Owner: Tix R Us GeekEvents URL:http://tixrus.blogspot.com Join Date: Tue, 22 Apr 2008 22:33:54 -0500 Rating:0 Site Description: Quirky and Eclectic collection of Web 2.0 sightings, local blather, and insights of both the technical and personal nature. Site statistics:Click here
RSShugger: a clever way to get publicity 2008-04-19 10:05:00 RSShugger is yet another blog directory I have found. It's not Web 2.0 -- it's pretty old school and refreshingly simple. Hey not everything has to be a widget. Rsshugger is not huge yet but I predict they'll grow. They request an honest review, so here it is: The usability issues I see is that 1) the control panel link is not a top tab. It's up at the upper right ONLY and I had to look for it a little. 2) sometimes it's not spelled out what's going on and the verbiage leaves the casual reader in the dark. I can imagine what the backend of this looks like and figure it out, but to most people the back end of a website is a mystery. 3) when you submit your blog feed it isn't at all obvious that anything happened because it reposts the same page. And another thing is that t Read more:publicity
Good Bye Blue (AKA Bloopie) 2008-04-18 23:51:00 I am, with great sadness, going to turn over one of my 2.25 year old Lab/Griffons to a family with 10 acres tomorrow morning. Blue (AKA Bloopie) was the one targeted for relocation. There were quite a few people who wanted her. But 10 acres and close to me with a stay at home adult was the clear choice. One of the other people who wanted her is going to be severely disappointed. The others -- I think they will be fine. I keep telling myself it's for the best. It's impossible to train two dogs at once, and it takes a serious time to train them one at a time. Two littermates who have never been separated exponentiate the doggie craziness around here, and it's upsetting to some family members who don't deal with craziness as well as I do. I've held half a dozen jobs in corporat Read more:Good Bye
What Type of personality are you? 2008-04-18 01:47:00 Well there I am, summarized for all the world to see into a neat little bar graph. If you want to see how you stack up, go ahead and click the widget. It will take you to mypersonality.info where you can take the test yourself. It's fun, fast and free and you'll get a nice little widget souvenir like mine for your own blog. I have taken these things before, including the full Myers-Briggs (which is way bigger, way more official, and 4 choice questions, and not free, I'm sure, though I never had to pay for it. The results are always the same. I am in a tiny minority -- the Introverted Intuitive Thinker Perceiver. This is what the site says about us:"INTPs are logical, individualistic, reserved, and very curious individuals. They focus on ideas, theories and the explanation of how th
How much is YOUR domain worth? 2008-04-17 13:11:00 My Site is worth $2,572How much isyour site worth?Not too much, but maybe a little. This is FREE domain
valuation from your friends at dnscoop.com. They use data from Alexa, Google, your domain registrar, and other sources. We are apparently a Google page rank 5 -- that's darn good considering the limited amount of traffic we get. On the other hand we have a phenomenal conversion rate! When people come to TixRUs, they are pretty set on buying tickets and they successfully convert more often than not. Google favors sites such as TixRUs that are provide a great deal of useful content, even though our SEO is only what little old me can do here and there.
Ning makes top 20! 2008-04-17 12:22:00 I nabbed this graphic off a-stat-a-dayDid you know we have a ning site of our very own? So if you visited it before these stats were compiled, your visits were included in these stats. And if not, it's not too late to join it!
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On digital abundance... 2008-04-15 10:37:00 he web is my platform; I shall never lack. She maketh me to surf abundant (though often vapid) content;She leadeth me to streaming media; she restoreth my cache. She guideth me in the path of abiding by the TOS for my conscience's sake. Yea, though I tread a fine line of legality I will fear no lawsuits for my poverty and my five wits are with me. Thy large redundant data warehouses and distributed availability comfort me. Thou preparest a bounty of digital goodies for me in the presence of corporate lawyers. Thou annointest my blog with widgets; but my hard drive stayeth small. Surely twitters and readers shall follow me all the days of my life, and I shall dwell with Scoble in the house of the rich bloggers forever.
ORblogs -- a great resource for Oregon bloggers 2008-04-14 12:34:00 Tix•R•Us Geek Events just got listed in ORblogs very recently. ORblogs is an excellent blog catalog in its own right, and it is especially excellent for anyone with a local business or organization in Oregon
. What I really like about it is it breaks the catalog down by town. There were 65 registered blogs in my hometown of Corvallis, only 7 in neighboring Albany when the Tix•R•Us Geek Events was added, and of course hundreds in Portland. I expect those numbers to grow as news of ORblogs gets out. I wish them the best and thank them for this excellent resource.As I was surfing the Corvallis blogs, not too surprisingly, I found a few belonging to people I know or wish I did. Here's just a few, and believe me I intend to get to all of them but for this initial list I cherry Read more:bloggers
Twitter -- the birdsong of 500 lb. canaries with bullhorns? 2008-04-10 00:07:00 What is the deal with Twitter
? I just don't get it! I'm with Kathy Sierra on this one. (For those who don't know, Kathy Sierra is one of my all-time heroes -- a brilliant educator, writer and blogger who shut down last year due to misogynistic death threats. Would the bullying have been so egregious, or would it even have happened at all if Kathy had been a male? We'll never know, but you should really check out the link. Kathy makes her points eloquently and there's no point in me paraphrasing it. Let her speak for herself beyond the cyber "grave" of self-banishment.) I wouldn't have given Twitter the time of day except that my very good friend John Sechrest suggested I get on. So I did, thinking hmmm... maybe there's something I'm missing. But no, not really. It's all about
How Commerce Works 2008-04-02 10:41:00 I was intrigued by this depiction at a meeting I attended yesterday. I'm told the original purposewas to illustrate "How a woman's brain works" but that statement is not verifiable. You can go gaga looking at the little blue balls moving around. Not sure how well blogger handles Iframes' either.
Read more:Works
Pimp your Blog II: Entrecard, Blogcatalog, and mybloglog 2008-04-01 18:15:00 Sorry kids, there's no picture in today's post. I've just been playing with three blog pimping services Entrecard, Blogcatalog, and MyBloglog. Entrecard is a widgetified version of the old Link Exchange that they used to have in the 90's. You provide a graphic and they use it to build you this widget which you paste into your site. Then people visit your site and they "drop their card" on your widget. You get credits for this. You can "drop your card" on other people's widgets too. And you can "sell" the space on your widget to somebody else and get credits that way. Blogcatalog is a social network that's focused on blogging. They have forums, friends, shoutboxes, etc. Oh yes and LOTS AND LOTS of widgets. MyBloglog and blogcatalog are very similar. They also allow you to list
Easter Island Tribute 2008-03-30 01:07:00 The cousins collaborated and built this snow sculpture in Kansas over the Christmas break. Mulligan and Ida, Jean, Connor, Eamon, and Eleanor I, and Keegan and Eleanor II all had a hand in it. Keegan and Eleanor II's mom is an artist and Mulligan and Ida's dad is as well, so there is art in some of the cousins' genes; and the ones that don't have it (basically my crew) are still useful as snow packers. This project was a long time coming, primarily due to lack of sculpting supplies in visits past. This was the first visit to Kansas in years where the weather has been remotely like I remember Kansas winters--cold and usually snowy. The four or five winters prior to 2007 have been snow-free and balmy enough for me to run outdoors with no jacket. I felt stupid lugging a down jacket al Read more:Easter
, Island
Social Bookmarking 2008-03-26 11:31:00 This is a really nice video explanation of social bookmarking. We have a bookmarking icon on our info pages currently, but look for a much cooler new bookmarking panel in Wazzup Local and Tix•R•Us in a version coming soon to a browser near you. Event presenters can use social bookmarks to get more publicity (FREE) for their events. Fans can help their favorite performers by social bookmarking the Tix•R•Us information page about it. Tix•R•Us has done its part by making the links much more search engine friendly. Instead of the old search-engine-unfriendly format our links are now of the "friendly" format. If your event is "Rusty Muggers plays at the Old Grungepub" instead of being eventinfo.php?linkid=5424 the link is now eventinfo/rusty-muggers-plays-at-the-old-grungepub Read more:Social
, Bookmarking
, Social Bookmarking
Move over Dilbert.... uh... (sort of) 2008-03-23 23:13:00 I was just surfing around the startupalooza website for who's coming to Portland and I ran across the toonlet site. I remember writing a Mr. Potato head stack in Hypercard many years ago and it was a lot of fun. I'd seen others as well, desktop toys for Windoze and Mac, all along the same line. Well, toonlet lets you give them moods and write captions and publish them for posterity, which is a step further. So I got into toonlet and created Calendargeek, an alterego for myself.I don't really have dreadlocks but it was the coolest hairdo that fit the face. Some avatars are what people WISH they looked like, not what they really look like. I built Calendargeek to be expressive, not necessarily to look like me, or look like I wish I looked, and certainly not to be a glamour queen. Howe Read more:Dilbert
Webshots goes Web 2.0 2008-03-18 22:49:00 I've had my big birthday bash shots on Webshots
for a while -- so long, in fact, that my friends are starting to hint that maybe I should throw another party and try to outdo the 2005 one. That would take some doing! The 2005 party was spearheaded by Kathryn Ronnenberg (decorations) Ruth deMaio (activities), Vere McCarty (food and beverage meister), and Connor Dick & Kit Andrews (live music maestros). I've been to many parties, including some that cost thousands, and none can compare in my mind to the absolute perfection of my 2005 birthday bash. By comparison with some parties we didn't spend a lot, but by golly we had it engineered to a T! We had 70 people there and no one got hurt or obnoxiously drunk or had any unpleasantness. Pretty much all the trash got put where it belonged;
Pimp your Blog 2008-03-18 20:06:00 I'm sort of guessing anybody reading blog posts is halfway looking to promote their own blog, so this one's for you, kids. Blogrush is an interesting widget that is intended to mix up the gene pool a bit with regard to blogs. You basically place your blog in a category and then you put your own custom widget for that category on your blog. (See left pane.) The widget has links to other blog posts in your category. Every link is tagged with your blogrush id so that they know who sent a page to that other blog. You get points every time someone clicks the widget to see one of the related blog posts. When you have enough points then links to your blog will pop up in other people's blogrush widgets. The other thing about Blogrush is that it works like those Multi-Level-Marketing (M
SAO Marketing SIG Kickoff 2008-03-14 15:14:00 On Thursday 13 March the Marketing
SIG of the Corvallis branch of the SAO had their kickoff event. They had done their research by giving interested parties a survey monkey survey to identify both their customer and what the customer needs. You get to be a customer by answering the survey. The most popular need they identified was "market research on a shoestring budget." The crowd was adequate but not the biggest ever SAO turnout. Our speaker was Dr. Paul Abel, specialist in marketing research. Dr. Abel started out by noting that "sales" are about the company's needs, whereas "marketing" is about the customer's needs. His official takeaways were Education, Focus and Plan. However, the takeaway points for me were:Qualitative vs. Quantitative Market Analysis: Qualitative is when
Señora Camacho's Mole 2008-03-12 14:45:00 I will be forever in debt to my friend Carmen, who showed me the magic secret to making great mole. I had been making mole for years but her little trick made my mole perfect and perfect every time. This picture was taken several years ago when a bunch of us got together in the church soup kitchen of St. Mary's Church and built close to 1000 tamales for the Fiesta de Nuestra Señora de Guadalupe, which is celebrated on 12 December. I use this mole for traditional mole dishes served over rice, and for pozole, and also for tamales. Are you ready? You can make as much or little of this as you like, and you don't have to have every single thing and you have a lot of substitutions in what chiles you use. I've found that the magic with chiles is always use several different kinds,
Beaver Bar Camp 2008 2008-03-03 11:03:00 On Saturday 1 March 2008 I had a great fun day at the First Annual Beaver
Bar Camp Bar Camp is a participant organized event and it was 100% paid for by sponsors, (ergo free to participants.) The idea is when you get a bunch of geeks and friends of geeks together good things happen. They don't have to be computer geeks, perhaps we should call them mavens instead -- people who are passionate about whatever the theme of the bar camp is. Attendees exchange cards, info, and tech tips, sign up to make presentations in a variety of formats, and generally use the old-fashioned word-of-mouth method of spreading joy. Instant communications and www notwithstanding, personal contact is still by far the most effective way of communicating. I met some excellent new contacts. Over on the presen
Village Green Celtic Band 2008-02-25 20:51:00 Way back in 1989 my good friend Laura Zaerr fiddler Roy Rowland, and Tom Creelan (R.I.P.) and myself were a band called Heather Breeze. We played for a couple of years but babies, careers, relationships and geography kind of got in the way. In 1995 when I was living in Mexico, Laura regrouped with three other musicians to form VillageGreen
. I found out about the band and wanted to be in it but at that time they didn't think they could use me. So I got hired by The Nettles and played high energy dance music with them for five years. Meanwhile Village Green lost their box player and vocal bottom when she moved to Hawaii. After I had parted from the Nettles, Village Green decided they wanted me after all, so for the past 2.5 years we have been reworking the arrangements a few at a Read more:Celtic
Corvallis Celtic Session 2008-02-23 13:29:00 I've recently gone back to my "roots" and started attending the Corvallis Celtic
Session at the eggsistential Sunnyside up Cafe in Corvallis. It is a great friendly session; there are some strong regulars that make it fun and varied, and I recommend the food if you are hungry. Originally I didn't know the name of the bloke pictured playing fiddle, but I found out that his name is Mark Phillips. I plan to make it a regular occurrence and of course it's a recurring event on the WazzupLocal community calendar. By the time you read this the specific event may be expired but it's every Friday at sixish. And the next time I go I will gift everyone with a pretty ABC2ps version of Fire in the F-Hole.ABC is a music notation computer program developed for shlepping ASCII text files of tune
Tix•R•Us offers FREE banner ads 2008-02-12 17:16:00 This will be the last blog post for a while, as I have pretty much all the Web 2.0 widgets I want for the time being and I'd like this post to stay at the top for a while. Tix•R•Us is offering FREE banner ads on our calendar pages. Yes, you heard me. FREE. No strings. No obligations. We run the openads adserver, a very mature and widely used open source software package. We currently display ads on our own websites, but Openads is certainly technically capable of serving ads for other webs at some time in the future. Let me be clear. These are untargeted banners so they are not likely to deliver direct conversions. What they will do is put your brand in front of mostly local eyeballs, most of whom are probably unaware that you exist. Let me also be clear that this is a l
Buzzbites 2008-02-12 10:45:00 Another widget you can make very easily! Go ahead, vote! it's easy.
Raw Food Extravaganza 2008-02-10 23:03:00 Today a friend--an extremely private person wishing to be known only as X--and I spent all day creating raw food. I bought everything that I contributed to this food-o-rama at the First Alternative Coop. X normally has a few very specialized raw ingredients on hand that the Coop does not carry. She either has to get them in the big city or via special order. Pictured left to right are 1)the piece de resistance (a raw torte consisting of coconut crust, pineapple custard, and decorated with kiwi slices and berries), and 2) a raw vegetable soup, where we also put some thought into the presentation. It was my idea to plant a little sprig of rosemary in the middle and use a star pattern of red pepper strips. Those were the two most beautiful dishes we concocted. There were loads more, Read more:Extravaganza
Subversion saved my derrierre 2008-02-08 15:11:00 Man oh man do I ever feel like I got run over by a truck and lived to tell about it. I guess this is part geek blog, part personal, and part Tix•R•Us I won't bore you with the gory details but suffice it to say MAJOR server crash requiring a rebuild. That alone is fairly traumatic, but I've survived it before thanks to good backups. This time... well let's just say some stuff, OK a LOT of stuff, got blown away for all time that shouldn't have. The feeling you get from something so utterly devastating is beyond despair. I honestly felt like blowing the whole server up and retiring to a life of taking pottery classes. But I saw one of my favorite clients, Tina Green of the LaSells center, that night, and even though Tix•R•Us was temporarily unable to produce a seating chart Read more:saved
OpenID 2008-02-03 23:43:00 Did you ever get sick of making up a user name and password to each and every one of those websites where you have to have user names and passwords? A lot of folks try to simplify by using the same id and pass on every site, but that's dangerous, because if just one site is compromised or untrustworthy, the bad guy can guess your login at all the others. Wouldn't it be great if you had a SINGLE secure identity that was recognized all over the internet without requiring each site to know your password? Now you can --it's an Open Source initiative called OpenID
. Right now the bottleneck is the relatively small number of websites that support OpenID login. I first heard about OpenID at the last SAO talk in January by Scott Kveton of MyStrands. OpenID takes advantage of the fact tha
Zend Framework Chronicles Part I 2008-04-23 22:34:00 Ladies and germs, this blog is going to take an extreme turn in the geek direction, which was, after all, it's original charter. Geeks will eat it up, but if you don't care for dorkage, I can actually be quite normal at times, and you should read some of my other posts by searching for non-geeky keywords. The decision has been finalized to rewrite the legacy style code of TixRUs to leverage the power of frameworks without forcing it into the rigid confines of a Content Management System (CMS) such as Drupal, that you then have to find modules for or program your own. The framework has been selected. And the winner is..... (drumrolllllllllllll)ZEND FRAMEWORK Zend Framework seems to suit my needs. I considered CakePHP and Symfony, both strong contenders, and CodeIgniter, which some pe
Ciba Eat Local Breakfast 2008-04-25 13:39:00 Once again the Corvallis Independent Business Alliance (CIBA) is hosting a series of three local breakfasts the first Saturdays of May, June, and July. (See the wazzuplocal calendar page for full details.) These breakfasts are delicious and nutritious and ridiculously cheap even without a coupon and best of all it's ALL locally produced, cooked and served by your friendly CIBA members, who are also probably your friends and neighbors. They are a great way to enjoy the summer weather and meet someone you know, or make a new friend if you don't know anybody. After you eat, it's just a few steps down the stairs and around the block to the Farmers' Market. You can support the local economy by buying local produce (it's fresher and better for you), also shopping at nearby locally owned Read more:Local
, Breakfast
Print your Blog! 2008-04-27 18:02:00 Get the FeedJournal widget and many other great free widgets at Widgetbox! Yes you read it right... Print
your blog. Of course you could always just print the web pages, but this widget delivers my recent posts as a high res PDF, and it can do the same for your blog. I first saw this on THINK ABOUT IT. When I don't have time to write a full blog post, I just spread something cool like this. Of course this is the free version--you have to pay for your lovely graphics and logos to be included. My insight and prediction for the future: This sort of company has a limited life span. PDF-izing features will be incorporated as part of the next generation of blogging software, just as they are in the current generations of MS Word and Open Office (like MS office suite only FREE in case y
Geek Events In the News 2008-04-26 20:49:00 Note: This clipping is strictly for entertainment purposes, is 100% fictitions and facetious, and has no connection with any news media or individual living or dead bla bla bla...... You can get your own fake clipping like this free from getclippings.com.
Read more:Geek
Does your blog have unsavoury "friends?" 2008-05-01 23:03:00 You are known by the company you keep. If your blog links to a bunch of dicey websites it could tarnish, if not ruin your reputation. Courtney Tuttle put me onto this little tool that evaluates your linkees. Check out Bad Neighborhood.I was a little surprised to see that one of the sites I linked to that I thought was a blogging site had a lot of dicey keywords in its earlier posts that raised the red flag, and a couple of my posts even had tags that set off an alarm. In the case of one post I had the word pharmaceuticals --I guess that's a taboo subject now-- and if you want to find the other one you can run bad neighborhood against my blog -- I'll leave it in for you. Other than that, and a surprising 404 (which will be history shortly) no real shady characters around here. You
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