rose.pruyne

The 45th Eastern Primitive Rendezvous takes place September 23-October 1, 2022.   For more information, visit the official EPR website and Facebook group . We will be hosting the 45th Eastern Primitive Rendezvous on our family farm, near East Smithfield, PA. The dates are September 23 - October 1, 2022.  This is a living-history event depicting 18th-century activities. Visitors can tour the camp each day from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m.  Tuesday, September 27 is School Tours Day, during which we welcome classes from all of the area schools. Campers need to preregister ( nrlhf.org/pdf/pre-reg.pdf ), and period-correct clothing and gear are required.  For the exact location and more details, visit the  official EPR website  and Facebook group . For those of you who attended the 2017 EPR, this is the same location.

The 45th Eastern Primitive Rendezvous takes place September 23-October 1, 2022.   For more information, visit the official EPR website and Facebook group . The following is a list of museums and historical sites within an hour or so's driving distance from the 45th EPR campsite. Other places of interest will be added to this list as time goes on. This information also will be included in the event's Gate Book, which campers will receive upon arrival. Bradford County Farm Museum Alparon Community Park RR 14; Troy, PA Distance from EPR Camp: 14 miles Call for Hours: (570) 297-3410 theheritagevillage.org Bradford County Historical Society 109 Pine Street; Towanda, PA Distance from EPR Camp: 14.5 miles Call for Hours: (570) 265-2240 bradfordhistory.com Chemung Valley Historical Society and Museum 415 E Water St, Elmira, NY 14901 Distance from EPR Camp: 19.3 miles Call for Hours: (607) 734-4167 chemungvalleymuseum.org Corning Museum of Glass 1 Mu...

Everyone likes to think that the meeting they're sitting in is productive and staying on track. One of the best things about using a Kanban system is that it provides a highly visual representation of your team's progress. I've found that Trello works great for conducting meetings, work sessions, and other group activities. After all, what is a meeting but a short-duration collaborative project? If you go into every meeting with an agenda — as you should — then you have a predefined set of items for the To Do column. Then it is a matter of simply moving them through the steps required to bring them to conclusion. Furthermore, you can use Trello features such as commenting and voting to capture all sorts of information during the session. Here are a couple of the meetings and work sessions we handle using Trello: Agile Iteration Planning The main part of our Iteration Planning is done by the entire team. Once that is completed, the Scrum Master takes care of a...

Trello  is a highly visual, easy-to-use collaboration tool that lets you organize projects using  Kanban boards. Trello makes it simple to break down projects into components and components into checklists. You can track progress on each component, comment, even vote on tasks or ideas. Fog Creek Software, the maker of Trello, says it will be offered for free, forever. Here are a couple of the ways that our team uses this tool: Project Ideas These are ideas we pitch to our sponsors and stakeholders.  The columns: New Ideas: This is where the idea lives until it grows some legs. Documented Ideas: We've done technical research and requirements gathering. Proposed Ideas: We've pitched the idea. Approved Ideas: Sponsors and stakeholders like the idea. It can now be moved to the Project Backlog. Project Backlog Our Agile team keeps a Trello board for tracking the state of each project. The columns: Accepted: All have agreed that this is a project we...

So, your team has been practicing Agile for a while, but it's not making a whole lot of difference. Excessive planning sucks up weeks of time before the work even starts. Releases still take forever to accomplish, and you are not delivering value to the customer but once every few months. Iterations don't stay inside their time box but straggle all over the place. Has anything really changed? Maybe not. Because maybe you are using Fake Agile. In the big and overlapping world of The Agiles and their ilk, teams can adopt and fine tune a combination methods — team roles from Scrum, user stories from Lean, project boards from Kanban, pair programming from Extreme. But that does not mean you can borrow one or two techniques and call yourself Agile. You absolutely need to put in place the following: An iterative process in which the customer is an integral part of the team. Base changes and enhancements on customer feedback. Then do it again. And again.  A tea...

I just published this article at plone.org on Andreas Mantke, a deputy member of the Board of Directors of the Document Foundation for LibreOffice . Mantke led a workshop for new Plone site administrators in the LibreOffice community during its annual conference last week. See the full article at plone.org/news/andreas-mantke-to-lead-site-administration-workshop .

I recently wrote this article for plone.org about the University of California, Los Angeles Diazo Work Group that collaborated with other members of the Plone community to improve Plone’s Diazo UI. Read the full article at  plone.org/news/ui-project-leads-to-significant-improvements-in-plone-4.3-theme-editor .

About 30 members of the Plone community participated in a 3-day sprint at WebLion , following Plone Symposium East 2012 . We worked on PloneEdu, Plone Installation on Windows, ZopeSkel Documentation, Plone Accessibility, a promising new product called plone.app.toolbar, and a follow-up dose of Code Cleanup and Removal. Thanks to Steve McMahon for leading our sprint; to team captains Kim Nguyen, Ross Patterson, Cris Ewing, Matt Barkau, Nathan Van Gheem, and Eric Steele; and finally, to Mark Corum and Rob Porter for...um...naming this the Hot! Hot! Hot! Sprint. Here are the teams and what we accomplished: PloneEdu Plans include fresh content, a site facelift, and new hosting for PloneEdu , a resource for educational institutions using Plone. Team: Kim Nguyen, Mark Corum, Rob Porter, Chris Thomas, Brian Davis, William Fennie,  Prathmesh Mengane, Greg O'Toole Accomplishments: Defined the PloneEdu audience Made plans to migrate the site's hosting to Osh...

We adopted Agile in WebLion in January 2011, using Agile Software Development with Scrum as our first guide. before agile Before making this change, we were highly collaborative in our own way. But we lacked the structured cohesiveness that Agile brings. We had no systematic process for vetting one another's work, no way of identifying when a task was truly done . And — I don't like admitting this — we worked alone or in pairs way too much. agile resources in the webLion wiki: http://socuteurl.com/freshykissymidgypiggy Add to this all of our projects. These varied enough in nature and complexity to make it difficult to distinguish priorities, dependencies, and monsters that might bite. Our self-taught foray into Agile served us pretty well. We were getting better at requirements collecting, time estimation, sorting out dependencies... But the big change came in August 2011, when we took a NetObjectives course on Lean-Agile with Scrum . Today, we are more L...

Capturing requirements in Agile stories is finicky business. Stories need to be just the right size and shape, have the right bits of detail, point to a clear outcome. They must capture the who, what, and why in a way that speaks unequivocally to the user and to the team. Badly written user stories will slow down your team in any number of ways. A few recommendations... Get the right people writing the story. Even if you've done lots of requirements gathering, or the functionality seems like a no-brainer, don't assume that you have sufficient information to compose stories without stakeholder participation. In fact if at all possible, the stakeholders should do the writing. You are there to ask questions and help clarify. Without this collaboration, you will end up going into iteration planning with hobgoblins, not real stories. The team then must devote time to figuring out what's actually needed, returning to the stakeholder with lots of questions, rewriting and...

transparency is undeniably more efficient. Developing products on your own with inadequate checks and balances for long stretches of time might seem acceptable, or even cool, for a while -- if you're inexperienced or a cowboy. But in reality, it's a burdensome and buggy process. It's rife with questionable decisions, bad habits, and shortcuts. Egos get tied too closely with methods and products. Change causes pain. Troubleshooting and maintenance becomes a real killer. And pity those who inherit the lone wolf's pile of work later on. Lean-Agile's systematic approach helps ensure that the entire team is aware of what is being worked on and how the work is progressing. Tracking tools (we use FogBugz to good effect), Kanban boards, incremental unit- and acceptance-testing, daily standups, iteration planning sessions, retrospectives, and vigilant facilitation at each point in the process help to keep team members from straying off course or going underground. ...

Consider the following Web site navigation: Home | Priorities | Giving | Council | Alumni Efforts | Foundation Challenge You might be able to guess that this is the main navigation for an alumni site of some school. But aside from Home , can you formulate a clear idea of where any of these links will lead? always crashing in the same car: recurring mistakes and misuses of the web Supposing your goal is to join this institution's alumni association. Which of these links would you follow first? Would you follow any at all? And what exactly is a Foundation Challenge, anyway? You see this all over the Web: critical navigation distilled down to as few words as possible--preferably a single word. Design teams hold meetings in which everyone struggles to come up with the right word to describe a category of activities, a diverse collection of information, a whole branch of services. It's mind-numbing work, and for a good reason: few single- or two-word descriptions ar...

Following are the slides from the presentation I gave today at the Penn State Web Developers Forum on handling content for Web 2.0: This presentation is also published at docs.google.com/present/view?id=ddjp8wn9_1271dnxfh2cg .

Following are the slides of a presentation I gave yesterday at Penn State in which I share my philosophy and approach to managing collaborative Web environments: This presentation also is published at http://docs.google.com/present/view?id=ddjp8wn9_1389hk6r9md3 .

As of this writing, a particularly virulent SQL injection spider attack is largely targeting sites running ColdFusion. Here's how the attack appears in server logs: The code creates a cursor of all the user tables and all the character columns in the database. It then appends a string to each of the columns, making an ungodly mess. Mark Kruger's post goes into a great deal of helpful detail about how this spider operates . If you do a Google search on this attack, you will quickly get a feeling for how widespread this is. If your site is getting hammered, and you need to buy time while you fix vulnerable code, there are scripts such as this one posted in ColdFusion Developer's Journal on August 8, 2008, which can be modified to thwart this most recent attack thus . Be aware that this only buys time. The most effective course is to make sure your queries are protected with cfqueryparam . Ben Forta's primer on cfqueryparam provides a very good start on prote...

What does it take to be successful on the Web? The answer to that is simple and yet not so simple: Provide relevant information. Make it easy to discover... >>> Read the rest of this guest article on Dr. Terry Etherton's blog at blogs.das.psu.edu/tetherton .

The following presentation, "Migrating Your Site to Plone" was given at the Penn State Web Conference on June 9, 2008. You may view a screencast of the presentation slides accompanied by audio of the speakers, or just listen to the audio. ::: view the slides p la y the screencast listen to the podcast s ubscribe

Frequently, potential adopters of Plone at universities tell me that they have a difficult time convincing administration within their organizations that Plone -- or any open-source content management system, for that matter -- is worth the investment of time and effort. Or in the case of Penn State's WebLion services , any consulting fees that may be involved. This proposal is loosely based on what I wrote for my own shop. However, I am fortunate to work in a highly clueful department . Making the case for adopting an open-source enterprise-level content management system was not an arduous task. With that in mind, I'm sharing the following example proposal for adopting Plone at the university department level. If you are striving to convince your organization to adopt Plone, feel free to make use of any part of this material for your own justification. In this example, the department currently maintains a home-grown content management system based on proprietary tools...

Aside from the usual reasons why it's silly to duplicate static content from Web page to Web page, here is yet another: If your Web site has content copied and pasted from one page to another, it is very likely that Google is filtering out some or all of the involved Web pages from search results. The reason: The Google search engine does its best to optimize user experience by returning unique content. Because no one wants search results listing page after page of the same stuff. always crashing in the same car: recurring mistakes and misuses of the web Higher Education and other organizational Web sites tend to needlessly replicate content. This happens perhaps most frequently when information is repurposed as marketing material. The same content ends up appearing at its original source as well as at one or two marketing pages. Unfortunately, if this marketing material resides above the core content in the site hierarchy - and it usually does - it can end up replacing the core ...