Task description: BPC

This Spring/Summer’s revamp of the BPC site will include the following fixes/overhauls:

- When plans are presented to judges, they should be in a random order.

- Judge selection (which happens in several different places) needs to be much more flexible using an AJAX-y system (already built a prototype)

- The system for sending email to judges and teams needs serious work to make it much more usable and flexible.

- The process of finalizing judge feedback requires some work – probably renaming as “finalizing” isn’t the right metaphor.

- Minor things: when teams send email, make sure the email is labeled with team information. Better uploading widget using the AJAX-based system I built for VIP image uploading.

- Periodically save judge feedback? Maybe a draft saver?

- It -should- be possible to use other tools to make reports and such better.

Upcoming tasks: BPC

This Spring/Summer’s revamp of the BPC site will include the following fixes/overhauls:

- When plans are presented to judges, they should be in a random order.

- Judge selection (which happens in several different places) needs to be much more flexible using an AJAX-y system (already built a prototype)

- The system for sending email to judges and teams needs serious work to make it much more usable and flexible.

- The process of finalizing judge feedback requires some work – probably renaming as “finalizing” isn’t the right metaphor.

- Minor things: when teams send email, make sure the email is labeled with team information.  Better uploading widget using the AJAX-based system I built for VIP image uploading.

- Periodically save judge feedback?  Maybe a draft saver?

- It -should- be possible to use other tools to make reports and such better.

Leveraging the Web

Friday, February 20:

In a new sort of activity for me, I’ll be speaking to the Venture Initiation Program this Friday about using the web to further their fledgling ventures.  The ventures are at very different stages, so it’ll be a challenge trying to come up with content that is interesting across the set.  But the rough outline will be:

• Greg’s first rule of technology (I’m not sure I have a pithy way of putting it, but it boils down to: Your time is worth too much to waste it on technology unless you know it’s going to help)
• Your web presence before you’re really anything (ISPs, domain names, design, rentacoder)
• The Web 2.0 thing: creating content that builds your brand… aside from your actual website.  Blogs, YouTube, Twitter, and so on.
• Using the tools available on the VIP website to leverage all the stuff you did above.

I’m going to be demonstrating that last point, probably pulling in content from this blog to show how you can pull content in from blogs.

Back to posting

This site has lain fallow for a while, but I’m hoping to get it back up to operable as I move into the spring-summer project season.

A few updates:

- GNU Partition Editor turns out to be one of the greatest things ever.  It’s free (GPL), comes in a bootable-CD form, and gives you a simple graphical interface for messing around with partitions.  That’s a huge plus for me, as every server I build turns out to have too small a system partition (no matter how big it was at first).   I tried it out on our development server, and it was incredibly simple to use.  I backed everything up first, but didn’t need the backup, and now I’ve opened up five more gigs, which should keep thing going until that box gets replaced by a virtual machine.

- One meta-project I’m thinking of now is applying for the Penn EMTM program.  I’d like to go full-time and get it out of the way quickly – that’s a big workload, but in many ways I’m hungering for exactly that kind of crunch.  “Full time” means I’ll miss every other friday of work, so I need to draw up the plan by which I’m still giving work a full balance of hours.  I’ve attended some info sessions and whatsnot for the program, though, and am very excited at the prospect – plus it looks like having a WEP “spy” over there might actually help us gain some new contacts and connections.

- On another front, I’m presenting to the members of the Venture Initiation Program next week, talking about ways to maximize web presence, both through using the tools I’ve built for them on the VIP website and using what’s out there in the world.

- The Wharton SBDC website just got a big aesthetic overhaul: http://whartonsbdc.wharton.upenn.edu .  It’s a great accomplishment for several reasons: first, it represents the way in which I helped the center re-think a large project (building a whole new super-complicated website) as a series of more achievable goals and positioned the easiest, highest-priority things first.  Second, the transition itself went very smoothly – time and time again, I demonstrated that the technology is the easy part.  Much easier than choosing pictures.  Finally, Bob did a lot of good administrative coordination and anchored some of the project on the WSBDC side, which was good to see him succeeding at.