Exploit Boston! Part 3939302111

I probably have more to talk about than Exploit Boston! but it’s been consuming a lot of my time so that’s what I’ll talk about here. I put the site back up today with a new layout. There is a lot of tinkering left to do. But thanks to some help from Matt with CSS, Brad with Perl and Movable Type and Mike with Mac testing it finally has some of the new functionality in place. Hindsight of course tells me I should have probably just used a regular, plain Movable Type weblog template and then EB! would have been active several months ago. One day I will learn the lesson of not trying to do so much at once — especially when it’s a labor of love sort of project. One day! But I’m happy that EB! is back up and ready for contributions. I guess I need to re-connect with everyone who expressed interest to contribute. I did come around on whether or not it should be primarily an event calendar. At first I didn’t really want it to be a “weblog” — mostly because I am so tired of hearing that word. weblogweblogweblogblahblahblah But the idea of having a zillion events up on the site at all times would be really tough to maintain solo. So, it’s a weblog on the homepage that others can post to and then there’s a 3-day calendar and spotlight events. The drop-downs for browsing by week, month and category were upsetting the XHTML validation so they’ll have to wait until I figure out how to fix that (or until I ask someone for help!).

In some ways, Exploit Boston! feels like a sort of re-entry onto the Web. I’ve felt extremely disconnected from lots of the people I used to know and/or conspire with. Being able to bounce ideas off of new pals has been a lot of fun and reminds me of what my web life used to be like a long time ago.

Now if the sun would cooperate this weekend I might even crawl out of my cave!