A wonderful Wired Wednesday

Last night I was fortunate that my schedule, which has been beyond busy of late, opened up enough for me to attend the inaugural Wired Wednesday event. Much like Third Tuesdays being organized by Joseph Thornley, it is the quality of the attendees and presenters that make the the event so enjoyable. My hat goes off to the organizers (Karla Briones, Erin Bury / Red Wire) for getting 3 great Ottawa startups (Choicebot, Gazaro and DNA11) and the always engaging Joseph to kick this monthly event off.

I didn’t realize how busy that schedule was until I looked at my WordPress post calendar and saw that it has been almost 4 months since I made an update to this blog. While that would generally border on being unacceptable I’m willing to cut myself some slack because I have made a lot of great things happen over the last few months:

1. I was an active member in a large team that re-platformed and re-designed www.canadapost.ca. Not only am I jazzed to be able to say that I had a helping hand in re-launching one of the top 100 Canadian web properties, but the scope and complexity of the site continues to present new challenges to expand my skills. With the new platform in place more projects are in flight which you can look forward to making your postal life easier.
2. I designed and developed a new site for the non-for-profit Centre for Treatment of sexual abuse and childhood trauma. The staff wanted an easy way to update the content on their site by members that had a wide variety of technical skills – yet again WordPress proved to be capable of supporting these needs as well as integrating eCommerce and paypal donation options. The initial launch suffered a few hiccups due to hosting environment challenges, but all is good now.
3. Geeks, Beer and BBQ – What else do I really need to say? A few twitter conversations lead to me deciding to organize the 1st annual Ottawa Geek BBQ (#ottawageekbbq) for freelancers, social mediasts, developers, entrepreneurs and their families. Big thanks go out to @chrisjschmitt for hosting, @reconfigures for taking great photos of the event and most importantly The Code Factory, Labarge Weinsten and ExpertHost for donating / subsidizing the food, drinks and key infrastructure (porta-potty). This event managed to raise just over $400 for the Startup Ottawa future events fund. I look forward to someone self-organize the first annual fall Ottawa Geek BBQ.

   

Looking forward I have a couple of great things lined up for new ambitions that I will announce in short order. I think part of the reason that I have been blogging less is that I’ve gotten more active in my use of Twitter. If you want to stay up-to-date with the latest and greatest in my world, you can follow me at www.twitter.com/idealien.

One item I will let out of the bag is that next week will feature 3 great blog posts with a social media slant that have been sitting in draft for far too long. I was holding them off in hopes of posting them as first fresh content in parallel with a re-design of the Idealien Studios site. However, that ‘too-busy-for-my-own-good’ schedule relegated personal projects to the bottom of the to do list. So starting Monday I will share the series which is based on a series of interviews I did with the knowledgeable and beautiful Natasha from Virtual Eye See.