Grab Networks, the media company known for making news video clips available on the Internet, just laid off their entire Ruby development team yesterday. I worked there myself until midsummer, so I know all of the folks who just got the axe. If your organization is looking for some good Ruby (or Java) developers, check out my Contacts page and send me an email.
Atom Feed Now Available
I’ve just added an Atom feed to the KeenerTech.com web site. The feed makes articles easily accessible to users with any feed reader. It also makes it easier to leverage the content on other sites, e.g. – article entries are now visible on LinkedIn.
New Specktrum Release
A new release of Specktrum.net went live today. As part of the release, the web site has been moved from Windows hosting to Linux (CentOS) hosting using the Apache web server. Specktrum is an accounting firm.
All Articles Now Online Again
All KeenerTech.com articles are now online again. Some of the older articles, from 2006 and early 2007, required extra work to get them moved into the new content management system. So, now you know how Dave Keener spent a good part of his July 4th holiday weekend.
Missing Content Online Soon
There are still a few issues being worked out since the launch of the new KeenerTech.com on Sunday, June 21. The largest is that some of the oldest articles on the site, including a couple of Dave’s most popular articles, are not online yet. That will be fixed by the end of this upcoming weekend. Those articles actually pre-date any use of a content management system for the site and are thus in HTML form. They’ll be online as soon as they can be entered into the site’s CMS and be suitably edited and verified.
Hosting with WebFaction
Based on recommendations from several of my fellow web professionals, including Naveen Vemula and Allan Bunch, I’ve chosen WebFaction.com for my Rails web hosting needs. I have 4 web sites that will be moved to Rails over the next few months, including KeenerTech.com.
Recent Partial Web Site Outage
My apologies to everyone for the recent problems with the web site. My hosting company, AccuWebHosting.com, made a sweeping security policy change on the Windows host where my site resides which broke major portions of my web site. Basically, they broke the site’s capability to show the full text of articles and also broke most of the administrative features of the site … right before I went on vacation to Scotland for 10 days. Needless to say, I exchanged some progressively more aggressive emails with them until the problem was resolved today.
Specktrum.net Goes Live
I just completed a new web site, Specktrum.net, for a small accounting firm owned and operated by Mark Speck. The site officially went live today.
KeenerTech Version 3
A new version of the KeenerTech.com web site, designated as Version 3, is in the works. Version 1 was a Java/JSP intranet (on my home network); Version 2 is the current ASP.NET site. Version 3 is a full Rails 2.2.2 site, with admin functionality implemented using the ActiveScaffold plugin, a wider page content area and numerous other features. This should explain why there’s been fewer blog entries on the site lately (plus the workload at Grab Networks, of course).
Voxant Merges with Anystream
The official announcement went out over the wires today. My company, Voxant Media, just merged with Anystream. Voxant Media specializes in building an advertiser-supported distribution network for monetizing content such as video, images and text. Anystream produces products that process video, transcribe video as needed and generally make it available for distribution. Their most notable recent activity is streaming all of the content from the Beijing Olympics.
Note: (2018/01/13) I worked for Voxant, an Internet startup. They merged with Anystream to form a new company called Grab Networks and, later, Grab Media. The combined company never achieved the financial results the venture capitalists were looking for and they finally sold off the various pieces of the organization about four years ago. I ended up leaving Grab Networks in mid-2009.