This week I'm spending my time in (hot) Las Vegas, NV at TODCON. I'm delivering two presentations, "The PROFITABLE Web Development Process" and "Selling You & Your Services, Revisited." It's a great little conference of between 100 and 150 people that has more of a personal feeling than other conferences where I've presented. My first preso was yesterday and seem to come off pretty well. The best part for me is seeing people who listened to me last year come back again this year.

I'm on the board for the Greater Keene Chamber of Commerce and, more specifically, on the Business-2-Business Committee. Our committee was charged with starting mini-expos, half day events that focus on a particular business topic. This past month we did Managing Your Business to Success. The sessions were informative (though not well attended due to some traffic issues we're seeing in Keene these days...no, I'm serious. Traffic issues essentially shut down little old Keene for the day).

Well...it's been many month (years?) in the making but we've finally posted the new site live. It's the age old cobblers children scenario. What made matters worse was that our previous site was downright embarrassing. The new site was made possible through many of our team players...

I've been pretty interested in the idea of "what make an entrepreneur" for a while (for obvious reasons) and, more recently, with how we can grow Keene to be a sort of e-Keene. Silicon Valley and the eCoast (Portsmouth, NH) are fascinating because they not only are hotbeds for young, innovative thought leaders but because they are known for it. Keene could be the most innovative place on the planet and it wouldn't matter without some recognition from the rest of the world.

I'm not sure if all of our clients can tell but we've been leveraging VOIP for going on two years now. We've traditionally used Vonage for each individual phone line and Accessline for our auto-attendant. A couple of things we've learned through the process: Auto-Attendants don't project that you're super professional...they say you don't care about the customer. - We found out the hard way through people getting lost in our phone system that auto-attendants are not as user friendly and speedy as we would like.

So we just got home from seeing the "Meet the Robinsons" at our local cinema; great film. It was a throwback to the imagination of Walt Disney and brought the sense of wonderment and dreaming that Disney was once known for. That seems to get lost in the world where dollars and cents (sense?) seem to rule the day. But for the hour and a half that we were in the theater time was suspended and I really enjoyed seeing the movie as a kid.

When my sister, Donna, was living up here, she bemoaned the fact that there was no way for local young people to find one another (short of getting into a clique). Well...that's changing here in Keene. Based on the recent popularity (and publicity) of Young Professional Networks in Concord, NH and Manchester, NH, the Keene Chamber of Commerce has decided to help a YPN get started here in Keene. I'm on the planning committee and pretty psyched. (In spite of my graying hair, I do qualify for the 21-40 age range).

I'm always excited to find new employee recognition ideas so I thought I would share one of the things we do here. In the book Good to Great by Jim Collins, he talks about Level 5 leaders who get the right people on the bus and then figure out what seats to put them in. I really like that analogy so we talk a lot about getting on the Lucibus and finding a seat.

So I finally took the time to look at the CCK module(s). I've heard a bunch about them while researching Drupal themes and modules. (My staff always cringes when they find out I'm keeping my head in geek stuff but it's pretty much part of my A.D.D. personality). It's a pretty impressive form building application that captures data in a straight forward way. It is, by far, the easiest way to build custom "nodes" for Drupal that I have found. For me, the danger was in trying to model everything on the fly as a new content type.

So I'm pretty excited about Lucidus taking over the New Hampshire Amateur Hockey Association website. It's a great opportunity to show what Drupal can do for a multi-author sports related website. At this point, we're planning to use the Aurora template with some slight modifications. The challenge is figuring out the appropriate way to post scores and standings.