Matthew Darby's Blog

I have now been in web development for seven years. I got into it while in college. I built my first web page with notepad and made a simple profile page that today anybody could do. I was proud of my work. My first real web application consisted of constructing a form that stringed a few hidden parameters across multiple pages so that users could order off of a catering menu. Upon it's creation I thought it was the coolest thing. I still have the code in one of my old hard drives. The language I wrote that application in was one I had not heard of before receiving the opportunity.

At the time, I was on my summer break working an internship that was nothing more than a blessing from God. Back in school, I was struggling to matriculate into Computer Science learning Java and C++. This internship, however, provided me a chance to learn something totally different. Little did I know, it would lay the foundation on what I consider to be a great career. I was hired to work in the IT department, installing computers, punching telephone lines, providing technical support. The company changed its name so a rebranding effort gave me the opportunity to explore something no one else in my department had any expertise in. I became involved in revamping all of our intranet sites.

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Outside of writing blog posts, I am not a public speaker. My dad, a preacher, and my mom however, have no problem with the spotlight. As a kid as was more adapt to hiding behind them. Today, I will give my first public presentation ever, outside of teaching a Sunday school class at my church. Jim Priest, the Triangle Area Coldfusion User Group manager, has invited me to give a presentation on Mura CMS.

Yesterday, I did my first dry run in front of an audience. I invited some of my coworkers to help critique my timing, information I covered and my effectiveness in presenting. Things didn't go as well as it did when it was just me in my apartment speaking to my TV. However, there were a lot of lessons learned and I think from that experience I was able to make my presentation better.

Today, I will introduce Mura CMS. This is a coldfusion based content management system I have been playing around with for the last few months. My audience will be like minded coldfusion developers here in this area. My goals are to cover some of the basic and more fascinating features of this web application software and what it can do for both technical and non-technical people alike. Mura CMS is the new kid on the block and it has some promising features that can help open the door for people looking to alternatives to other content managers like FarCry and Word Press. These types of tools are what aid people to manage content like the one you are reading this blog post from. Mura can also help to bolster the ColdFusion community by bringing in people who might not be familiar with Coldfusion as a web application service that competes with the like of .NET and PHP. Hopefully, people will be able to take away the things that can be accomplished on the fly with the software.

So if you are in the Research Triangle Park area please come out at 6 pm, at the SRA building, 2605 Meridian Parkway, Suite 200, Durham, NC. Hopefully, the people will learn something, and I won't stumble through my presentation.

Have you ever needed to write up a tutorial for something that covers a process on the computer? You could grab some screen captures and add them into a word document, but they can't cover actions or processes that are better conveyed when recording their movement.

This is where Wink comes in. Wink is a free product that allows you to create flash based tutorials. It is pretty simple to use, you can start a capture, either on a particular window, your screen, or a editable area on your computer and record your actions you want to discuss. Next you can take the screen shots recorded and add text boxes, shapes or other image to help discuss what it is your are trying to convey to your users.

I hate writing documentation and I hate having to prepare documentation, but I recognize the need for providing it. Wink has come in handy for me as I create tutorials for how to do certain things. Even now I am completing a task with it, I had long put off.

Grab a copy of Wink here: http://www.debugmode.com/wink/

For some time now, my pastor has been making comments about potential problems with social websites such as Facebook.com and mySpace.com; being a software engineer at IBM helps to gives him a little creditability in this subject. He discussed the rising issue of online predators who prey on unsuspecting victims and now school and businesses that dig for information on potential candidates for enrollment or jobs. What it is important to remember is that it is not the site themselves that create the danger; instead it is the naive users who willingly put information about themselves that could later damage their character down the line.

For instance, my pastor was easily able to look-up information about several church members who had profiles on myspace.com. Among the few he found, where some very despairingly comments, pictures and phrases on profile pages of members and children of members of the church. It seems that many people, mostly teens and college-age young adults seem to believe that posting such information would only be shared among friends or other users of the site themselves thought of as their peers. Instead, for myspace.com at least, anyone can view the profile and begin making assumptions about a person's character based on what they read of see.

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If you have checked out the main page for this domain at http://matthewdarby.com you will notice there is an ugly place holder with my name on it. For months I have been trying to come up with design ideas for what will become my personal site. It will include my portfolio, info about me and whatever else you would expect to find on a personal site. Unfortunately I have been stalling on making progress with the site ever since I got sick, and it has been hard for me to find that same drive I had earlier to launch this blog.

As a developer I get writer's block. My brain fatigues and I suddenly become disenchanted with doing anything creative toward web programming. I am sure this is quit common for many other people when it comes to other areas of creativity. It just so happens however it couldn't come a worse time.

My motivation to go ahead and launch my personal site has been driven by my participation in a fundraiser for the St. Baldrick's Foundation (more on this in a later post). What I would have wanted to do is set up a page so that I could not only raise the money I needed for the event I will be participating but also use it as an opportunity to showcase my site to my friends and family. However, it seems procrastination and motivation loss got the best of me.

Thankfully tonight, things took a change for the better and now I have come up with a least a template for the new look and feel of my site. So with the ball starting to roll, lookout for some changes and hopefully the release of my new web site within the upcoming week.