one that integrated the groups aspect for Propeller.com. The feature had been noticeably absent since the re-launch of the site over the summer. I hate to pat myself on the back, but it is a pretty slick feature.
The Overnight Challenge wrapped up around 10:30 or so today. The overall winner of the event was the organization District 202 (old site here) and their team Praxis. I can’t say for sure on how the judging was conducted, but I’m sure the key was the overall impact to the organization on fulfilling their mission rather than merely the things that “geeks” would otherwise hold dear. If I remember correctly, Praxis set up some sort of 3rd party community platform through Ning. I don’t know much about Ning, but the theme this year was definiatly reaching constituents through social media integrations. I also think most groups ended up going with some sort of pre-rolled CMS too. We, and a few others, used Wordpress – which after this long weekend, I think more and less of as a piece of software.
Wee…. still working… listening to Smodcast re-runs since I don’t have any music on my computer. Why does it seem that so much of my life is dedicated to building form styles? Lame. This needs redbull…
Ug. Losing energy. Getting annoyed. Turning Green…. then… COOKIES.
It’s 4:00. Still plugging away. Things are going well. I’ve mostly been setting up 3rd party accounts for YEA (facebook, twitter, etc) to integrate into the Wordpress install. Next step is to look into a profile plugin to Wordpress to be able to augment the user profiles to act as a CRM. Wee.