My family is full of crazy ideas, some are more crazy then others, most, in my opinion, are awesome. So, when my brother told me last year he was going to dress up like Waldo (he fits the description well), I jumped at the opportunity to help him out. He rounded up four friends who dressed as the other Waldo characters (Wenda, Woof, Odlaw, & Wizard Whitebeard) and they scheduled an afternoon to spend in downtown Chicago wandering the...

I’ve been working on this project to create a wikipedia-like information hub for north Minneapolis, InsideNorthside.org, for a while now. Needless to say, it’s slow to catch on, but that’s understandable. In the workshops I’ve done, we’ve brainstormed what resources our community needs that we could use technology resources to address and one of the needs that arose was a comprehensive youth calendar. There are so...

I had the opportunity to participate in this web design project earlier this year with the staff at Crossway Publishing. I can’t take credit for the actual design work, most of that was done by the excellent graphic design staff at Crossway. They gave me a finished inDesign file for what they wanted the site to look like and I turned it into a fully-functioning website. I think we are all happy with the...

This might be a obvious list of information for some of you, but for others it will be new and helpful for years to come. I don’t know how much time it will save you over the course of your life, but I become quite impatient when I’m helping someone on the computer and they are clicking around the menus to copy and paste things instead of using the shortcuts. Constantly switching your fingers from the mouse to the keyboard takes time...

WordPress, my CMS of choice, was recently upgraded to 2.9 and with the latest upgrade was the new requirement of MySQL 5.0 databases. MySQL 5.0 has been out for a while now, but 6+ years ago when I started my blog I had just MySQL 4.0 to choose from. 1and1.com, who I use as a webhost, doesn’t have any sort of ability to switch your current database over from 4.0 to 5.0 (most hosts do not). So, I had to create a new database and transfer...

I’ve been doing a lot of work on Facebook Fan Pages lately. Mostly on a personal community project called InsideNorthside, but also on a few other non-profit and business related fronts. Facebook, regardless of your personal opinion of it, is one of the largest potential customer pools for any business (or non-profit or cause). Second only to maybe Google (specifically: showing up in a search results or buying ads), Facebook has an...