Well, it has been 2 months of work. Lots of weekends and 2 in the morning nights. BlueChannel is here. This would also explain my complete lack of posts in the past few weeks.

BlueChannel is a content management system built on Django. It is being used by one of my clients now and will be deployed by AGI and another clients in the coming weeks.

The name comes from the channel that is created by surf as it interacts with the shore. You use the channel to get out through the waves quickly, and often without even getting your hair wet! A good channel can make a great surf trip. If you follow the analogy, Blue Channel will help your project get it’s content on the web with ease.

Django is an amazing framework for development. They have not even hit 1.0 yet, and they already are an incredibly powerful, fast, and flexible platform for developing applications. Adding features to BlueChannel is simple and quick.

For instance, Jason DeMoe came to me the other day and said that he wanted to change the sort order for a given page of staff descriptions. I could have written a custom SQL statement to sort the results. However, I don’t need to be involved if he wants to change his mind later on. So instead, I added a field to the data model called order. Now, he just changes the number in the order box and the system will show his new order. It took me less than 5 minutes to add.

I am so excited about both Django and BlueChannel. As I hinted at earlier this summer, I have two more ideas coming… but it will be fall at this point. But the fact that I know what is involved, it is just finding the time, is thrilling. It helpss take creativity to a whole new level.

If you are interested in using BlueChannel, I have released the code under a MIT license at Google Code. Please post any questions on the Google Code site.

Well, it is public news now.

AGIPRODJ is shutting it’s doors.

It is actually a good thing. I have been working on AGIPRODJ for a number of years and some really great innovation has come out of it. Both from marketing initiatives and in the technology that I led the development of.

We worked really hard to be a part of the DJ community. Honestly, Justin & Ty worked their tails off over the past few years building a dedicated and loyal customer base. We developed some great videos and were able to speak to the needs of the customers very well.

So why is it going away? Well, AGI, the parent company, is refocusing on what it believes to be the keystone of what they are supposed to be doing. DJ has proven to be a valuable learning experience and will shape future efforts with AGI. But as a business model, it is outside the scope of AGI’s mission.

It is a bitter sweet thing to se something we have worked so hard on go away. But at least it is because AGI is making wise choices about what it is supposed to be doing.

I have learned a lot in the past few years with DJ. Here is just a few of them.

Becoming part of a community is HUGELY rewarding
By becoming a part of the DJ community, AGIPRODJ was able to leverage the vast knowledge at its finger tips. This was exciting financially of course, but it was exciting relationally as well. Justin & Ty both developed great relationships with customers and those relationships became an us experience instead of a we vs them experience.

Enabling that community is crucial to success
In order to NOT take advantage of the community, you have to give back. Justin & Ty did that through video, blog posts and the occasional podcasts. Not to mention the excellent customer service and the knowledge that these guys have int there head. They invested in the community and did not leech the community.

Vendors make all the difference
The relationships that AGIPRODJ and the vendors have is steller. They work hard to comply with policies and work with the manufacturers.

WordPress is incredibly flexible and powerful
On a completely different note, WordPressCart, the shopping cart we used to prower AGIPRODJ was built on WordPress. It was one of those eureka, forehead slapping moments. Tie a blog to a product and you get a product you can subscribe to and discuss. WordPressCart does just that.

To wrap it all up… I am sad to see it go. I am happy that AGI is staying focused on what is important. I have learned a ton in the process.

UPDATE: The vodcast has since been pulled. Justin-Michael in no way wanted to infer anything and has apologized for the errors.

This post is a little unusual for me.

I am writing to correct some errors that were reported in this vodcast in conjunction with work that I have done with AGI and the open source projects WordPress and WordPressCart.

In one instance, Justin-Michael from agiprodj refers to the work that I did as one of a kind. In another instance, work that we are about to do is described as “never done before”.

This is completely untrue. The projects that I have aligned myself with are open source. By their very nature they are developed with open source ideals and by, most importantly, open source developers. The open source movement is a collaborative effort that relies on individuals and teams collaborating and turning out some great software.

So I want to clearly state that I am not the only designer or developer to discover the idea of merging WordPress and a shopping cart. I believe that our solution is fantastic and offers features that the others may not, but I would never be so arrogant as to suggest that we were the ONLY ones.

And, the second claim that what we are doing has never been done before, is also completely false. When the new concept launches, this will be very clear. We will be depending on open source applications that have been in use for some time.

So, to the folks at WordPress, I apologize for the confusion. To the other developers and designers out there that I have learned from, please accept my humble apology. I know my place.

Justin-Michael did not intend to cause a stir. He simply misspoke. My heart is to clear up the confusion.

If you have any questions, please email me directly at dave at davemerwin dot com.

Michael Calabrese and I have been working on WordPressCart for almost 2 years. WOW. Time flies!

The result is a system that is incredibly easy to deploy and use.

At AGI, in the last 4.5 working days, we built, designed, populated and deployed a specialty store for selling end of year products. AGI needed to clear warehouse space and we realized that the easiest way to do that would be to deploy a store and let our customers know.

Using WordPressCart we had the store infrastructure built in a coupel of hours. A COUPLE OF HOURS! Including credit card processing. The rest of the time was tweaking content and testing the design in I.E.

It feels so good to have hard work pay off and make life easier.

An Event Apart News: An Event Apart Seattle 2006 Schedule
Bell Harbor International Conference Center

Oh yeah. Just signed up. I get to go see Eric Meyer and Jefferey Zeldman. If ever I had a geek out moment, this is it.

Meetings, Meetings, Meetings.

I got about 7 good hours into redoing the markup and CSS. Then I got slammed with meetings and interruptions. Which is totally normal, but kind of kills the idea of a quick turn around. Today for example. I had hoped to start coding at 9AM. But one interruption after another has pushed that start time to 2:30. Ouch.

Here we go. Oops, now I got a phone call. LOL.

AT AGI I am working on an upgrade to the dj site. Should be pretty cool. In working with the developer on the upgrades, I noticed some strange rendering issues. Upon further investigation, I have seen some other uglies. The other issue is that I have read Bullet Proof Design and CSS Mastery in the time since the first DJ launch.

So here goes, I am ripping out the old css and some html and cleaning it up.

Here is the current speed report. We’ll see if I can improve that. ;-).

http://www.websiteoptimization.com/services/analyze/wso.php?url=http://www.agiprodj.com/

Total size: 193769 bytes - 38 seconds at 56k. (BIG images that need to be optimized by the team)
UPDATE: CSS File Size: 16770

UPDATE: I might make it. Most of the code is done. Now I just need to modify the files.

Christian Musician Summit Ad, originally uploaded by dave_merwin.

Just finished this add for the Christian Musician Summit coming up in November. The add is for AGI and will be placed in the pre-mailer and program. I had about 8 hours to actually turn it out before deadline so I am pleased with the result. Jason DeMoe helped with the copy.

The photo is from Steve Smith at PhotOregon. Read about that great experience here.