DevCampus and Technical Writing
November has been quite a busy month for me and it looks like things are only going to get busier until the end of January.
For being something I only get to work on in my spare time, DevCampus is coming along pretty well. The last time I posted about my progress, I had just finished up building the admin tools that will let me manage the site through a web interface. Since then I've actually had to add a few more admin tools and have also finished about a dozen pages that will be publicly visible, including Login, Registration (and e-mail validation), Password resetting, and a spiffy contact form. The biggest pages to tackle are going to be the home page and the article (a.k.a "Lesson) page. I also want the site to have a severe case of RSS support so it's going to take a bit of time to get that all running as well. Anybody know of a component (dll library?) out there that generates RSS XML if you feed it some data? That would be a big time saver. If one doesn't exist (I'd be surprised) I'll probably open the source to the one I build.
On a related note, I'd like to publicly thank Jeremy McPeak (wdonline.com) for his assistance in adding some functionality to his XWebMenu DHTML Menus so that I will be able to do some really cool stuff with my content. That's in addition to his awesome client-side JavaScript xml-driven menu's and context menu that I'm also using for DevCampus, of course. :-) We've been trading e-mails about some ideas and I'm greatful that someone would take time out to help me. Thanks Jeremy. Oh, and Jeremy has an AJAX book coming out real soon. Check it out - I know I'll be ordering a copy.
In addition to DevCampus, I've started doing some technical writing for Telligent Systems to create some end-user documentation/guides for their awesome Community Server product that many blog (and other) sites out there run on. I'm excited to be doing this and hope my work will really be a benefit to those that run Community Server. If you visit Telligent's Community Server forums with any regularity you'll probably start seeing my name (or alias, I guess) pop up in there pretty often.