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Race For the Cure

Yep, its that time again. Time for the Race For the Cure to support breast cancer research.

I'll be running on June 9th. If you' like to join me, send me an email. If you'd like to support the cause and contribute with a donation, you can do so online right here. If you would prefer, you can also send your tax-deductible contribution to the address listed below.

Komen NC Triangle Affiliate
2314 S. Miami Blvd, Suite 154
Durham, NC 27703

Technorati : Race For the Cure

posted @ Monday, April 30, 2007 10:51 AM | Feedback (0) | Filed Under [ General ]

What can orange do for you?

Lisa brought up an interesting point about RSSBus - some people are confused about what it does.  Thats because it does SO MUCH.  I have some 'splaining to do.

RSSBus gives you the ability to access all of your data sources in the same way and in the same format.  The beautiful thing about this is that it opens up so many options for what you can do with the data in a small amount of time.  I like to say that RSSBus is three things:

1. It's a feed generator.  RSSBus gives its users the ability to create RSS feeds from data sources located both behind the firewall (like databases, Quickbooks, Excel, your mail server) and out on the internet (like Google services, Yahoo services, SalesForce.com, PayPal, etc).
   
2. It's a Really Simple Service Bus.  If you don't know what a service bus is, it doesn't matter, because when I say simple - I mean simple.  Basically all this means is that using RSSBus you can exchange messages or transition data between various places (applications, data stores, web services, etc).
   
3. It's a feed customization and routing tool.  We provide users with the ability to customize, mix, pipe, and mashup feeds.  Without any coding/scripting you can create, sort, search, randomize, or combine feeds.  If you want to dive deeper and do a little scripting you can customize the feeds with nearly no holds barred, and you can move data between one source and another simply by piping two feeds together.

Technorati : rssbus

posted @ Friday, April 20, 2007 2:20 PM | Feedback (0) | Filed Under [ RSSBus ]

Smoking swag in Cali

So we're back from the Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco.  Here is my favorite photo from the trip, a view of the Golden Gate and the skyline. 

After the show was over we had some time before the flight home, so we took a little trip over to the Golden Gate, then back south to Santa Cruz and back up through the valley.  We also took a cool catamaran cruise through the bay around Alcatraz and under the Golden Gate, but I didn't have my camera with me which is a shame.

Swag vs Schwag

The show was great, lots of people and lots of interesting sessions and speakers.  A lot of people told me that the RSSBus swag was the best swag (here's a picture of the RSSBus-branded moving love-mobile that we gave away).  I agree, that bus is smokin!  Lisa Morao says we had the best too, woohoo!  After I read her post I randomly wondered to myself - is it schwag or swag?  I've seen and used both terms.  I'm a real curious nerd and I just had to know right then.  So what did I do?  The same thing I do everytime such a question comes to mind:  I asked wikipedia!  I found out that it doesn't really matter, schwag is a colloquialism for swag.

So, although we don't really give away schwag (we can't give that away without legal issues even though it might have come in useful during some of the less exciting sessions - I can hear the speakers now - "Dudes... you're sooooooo gonna love this new product that we have, it - is - so- cool.  Totally.  I mean, really...think about it...what if the web 2.0 remote could actually be used to control you?"), we do have some really cool swag.

Technorati : rssbus, web-20

posted @ Friday, April 20, 2007 2:17 PM | Feedback (2) | Filed Under [ RSSBus ]

Tip: How to Deploy RSSBus Feeds on Shared Hosting Servers

There are two ways to deploye feeds created with RSSBus to shared hosting web servers, both of which I will describe below. If you need more details on either of these please do not hesitate to contact me.

1. To publish a live, dynamic feed:
   
   - In order to do this you'll need to make sure the file extensions .rsb and .rst are mapped to ASP.NET. If not, just ask your hosting company and they should be able to do this for you very quickly without any fuss.
   
   - Copy the .rsb and/or .rst file(s) to your host. The folder in which they reside must be an ASP.NET application folder.
   
   - As with any other ASP.NET application, you'll need to copy any dlls to the bin sub-directory of the forementioned ASP.NET application folder. At the minimum you'll need nsoftware.RSSBus.dll, nsoftware.RSSBus.Engine.dll, and nsoftware.RSSBus.Formatters.dll. Also copy any other dlls for RSSBus Connectors that you use in your scripts/templates. For example, if you use an operation from SqlOps, you'll need nsoftware.RSSBus.SqlOps.dll.
   
   - If your ASP.NET application folder already has a web.config file, you'll need to modify it to add the httpHandlers for RSSBus. You can copy and paste these directly from the web.config file that comes installed with RSSBus. If you do not already have a web.config file, simply copy over the entire file.
   
2. To publish a static feed:
   
   - If you do not need your feed to be dynamic, you can simply show the feed on your desktop, save it to a local file and copy that file to your server. For example, when you are in the Feeds tab of the RSSBus Admin Console and you have completed your script, click "Show Feed". When your feed comes up in the default browser, save the feed as xml (ie, myfeed.xml). Then FTP this static file to your server.
   
   [Note that in the final release, RSSBus will make this option easier by providing an automated solution to automatically deploy a static feed.]

Technorati : rssbus

posted @ Friday, April 20, 2007 12:45 PM | Feedback (0) | Filed Under [ RSSBus ]

"You can connect all sorts of data and systems together using RSS"

posted @ Sunday, April 15, 2007 6:39 PM | Feedback (0) | Filed Under [ RSSBus ]