Streamlining, Broadcasting and Fundraising

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With the holidays over and the working year underway, I’m back into the swing of things this week. That, and the fact that I am no longer having my daily on-holiday-lunchtime-beer means that this post should be of significantly more interest than last week’s. At least, I hope so.

I imagine most of you are back at work, too (if you even took a break), but I hope that you had time to take some holiday snaps over the Christmas period. If you did, you have a few hours left to enter them into The Great Holiday Photography Competition, which is running at the forums. Submissions close at midnight tonight (Pacific time), with the winners being announced at the end of this month. There are some great prizes up for grabs, but perhaps the biggest coup is the fact that Paul Duncanson, writer of our book Photography for the Web is a guest judge, and will be providing tips and feedback on entries. So head over to the forums and submit your images before time runs out!
SitePoint Community

On the subject of competitions, the forum staff is slaving away on an exciting new contest. This one is aimed at the web designers amongst you. If pure HTML and CSS are your thing, then you want to keep your eye out for this one. Details will be released on Feb 1st.

Last up from the forums this week is for those of you who like to browse the forums on the go. We have installed the Tapatalk plugin. Tapatalk is a forum app which allows you to browse the forums on your mobile device. Please note that Tapatalk is a commercial app, however, and is in no way associated with SitePoint, so if you want to use it, there will be a fee incurred.

Something else that I have been looking at this week is twitterfeed. I am trialling twitterfeed to tweet our new blog and article posts. With no posts to date, I can’t comment on it’s effectiveness, but I have heard good things and the UI is easy to use. At the same time, I am trialling it to post to our Facebook wall, as I solicited feedback last week which suggested that notifications of blog posts on our wall would be useful. I’ll keep you updated.

The same request for feedback on Facebook turned up something fun that I’ve actually been working on a bit behind the scenes. If you followed my blog posts last year, you’ll know that in December I became the proud owner of a new Macbook Air. Part of the motivation for making the move to Mac was the fact that I saw some really fun video clips made by a colleague using iMovie. Ok–I accept that that is a fairly weak basis for requesting that SitePoint purchase me some expensive machinery, but it worked! To prove that I’m not all talk, I am working on some clips of life around the office. Keep your eye on our Facebook page for those over the next couple of months.

Last up from me this week is something far less positive. Many of you will have heard of the catastrophic flooding that is currently ravaging Queensland, Australia. While our SitePoint offices are based in another state and are therefore unaffected, we’d really like to do something to help out. We have had lots of requests from you to run some sort of fundraising effort in a similar vein to the one we ran for the Victorian bush fires a few years back, and we love that idea. We are working on the details of just such a fundraiser, but there are some legal requirements that have to be fulfilled first so, we are doing our best to get that organized. Should all go according to plan, we hope to have something to announce later this week.

Hot Topics This Week

This is a subject that I see every now and then in the forums, and I’m always interested in the different opinions that are around. In the Careers and Education forum, a student asks for advice on which direction to take at university–Computer Science or Information Technology?

There is a thread in the Content Management Systems forum about subdomains for registered users of a WordPress site. Do you know of any resources or plugins for building blog communities?

Protecting content is always an interested subject, and it is being discussed currently in the Content Writing forum. How do you protect your content?

Last up this week is a thread for the geeks out there. The guys in the PHP Application Design forum are discussing naming conventions. Have your say…

Whew. That’s it for this week! Catch you same time next week.

note:Want more?

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Sarah HawkSarah Hawk
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Formerly a developer in the corporate world, HAWK (known as Sarah by her mother) said goodbye to the code and succumbed to the lure of social media to become the Community Manager for the SitePoint network. Now Hawk is working with Discourse to build their product and community.

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