Speaking to a Public Audience

Thu, 16 Jul 2009 10:32:00 -0500

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.

Matthew Darby's Blog - Mura

Speaking to a Public Audience