Joind.in

One of the best parts about running a site that's so involved in a community (PHP) is that ideas come from all different points of view about what the site should do. Well, if you're one of those people that want to contribute back to the site ... [More] , remember that we've gone open source and welcome suggestions and code that way. Now, on to some of the improvements that have been made - most of these are for the people organizing the events, but there's a few user ones thrown in: Pre-Event Voting - this is the biggie! Previously, conferences were limited to only accepting comments once the event had started. There were some people out there (like a certain unconference chair I know) that wanted the ability to post talk suggestions and allow people to vote on them ahead of time. So, I've introduced a system to do just that - once you've marked yourself as attending (yes, you'll need to register) you can cast your vote on a session, for or against. The event organizers can turn on the feature by editing the event and clicking on the "pre-event voting" checkbox. This will turn it on for the entire event all at the same time. The attendees will see two buttons a "+1 vote" and a "-1 vote" to cast their vote on the session (one vote per session per user). These votes will show up just above the comments. Next up is the XML import for event information. This new feature allows event administrators to import their session information (talks, social events, etc) in as a structured XML file. The custom format is simple to use and makes things *so* much easier than adding in your talks one-by-one. The XML structure is validated before it's fully imported, so you're sure you've got the right format. Time zone corrections - One of the things the site has fought with since it started was trying to figure out the whole timezone fiasco. So what's the problem? Well, when events are scheduled for November 15th, that's not necessarily going to be based on the site's system time. So, I had to figure out a good way to calculate the differences. I decided on a (less flawed than before) method using the UTC offset to calculate the time difference. As a result, when you set up an event, you need to select the timezone offset for the area it'll be held in. And finally, another handy one for event admins - event-based claim management. Previously, when a user submitted a claim on a talk, they had to wait for me to get in there and approve the claim. Now the admins of the event can do it themselves, making the response time faster and making it easier to manage the talk claims across the whole site. Event administrators will receive an email with a link to the page every time a claim is submitted. That's it for now - there's tons of other great stuff coming up (check it out) so keep checking back for more great features to come! [Less]

As 2009 starts to draw to a close (I can't believe it's November already) I wanted to take a look back at some of the great conferences and feedback Joind.in has seen. We're just a bit over a year old ourselves and have loved the community support ... [More] we've gotten from both the users and organizers of the site! Here's a few stats from conferences this year: The php|tek 2009 conference in Chicago, IL brought in 105 comments on a wide range of talks The CodeWorks conference came in at 175 comments combined in all of the tour's seven cities. This year's ZendCon conference was a great success and ended up with 181 comments from attendees Finally, the PHP North West 2009 conference topped the list with 212 comments from those that attended! Thanks to the effort of Keith Casey, the unconference/pre-voting method of posting sessions was a great success for both the php|tek and ZendCon conferences this year! More features for this kind of thing are coming, so conference organizers, keep your eyes open! Finally, I wanted to let you all know about the latest status of this site's code. During the initial development of the project, I was hacking away on the code myself but it's time for that to change. I've posted the source for the Joind.in website over on github to encourage Open Source development. If you'd like to check it out, head over and clone (or just watch) the project and get an idea of the things to come! [Less]

As 2009 starts to draw to a close (I can't believe it's November already) I wanted to take a look back at some of the great conferences and feedback Joind.in has seen. We're just a bit over a year old ourselves and have loved the community support ... [More] we've gotten from both the users and organizers of the site! Here's a few stats from conferences this year: The php|tek 2009 conference in Chicago, IL brought in 105 comments on a wide range of talks The CodeWorks conference came in at 175 comments combined in all of the tour's seven cities. This year's ZendCon conference was a great success and ended up with 181 comments from attendees Finally, the PHP North West 2009 conference topped the list with 212 comments from those that attended! Thanks to the effort of Keith Casey, the unconference/pre-voting method of posting sessions was a great success for both the php|tek and ZendCon conferences this year! More features for this kind of thing are coming, so conference organizers, keep your eyes open! Finally, I wanted to let you all know about the latest status of this site's code. During the initial development of the project, I was hacking away on the code myself but it's time for that to change. I've posted the source for the Joind.in website over on github to encourage Open Source development. If you'd like to check it out, head over and clone (or just watch) the project and get an idea of the things to come! [Less]

As conference season gets into full swing (well, for the PHP community at least) I've been working more and more on updating Joind.in and making the site better and better. I've been fixing smaller bugs and adding new features to make the site work ... [More] better over all. Here's just a few: Corrected a bug in how the averages were being calculated to round more correctly. Added actual comment to the email a speaker receives when a new comment is added to one of their talks. Caching Twitter results for the events to get rid of some of the warnings the site was seeing. Cosmetic changes for the speaker and event admin pages There's two more new features, one that's included in the site now and one that's almost there and will be finished soon: a new "event related" section under each event and Speaker Profiles. The Event Related feature allows for event organizers to define things (like "Facilities" or "Wifi") that are related to the event and let the attendees rank and comment on them too. This opens a whole new world of feedback options to the organizers, meaning that it's not just about rating the talks anymore - they can get your feedback on anything! If you look at an event (like the PHP North West 2009 event happening right now) you can see the new "Event Related" tab under it. In there you'll see how they've defined the facilities and refreshments for ranking. These work just like any other talk. General event comments can still be left on each event's page, but this just lets you get a bit finer grained. Now, for the Speaker Profiles - the idea behind this one is to have a more centralized place where speakers can keep their information and let other groups (either those organizers using this site or outside groups) pull the information the speaker wants to share about themselves. Take Derick Rethans, for example - say for events on Joind.in, he wants to share just a photo and a bio for his speaker profile. He'll go in and set up his information and define which pieces of information he wants to share. There's also the ability to define a "key" he can give a group that will let them pull only the information defined by that key. Hopefully it'll give the speakers and organizers a much easier way to get speaker information than having to bug them with emails. So there you have it - some smaller fixes and two great features (one coming soon to a joind.in near you!) Keep an eye out here for more great improvements to come! [Less]

As conference season gets into full swing (well, for the PHP community at least) I've been working more and more on updating Joind.in and making the site better and better. I've been fixing smaller bugs and adding new features to make the site work ... [More] better over all. Here's just a few: Corrected a bug in how the averages were being calculated to round more correctly. Added actual comment to the email a speaker receives when a new comment is added to one of their talks. Caching Twitter results for the events to get rid of some of the warnings the site was seeing. Cosmetic changes for the speaker and event admin pages There's two more new features, one that's included in the site now and one that's almost there and will be finished soon: a new "event related" section under each event and Speaker Profiles. The Event Related feature allows for event organizers to define things (like "Facilities" or "Wifi") that are related to the event and let the attendees rank and comment on them too. This opens a whole new world of feedback options to the organizers, meaning that it's not just about rating the talks anymore - they can get your feedback on anything! If you look at an event (like the PHP North West 2009 event happening right now) you can see the new "Event Related" tab under it. In there you'll see how they've defined the facilities and refreshments for ranking. These work just like any other talk. General event comments can still be left on each event's page, but this just lets you get a bit finer grained. Now, for the Speaker Profiles - the idea behind this one is to have a more centralized place where speakers can keep their information and let other groups (either those organizers using this site or outside groups) pull the information the speaker wants to share about themselves. Take Derick Rethans, for example - say for events on Joind.in, he wants to share just a photo and a bio for his speaker profile. He'll go in and set up his information and define which pieces of information he wants to share. There's also the ability to define a "key" he can give a group that will let them pull only the information defined by that key. Hopefully it'll give the speakers and organizers a much easier way to get speaker information than having to bug them with emails. So there you have it - some smaller fixes and two great features (one coming soon to a joind.in near you!) Keep an eye out here for more great improvements to come! [Less]

Wow, things have been busy...I know, I know. It's really not a good excuse, but I've been a slacker and haven't worked on the site as much as I've wanted to. Little excuses mound up into big ones and one thing leads to another and - well, you get the ... [More] idea. No more! That's enough of that - PHP conference season is getting back into full swing and there's no excuse for not getting back into the site. With great conferences like CodeWorks (PHP's very own traveling road show) and the PHP North West conference, there's plenty of great conference action coming your way. Speaking of CodeWorks, if you're attending or speaking at one of the stops, you'll be happy to know that the full, updated schedule has been posted for each of the cities! San Francisco Los Angeles Dallas Atlanta Miami Washington/Baltimore New York If you're speaking, be sure to claim those talks! If you're attending, hit that "I'll be there" button at the top to share your plans with others. So, keep an eye on Joind.in, there's good things coming. Work is going to start back up and new features will be coming soon! [Less]

Wow, things have been busy...I know, I know. It's really not a good excuse, but I've been a slacker and haven't worked on the site as much as I've wanted to. Little excuses mound up into big ones and one thing leads to another and - well, you get the ... [More] idea. No more! That's enough of that - PHP conference season is getting back into full swing and there's no excuse for not getting back into the site. With great conferences like CodeWorks (PHP's very own traveling road show) and the PHP North West conference, there's plenty of great conference action coming your way. Speaking of CodeWorks, if you're attending or speaking at one of the stops, you'll be happy to know that the full, updated schedule has been posted for each of the cities! San Francisco Los Angeles Dallas Atlanta Miami Washington/Baltimore New York If you're speaking, be sure to claim those talks! If you're attending, hit that "I'll be there" button at the top to share your plans with others. So, keep an eye on Joind.in, there's good things coming. Work is going to start back up and new features will be coming soon! [Less]

This year's php|tek conference is less than a week away and the speakers are getting slides ready and making final touches to them in preparation. The main session are all set (and have been for a bit now) but there's another opportunity that several ... [More] others are taking advantage of that happens after the main sessions each day - the unconference. So, what's interesting about an unconference, you ask? Well, Keith Casey used it to find a novel use for Joind.in - asking for feedback on unconference suggestions before the conference. As sessions are sent to him and added to the list, visitors (those that are attending or not) were invited to add feedback on the topics, showing which one they'd like to see most. There's nineteen listed as of the time of this post and around thirty comments between them. It's an excellent way to get feedback on what people want to hear and has surprised me on how effective it's been so far. So, if you're planning on attending php|tek, get your vote in on which sessions you'd like to hear (and maybe suggest your own!) [Less]

This year's php|tek conference is less than a week away and the speakers are getting slides ready and making final touches to them in preparation. The main session are all set (and have been for a bit now) but there's another opportunity that several ... [More] others are taking advantage of that happens after the main sessions each day - the unconference. So, what's interesting about an unconference, you ask? Well, Keith Casey used it to find a novel use for Joind.in - asking for feedback on unconference suggestions before the conference. As sessions are sent to him and added to the list, visitors (those that are attending or not) were invited to add feedback on the topics, showing which one they'd like to see most. There's nineteen listed as of the time of this post and around thirty comments between them. It's an excellent way to get feedback on what people want to hear and has surprised me on how effective it's been so far. So, if you're planning on attending php|tek, get your vote in on which sessions you'd like to hear (and maybe suggest your own!) [Less]

What? What's that you say? You think the Joind.in project is losing steam because there haven't been many updates announced recently? Well, that's just because there's things afoot you don't know about. We've been diligently at work on a rewrite on ... [More] a chunk of code (thanks to a certain intern from Ibuildings) that will make a dramatic change in how things will work around here. This one's for you speakers and conference managers - here's the scoop: First, for the speakers: there is going to be a new "Speaker Profile" feature of the site that will provide a central resource for any conference to grab your details from. No more having to copy and paste the same information over and over. All you'll need to do is specify what information you want to share and hand them the code. The API will do the heavy lifting and use the code to had out only the information you've selected. Speakers, you'll also be happy that we're adding in "instance" support for the talks. For example, you have this one talk - you know the one - that you really like but you feel it could use some tweaking. You made adjustments and change it a bit for the next event. With the new system, the talk comments will follow the instance of the talk, not just the single talk. That way you'll be able to relate comments directly to which conference you gave it at. Now, for those putting on the conferences, not only will the API give you remote access to the conferences you're an admin for, but it will also allow you to grab the information about a speaker (with their permission/code of course) but also information about them - what talks they've given, what events they've been at. Things are afoot, my good friend...stick with us just a bit longer and you'll get to see the fruits of our labor. You'll love it - we promise. [Less]