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Short version:
Yay! My first professional DotNetNuke module has been released for sale!
(For any co-workers reading this, let me stress that this was developed entirely on my own time in the evenings and on the weekend)
Long version:
A year ago I was working on this crazy project at work. It was a crazy time frame, no possible way we could get everything done in time, and the release date absolutely could not slide. So, you know, just like every other project I have ever worked on. In any case, one part of the project involved building an online registration module for DotNetNuke (DNN) as well as a custom DNN security provider to go with it. I had my hands full with doing the staff tool, so we went to a staffing company we worked with and asked if they could help us find a DNN expert to handle the online piece while I finished the staff tool. That's how I met Brian Swanson.
From day one he clicked perfectly with our team. He is exactly the right mix of "he knows what the hell he's doing" with a complete lack of ego. He is proud of his work, and make no mistake, but he doesn't have the swaggering "Development God" attitude that frequently comes along with that level of skill. Brian is over in Memphis, and runs his own company - Purple Ant. Apparently the story goes that he was working on a project several years ago and someone said something particularly nonsensical, and Brian quipped, "That makes about as much sense as a purple ant...". The name stuck.
I finally met Brian face to face this past summer in Charlotte, NC of all places. I was there for a long weekend working with some developers my company had contracted with, and Brian and his wife just happened to be in town that weekend visiting a relative. We met for dinner and got along in person just as well as we had remotely. About a month later Brian and his wife came down to Orlando to see a concert, and we got to spend a little more time with them hanging out at Disney World. The poor couple, they even spent a day at the Magic Kingdom with Ben and me and got to experience the mystery and wonder of Snow White's Scary Adventures over and over again. And yet they still speak to me!
So a few months ago I mentioned to Brian that I had a DotNetNuke module I was working on, and was considering putting it up for sale. He also had a few ideas for modules, and asked if I might be interested in working together with him. We kicked around a few ideas, and came up with PaleDNN (pronounced like paladin). The name is short for Purple Ant, Lokheed Enterprises, DotNetNuke. Over the past few months in our spare time in the evenings and weekends I built a custom licensing engine for us to use, and tweaked and perfected my weather module. All of the existing weather modules I have seen out in the marketplace have been pretty inflexible - you need to know the weather service location ID for the place you want the weather forecast, and you get whatever layout the module comes with out of the box. With my module, you can enter any arbitrary location such as "Paris, France", "Moscow", "90210", or "Denton, TX" and the module will go out and find the closest match it can and get that location ID. Also, the layout of the module is entirely driven by templates using tokens for all of the data you can display. That means that you can dream up any layout your heart desires with as much or as little information as you like. If you can render it in HTML and CSS, you can display it that way. It is pretty dang nifty.
So this evening, the completed module was released for sale on Snowcovered.com and it will be listed on the DotNetNuke Marketplace tomorrow. I have no idea if it will sell, but I do know that the core DotNetNuke team members will be looking at it.
Our next modules (a Google Analytics module, a tag cloud module, and a PayPal "buy now" module) will all be coming shortly, all being developed by Brian. My next project is to take the Bibliography module I built for JamesAxler.com and package it up into a standalone module. I have a little bit of cleaning up to do there, but it shouldn't be a huge task.
Did I mention that I am dang proud, and pretty dang excited?
Yay! My first professional DotNetNuke module has been released for sale!
(For any co-workers reading this, let me stress that this was developed entirely on my own time in the evenings and on the weekend)
Long version:
A year ago I was working on this crazy project at work. It was a crazy time frame, no possible way we could get everything done in time, and the release date absolutely could not slide. So, you know, just like every other project I have ever worked on. In any case, one part of the project involved building an online registration module for DotNetNuke (DNN) as well as a custom DNN security provider to go with it. I had my hands full with doing the staff tool, so we went to a staffing company we worked with and asked if they could help us find a DNN expert to handle the online piece while I finished the staff tool. That's how I met Brian Swanson.
From day one he clicked perfectly with our team. He is exactly the right mix of "he knows what the hell he's doing" with a complete lack of ego. He is proud of his work, and make no mistake, but he doesn't have the swaggering "Development God" attitude that frequently comes along with that level of skill. Brian is over in Memphis, and runs his own company - Purple Ant. Apparently the story goes that he was working on a project several years ago and someone said something particularly nonsensical, and Brian quipped, "That makes about as much sense as a purple ant...". The name stuck.
I finally met Brian face to face this past summer in Charlotte, NC of all places. I was there for a long weekend working with some developers my company had contracted with, and Brian and his wife just happened to be in town that weekend visiting a relative. We met for dinner and got along in person just as well as we had remotely. About a month later Brian and his wife came down to Orlando to see a concert, and we got to spend a little more time with them hanging out at Disney World. The poor couple, they even spent a day at the Magic Kingdom with Ben and me and got to experience the mystery and wonder of Snow White's Scary Adventures over and over again. And yet they still speak to me!
So a few months ago I mentioned to Brian that I had a DotNetNuke module I was working on, and was considering putting it up for sale. He also had a few ideas for modules, and asked if I might be interested in working together with him. We kicked around a few ideas, and came up with PaleDNN (pronounced like paladin). The name is short for Purple Ant, Lokheed Enterprises, DotNetNuke. Over the past few months in our spare time in the evenings and weekends I built a custom licensing engine for us to use, and tweaked and perfected my weather module. All of the existing weather modules I have seen out in the marketplace have been pretty inflexible - you need to know the weather service location ID for the place you want the weather forecast, and you get whatever layout the module comes with out of the box. With my module, you can enter any arbitrary location such as "Paris, France", "Moscow", "90210", or "Denton, TX" and the module will go out and find the closest match it can and get that location ID. Also, the layout of the module is entirely driven by templates using tokens for all of the data you can display. That means that you can dream up any layout your heart desires with as much or as little information as you like. If you can render it in HTML and CSS, you can display it that way. It is pretty dang nifty.
So this evening, the completed module was released for sale on Snowcovered.com and it will be listed on the DotNetNuke Marketplace tomorrow. I have no idea if it will sell, but I do know that the core DotNetNuke team members will be looking at it.
Our next modules (a Google Analytics module, a tag cloud module, and a PayPal "buy now" module) will all be coming shortly, all being developed by Brian. My next project is to take the Bibliography module I built for JamesAxler.com and package it up into a standalone module. I have a little bit of cleaning up to do there, but it shouldn't be a huge task.
Did I mention that I am dang proud, and pretty dang excited?
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From: (Anonymous)
Congrats!
Hooligannes