The Launching of Hawkeye Tweets

There is no mistaking the fact that I am a HUGE Iowa Hawkeye Nerd. If you hadn't noticed, two of the last three sites launched by Brice Cheddarn Development have been Hawkeye related. Hawkapalooza was a pro-bono website put together to help a student organization at the University of Iowa. NILE was put together for a client to help him promote his novel.

Hawkeye Tweets is personal project to support my favorite team. It was inspired by the work of colleagues, who put together Suns Tweets and Cards Tweets as a way to use Twitter in support of their teams. I took the same concept and applied it to the Iowa Hawkeyes.

With the help of justSignal, the same technology used on Suns Tweets and Cards Tweets, I was able to put this site together in one massive all night, Monster-fueled hacking session. Hawkeye Tweets uses the justSignal Twitter Widget to pull in the streaming tweets and ColdFusion to power the backend and other ancillary components. ColdFusion will be used more heavily as the site expands.

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The Launching of Nile Kinnick

Nile Kinnick played football at the University of Iowa in the late 1930s.  He went on to break many Iowa Hawkeye football records on his way to winning the 1939 Heisman Trophy. But there was more to Nile Kinnick than just football.  And Tom Lidd did an excellent job of telling the full story in his book NILE.

Having discovered this novel one weekend while doing research, I was quick to purchase it. I also wrote a blog post about it on the Iowa Hawkeyes Blog. In that post, I made an open offer to help the author promote and sell the book. As luck should have it, Tom was a reader of the blog and sent me an email stating an interest in my offer.

Over the next several months, Tom and I exchanged several emails and ideas back and forth on how to promote his book. Th overall goal is to have the book turned into a screenplay, so having a web presence could only help acheive that goal. And believe me, this novel will make a fantastic movie.

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Iowa Tech and Social Media Interactive Conference

In just a few short weeks, Iowa will be hosting the Iowa Tech and Social Media Interactive Conference (IOWAtasmic), one of the very fist large social media conferences to be organized in the state. On September 18-20th, 2009 in Mount Pleasant, Iowa on the Welsyan College campus, IOWAtasmic will provide a chance for businesses and individuals around Iowa and the midwest to take part in and learn about the ever growing social media revolution.

While many people think social media is just a fad, IOWAtasmic sets out to demonstrate to Iowans that it's not. The goal of the event is to bring new technology and knowledge to Iowa, as well as to showcase the existing technology and services already offered in the area.

The conference also sets out to prove that Iowa is not ten years behind the rest of the World, technologically speaking, and will attempt to highlight incentives and benefits of relocating or expanding into Iowa.

Event organizer Bradley Laborman, known as Bradman in the online world, says attendees will benefit from the knowledge of top tech and social media figures from the U.S. and Canada. The conference will consist of keynote speakers, local musicians, youtube celebrities, social media gurus and entrepreneurs from across the country.

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The Launching of Hawkapalooza

Our involvement with Hawkapalooza began by feeding an addiction for Hawkeye information. Like most mornings, I was reading Iowa Hawkeye news while waiting for the caffeine to kick in, as I have found this to be the best way to start off the day.

One morning, the student newspaper for the University of Iowa (The Daily Iowan) posted an article about a newly formed Student Committee on Athletics whose purpose was to encourage Hawkeye Pride. The committee had a brilliant idea called “Hawkapalooza,” a pep rally and concert with the goal of the event to drum up excitement before the football team’s home-opener with Northern Iowa on September 5.

Being the web nerd I am, and having a fair amount of domain instinct, I checked the availability of the hawkapalooza.com domain after reading the article. Sure enough, it was still available. I quickly purchased the COM, NET and ORG versions of the domain and then sent an email over to the committee letting them know they were secured.

My purpose in acquiring the domains was not to profit from them or use them as leverage. Rather, it was to assist the student committee and contribute to a good cause. I used my nerdness for good to help support my beloved Iowa Hawkeyes.

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ColdFusion is the Sparta of Programming Languages

Now I know what the Spartan Warriors in the movie 300 felt like fighting a seemingly unwinnable battle. This feeling comes after responding to yet another forum question on LinkedIn this morning where 10 PHP and Ruby developers decided to pile on and declare ColdFusion dead. And they did so to such an innocent and harmless question that it begs to wonder: what the hell is wrong with people?

I wasn't going to write another post on this. When I last wrote a post on this topic, a few ColdFusion people sent in or posted comments about not paying this type of nonsense any mind. But it is getting harder and harder to ignore the mindless banality. This one being particularly hard, as one of the commenters to this LinkedIn question was a person that was present at my Developer Ignite speech, in which I came to the defense of ColdFusion and declared my ColdFusiontology crusade. (Don't worry, I sent my colleague an email calling him my new arch nemsis for his answer)

This one was also hard due to the question being asked. The question came from a dad asking if it is ok to encourage his son, as his son wants to start learning ColdFusion.

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