photo credit: EMMEALCUBO

Today I went with my wife Ruthie to a WordPress Meetup in Dallas that had the largest attendance I have seen yet at this meetup. I know there were over 100 people there, maybe even 120.

Tony Cecala, the organizer of the meetup somehow arranged for us to meet in this great big room at The Art Institute of Dallas. They had great Wifi, provided food and even made all the set-up and everything for the audio and video for the speaker.

The speaker was Giovanni Gallucci, a social media expert. He spoke for about an hour about social media software, building networks the smart way and tricks of the trade. The talk was highly entertaining, as Giovanni has tons of energy and is very easy going. He even brought his young daughter, who helped collect business cards at the end.

I think everyone that attended came away with at least one great new idea to start working on.

Recently I created a template for an eBay store for a client who also happens to be a friend. The eBay store is called Hitch and Tow and they sell hitch products and accessories on eBay. This project was a learning experience because of all the complexity involved with hooking into eBay and that user interface.

The part of the eBay selling template I created can be found by clicking on a live auction item and then scrolling down to the actual description area of the page (You will see the Hitch and Tow header in green). We also reused the template header and modified it a bit for the store header.

It was pretty challenging because you have to code for an environment that you control very little of the elements except for the template iteself, so to test it you have to actually make an auction live to see what will happen.

It also had to work within the eBay bulk program Turbo Lister, which was an additional hurdle, but it can be done. You also have to train the end user on how to work within the HTML of the template. I'm glad it finally worked out so well for my client that he currently uses it for over 200 listings and that total is growing.

Go to my family blog, the rooty jr. and gush site to see a live version of the SlideShowPro working. The program works from within Flash.

This is one with newer family photos from 2008. I will be adding some 2009 photos to the same slide show in another tab soon.

Since my last UT Dallas update the construction here on campus has been increasing at a fever pace (is that even correct grammar?).

This hopefully is a better photo than the last one, both taken from the camera in the iPhone. I thought this photo out a bit better before shooting it.

The construction on the UTD campus makes it a bit of a challenge getting around campus some days, but ya gotta hope we will end up with a much better campus when it is all done.

The job is going really well. I love working in this university setting and am being challenged every day with new stuff to learn and get involved in.

The other thing I am really loving is my iPhone. The always connected aspect is very cool. I am writing this post from the UTD Student Union building in one of my 2 favorite chairs right from the iPhone.

I also purchased an app called "FTP on the Go" ($9.99 in the Apple App Store) that allows me to log on to my other ( non- WordPress) sites, look at all the files, download and edit a file and upload the edited file. That's huge to be able to do that from my phone! At least it's huge to a web designer.

UTD - Where I work.

Where I work, The University of Texas at Dallas, they have been doing a ton of construction on campus!

I finally took a snapshot of it on my iPhone.

You have to walk way out of your way to get many places, but the end result should be worth it.

I also wanted to make a short mention of this great little iPhone app iBlogger, which allows me to make blog posts, like this one in any of my 8 WordPress blogs.

Great products Apple and iBlogger, thanks.