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Weekly Wrapup C & J; Soccer; CS3.0; TeleTwitter; Emma;

Published to Blog on 21 Apr 2007

It’s been a few days since I made a post. Really busy around here and rather than post half a dozen little posts, I’ll just group everything in one big one.

C & J - Thoughts and Prayers
First, and most importantly, I just found out that the wife of a dear friend was involved in a serious accident Friday night. Tonight she is still recovering in ICU. It looks like she’s made it through the worst. C & J, our thoughts and prayers are with you. Please Lord, see fit to watch over this wonderful lady and her family tonight and in the days and weeks to come.

The rest seemed important until a few minutes ago, but it quickly became irrevelant and unimportant after hearing the news above…

**First Soccer Game
**Today was our first soccer game. Despite my initial trepidations, our first outing was better than we could have ever hoped. We won 12-2 and that was despite my best efforts to slow down our scoring. I moved my best scorers to defense, I would pull girls to the sideline during the game to give the other team a player advantage, and I even moved all players to defense but one. My girls looked great, especially when my lone offensive player was going 4-on-1 with the oppositions defense and slicing through them like butter. But better than winning and scoring, the girls showed off some great individual skills, played with a great team mindset - making some fantastic passes to open players, and generally just had fun.  I can’t wait until game #2 on Thursday.

**Community Server 3.0
**Telligent released Community Server 3.0 this week along with a redesigned site to support it and a new store. My hats off to the CS team, what a fantastic product. I had hoped to convert this site to the new version this weekend, but now I don’t know if I will have the time to do so. Even if it is not this weekend, though, it will be soon.

TeleTwitter
I was not a big fan of Twitter when I first started hearing all the noise about it. It was one of those “so what” things to me - didn’t sound all that useful. However, over the last couple of weeks more and more Telligenti started joining and I figured I should check it out, too. At first I used GTalk to monitor and add posts and it seemed okay. Once I started using TelliTwitter, a winform client that Jason Alexander started, I really started getting it. It really opened a new communication avenue to other Telligenti that I had never really conversed with before (especially since I work from home and Telligent is located in Dallas and many of our developers are scattered about the country and the world). Since digging in, I’ve gotten to learn (even more) about my funny and talented co-workers and have been able to share of myself as well.

Lots of the Telligent team took some time to add pieces to TelliTwitter over the last week or two and it has really become a great tool. I added a couple of bits myself, including TTS (Text to Speech) via the Microsoft SAPI (Speech API) that allows TelliTwitter to read your messages to you. This all came about during a Twitter chat when I said “It would be cool if TelliTwitter talked to you”. Jason Alexander agreed and within minutes I was searching Google and MSDN to find information on making it so.

It has been fun watching the project’s momentum escalate and seeing everyone else’s interest peak as much as my own. Friday Jason changed the name from TelliTwitter to TeleTwitter, released it as open source and added it as a project to Google Code. You can find more information in his post about it. You can access the TeleTwitter Google Code project here. I have not used any other winform clients with Twitter other than GTalk, but everyone is saying it is the best Windows tool around and it just keeps getting better. I added some more features last night and I know of at least 3-4 other contributors who either worked on it today or are working on it as I write this. I hope the momentum builds even more now that it is available to the rest of the world. Check it out, join the project. I know you’ll love it as much as I do.

Emma
Seth Godin pointed to an interesting site yesterday, Emma, pointing out that their site is great particularly because it is written by real people to be read by real people. I checked out the site and he is correct. I love sites, especially businesses, that choose a narrative voice to tell their story. Maybe I like it so much because I have sucessfully taken the same approach in the past. Nevertheless, this type of approach appeals to me. I’m much more inclined to take a look at their product because they come off as honest, real people - people like me - not just some marketing guru spreading out marketing poo.

That’s it for now. I had more, but they are going to have to wait. It’s getting late and I’m running out of steam.


Dan Hounshell
Web geek, nerd, amateur maker. Likes: apis, node, motorcycles, sports, chickens, watches, food, Nashville, Savannah, Cincinnati and family.
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