The premise is simple.  Complete a video game in 48 hours.  Often a Game Jam will provide a theme to design around.  However, that is where the simplicity ends.  The goal of developing a game in that time period poses a number of challenges. The time to come up with an inspiring concept is limited.  Finding the right people to do the job may be tricky.  Working within the theme of the game jam itself can pose problems.  Keeping the scope of the project scalable for the amount of time you have is tough.  The list goes on and on.

However, with all of these challenges and adversities comes the joy of the whole thing.  The challenge is there, but the reward is that, at the end of an insanely short amount of time, you have a game under your belt.  You’ve also had the chance to interact with others who share your passion for game development.  Who knows what these kinds of “in the trenches” networking experiences can lead to down the road, or even what can result from the ideas generated during that weekend!

A great local success story comes from Boston’s own Owlchemy Labs.  They held a game jam led by Darren Torpey of Boston Game Jams, and from the game created during that weekend, Owlchemy launched the continued development of their (some would say infamous) Smuggle Truck (i.e. Snuggle Truck on iTunes).  So, what started out as an idea inspired by personal experience and a few friends blossomed into a high quality product.

If the 2012 Global Game Jam sounds like something you would like to be a part of, you can find all of the locations here to determine which site will work best for you.  Space can be limited, so act fast!

You’ll find that there are four convenient Boston-area locations.  I hope to see you at the MIT location, where I will be participating.  For more information, visit the Global Game Jam Wiki.  Join in, and Jam on!

Guest Blogger Bio:

Caleb is a game producer at Part12 Studios.  The Part12 web site is being completely updated, so there isn’t much to see right now.  In the meantime, you can check out his blog and follow Part12 on Twitter.  Part12 develops games and more for Social Networks, Web and Mobile platforms.  He just celebrated his first year in Boston with his family and is excited about the year ahead.

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Would you like to share your IT experiences and expertise?

If you are an IT Professional looking to blog, please contact Krista D’Amico at Krista.DAmico@BridgeTechnicalSolutions.com to express interest and for more information.

iPhone 4 – While everyone has been scrambling to buy the new iPhone 4S, the iPhone 4 is now cheaper than ever!  Sure, Siri is pretty cool, but at the end of the day, we’re pretty sure any iPhone will make a great gift!

SanDisk Sansa Clip Zip – For under $50, you can give someone the closest equivalent to the iPod Shuffle on the market today.  This player also comes with a screen, FM radio, voice recorder and 4GB of storage!

Kindle Fire – While this tablet doesn’t feature the full capabilities of the iPad 2, you can’t beat the Kindle Fire with prices around $199 if you’re looking for a tablet with basic but effective functionality.  This may not be the best tablet for apps, since there aren’t many created for it yet, but it’s great for browsing, shopping, reading eBooks, and social networking.

Jawbone UP Band - This bracelet comes paired with an app for your iPhone and encourages you to live a healthier lifestyle.  The band monitors your sleeping habits and activity, while the app poses challenges and suggestions to keep you on your toes, literally! Sounds like good timing for New Year’s resolutions!  The bracelet is $99, and the app is free.

Bose Headphones – Give someone the gift of “less noise and more music.”  Bose’s noise cancelling headphones can make such a difference in how you enjoy music. These are priced at $300 – $350.

We hope these suggestions help you (and the lucky people who get to unwrap them) make the most of this season and the coming year!  If you have any tech gift suggestions please share!

Happy Holidays from the Bridge Team!

So what makes an app a keeper?  In his book Tapworthy: Designing Great iPhone Apps, Josh Clark suggests that the urge to open a mobile app boils down to three mindsets:  1) “I’m microtasking,” 2) “I’m here,” and 3) “I’m bored.”  To give your mobile app staying power, make the content relative to time and place.  Durable apps, from weather and stock reports to horoscopes and, of course, driving directions, provide information that is time and/or location sensitive.  Apps with data content as essential as price lists or as trivial as movie and lyric databases provide quick answers and also tend to be keepers.  Finally, quick entertainment that is unique can make for a popular mobile hit.

As a procurer or a designer, take advantage of the mobile device’s services, such as GPS, data networking, and graphics capabilities, and make the application easy to use, interesting, and time- and location-sensitive – then it will be a keeper!

-BRIDGE Guest Blogger, Jim Sheusi

Jim Sheusi has been a freelance database and application developer for fifteen years and currently has three apps on the Android market.  Jim’s book on Android application development is due to hit bookstores in February 2012.  Jim is also an Associate Professor and Department Chair of Computer and Information Science in the School of Technology at Johnson & Wales University in Providence.

When I learned about GiveCamp 2010, I went to be part of a technical team to write solutions for non-profits and charities.   I was excited about working at a weekend-long “hackathon” in Cambridge at Microsoft’s New England Research and Development Center (aka NERD), and I thought it would be a great opportunity to help my career.  What I got out of it was more than programming fun and career development – I wound up a junior member of “Team Awesome” that wrote the new Web site for RESPOND, New England’s first domestic violence agency and the second oldest in the nation (read Evelyn’s blog post for RESPOND here).

During the course of the weekend, I had the opportunity to work with senior developers who were contributing to this cause for the sheer joy of giving back.  However, I must admit, it wasn’t all work . . .

We got to camp out at Microsoft!

Some folks pitched tents in the office space.  Others simply unrolled sleeping bags.  Some didn’t bother to sleep at all and just coded 24/7 through 48 hours of insanity.

GiveCamp keeps its irreverent sense of humor.  It is, after all, a camp!  We made s’mores and enjoyed “arts and crafts” time.

The fun of the weekend?  Jumping onto a team, learning new technologies on the spot, and finishing a project in just 48 hours.

The enduring part of the weekend – lives were changed, and lifelong friendships were made.  The unexpected reward:  RESPOND gave our team and GiveCamp the 2010 Timothy White “Take A Stand” Award for the individual or team that made the greatest contribution to ending domestic violence.

I just had to go back to GiveCamp in 2011 to volunteer again, reuniting with the friends I had made the year before and forging new friendships as well.   The main focus of the weekend was working on the projects at hand, and the folks at GiveCamp had improved our ability to do so.  This year, we had an on-site ad-hoc library with a reference “librarian” to assist the teams with extra resources.   The cross-team work both years was great – teams assisted each other with the technical help they needed to get their projects done.  There were also impromptu training sessions to give the teams access to any extra help they might need.

The biggest lesson I learned through all of my experiences at GiveCamp is flexibility – my first year, I worked with the CMS Sitefinity for the first time and had to learn it on-site.  My second year seemed to be what I called “Wordpress Weekend,” since most of the recipients of the volunteer work used WordPress from WordPress.org as a CMS.   Once again, I had to learn a CMS on the spot and meet a very tight deadline.   I was grateful for all of the coffee and for the opportunity to camp out on-site.   This year, I also learned the structure of a Web site built on a PHP platform, and I did the necessary research to get my part of the project coded in time to coordinate with the rest of the team.

New England GiveCamp relies on all of its volunteers’, both their technical and logistical (non-technical), support and on its sponsors, who generously donate food, coffee, and other provisions to keep us all going.

Of course, I’ll be back in 2012, and I’m keeping an eye out for when it’s announced on Twitter (@NEGiveCamp) that sign-up is officially open!

Evelyn Livant is an Entry-Level Developer who stays active in the .NET community and works for her own small business that she started in 2010.

Her primary interest is in Web solutions and databases. Her experience thus far has been with a variety of start-up companies, from the finanical industry to book publishing.  Follow her at @EvyLion, email her at evelynlivant@gmail.com, or visit her website at LivantEnterprises.com.

Want to share your experiences or expertise in IT?

If you are an IT Professional looking to blog, please contact Krista D’Amico at Krista.DAmico@BridgeTechnicalSolutions.com to express interest and for more information.

We are proud to report that we collected tons of old electronic waste. Literally, tons.  At the end of the day we had over 3,900 pounds of TVs, computers and monitors. Plus we collected over 735 other smaller electronic items like printers, VCRs, gaming systems, and piles of cables and wire.  This event was such a wonderful success, and we owe it to all our community members for the excellent turnout. 

In addition to all the e-waste that will now be recycled properly, we collected over $650 in donations. Bridge matched this amount so we were able to present First Lutheran Church with a total of $1308—money that will directly benefit our community.

A big thank you goes to Gabriella Devine, a senior at East Greenwich High School, who helped us organize this event as part of her senior project.  She landed an article in the East Greenwich Patch which helped our message reach a lot more people. We’d also like to thank Texas Roadhouse for allowing us to hold the drive in their parking lot, as well as Best Buy and Comcast for recycling the items we collected. 

For the folks who missed the event, don’t worry- we will be holding another one in the spring!

When I went to General Assembly for the Foursquare Hackathon, I really didn’t know what to expect.  I was really excited about seeing the new applications that would be developed, and as a non-developer, my utility would be pretty much non-existent and I had never been to either GA or a hackathon before.  Not only was I pleasantly surprised, but the event fundamentally altered my perception of foursquare. 

Fresh off releasing their User Push, Venue Push and Lists APIs, foursquare was in the midst of their second global hackathon, an event that brought together developers all over the world to test out the new API and create applications that would leverage the new capabilities…all in 48 hours. The hackers would get a chance to not only win bragging rights, but meetings with the leadership of foursquare, their venture capitalists and the international press that would surely set them up for the future should they decide to start a viable business.

As I walked in, I immediately thought of college. The GA loft exuded casualness, intellectualism and drive. People were perky (once they had their coffee at least), full of ideas and incredibly excited to be there. A sea of laptops covered the tables, anchored by young 20-somethings furiously typing away at their chrome Macbooks trying to build something special. At the heart of it, the thing about this event that is truly amazing is that in the room I was a witness to what inevitably will be a chapter in a promising young company. Which one, I don’t know. Will it be Homefield Advantage – the app that pulls data from baseball games and runs analysis on where they’re from, how loyal to their team they are and their interests? (A potentially huge idea for advertisers who are constantly looking for ROI on their sponsorship dollars.)  Will it be Yourcheckin Deal – an app that integrates YipIt and foursquare to notify you of deals at places to check-in? (An app that could converge the seemingly endless number of deals into an easy to use platform that would synch with your regular foursquare usage.)

Whatever it may be, the biggest take away from the hackathon is that there is such a wide diversity of applicable uses for foursquare. From analyzing census data to see how ___ you are (how blank are you), to hooking you up with fellow singles in those wee hours in the morning (matchsquare) to letting everybody know that things are cool in the event of a disaster (everything is cool) – foursquare is undoubtedly providing rich data streams that more and more developers are learning to utilize for innovative products. 30 hacks were made in total, levering the New York Times (Ven-news), public school data (School Rating), Hunch (hunchsquare) and other APIs. People were truly creative, even coming up with an app to help you find the cleanest toilets (Loo Review).

 The hackathon was only 48 hours of coding so the apps could only be so sophisticated. But as time goes on and more and more users sign onto foursquare, more ideas will surface that will be based off its API. All in all, the hackathon gave a glimpse into the future of location. And foursquare will be at the heart of that future.

-Matt McDonald is a strategy consultant with the Commercial Financial Services practice at Booz Allen Hamilton. His primary interest is in entrepreneurship, with a focus on mobile, real-time and location based data aggregation and knowledge management. His experience thus far has focused on developing an understanding of business development and strategies for organic growth within an organization and utilizing innovative ideas and creative thinking to grow business. Follow him at @MattMcDNYC

Drop Off Location: Texas Roadhouse parking lot in East Greenwich, RI.  Click here for directions.

Date: Saturday, September 24, 2011

Time: 9AM-12PM

Contact: Gabriella Devine, gadevine3@gmail.com

The United States Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) reports that in 2009, only 25% of electronics in the U.S. were recycled.  We can do better. BRIDGE is inviting our tech community and geographically-close neighbors to support us in this initiative to help protect our environment.  Spread the word, and come drop off old ipods or monitors, or whatever else is lying around your home or office!  We hope to see you there! Let us know if you can’t make it, depending on your location we may be able to come pick up the electronics.

 E-Waste you can drop off:

• Notebooks/laptop computers and computer parts (no laptop batteries, sorry!)
• DVD players (including BluRay and Portable DVD models) and VCRs
• Old gaming console hardware (Playstation, Xbox, etc.) and portable devices (PSP, Nintendo DS, etc.) and their controllers and keyboard counterparts. Also, if you have any PC games lying around, bring those in too!
• Cameras of digital nature, lenses for any of you SLR gurus, camcorders, digital photo frames, and memory cards.
• Pods and other MP3 players
• Old music and movies of the CD, DVD and BluRay variety
• Cell phones and their charging equipment as well as wireless broadband and hands-free sets
• Home audio equipment-this includes receivers, CD players/recorders, home audio networking, HTiB, speakers, boomboxes, CD/Cassette players, alarm clocks, personal recorders, and for you DJs out there turntables, amps and effects, and audio mixers
• Car audio equipment like your GPS, decks, speakers, amps, CB radios, scanners, security systems, radar detectors, and wiring harnesses and install kits
• All chargers, cables, wires, and cords (this includes TV Antennas, remotes, surge protectors, headphones and power inverters)
• Computer monitors and CPUs*
• Televisions*

 *We are asking for a $5 – $10 donation to recycle these items which will benefit the First Lutheran Church.

 Resources: http://www.epeat.net/; http://earth911.com/recycling/

I was asked by the folks at Bridge Technical Solutions if I’d be interested in contributing an article defending my choice of Drupal over WordPress and Joomla.  While it’s taken longer than I’d hoped to find time to actually write it down, the reasons have been clear to me for over 4 years since I first made the decision to head in this direction.  I’ve been involved in web design and development since about 1994 – having created Rhode Island College’s first official web site while I was in school there studying graphic design.  Over the intervening years I’ve used just about every imaginable application, editor and development platform, have built countless Content Management Systems from scratch, and have put together sites in many more.  So when I decided to move fully to a pre-existing CMS, I had a lot of ideas about what I wanted from an ideal candidate. 

At the time I was working as Director of Web Services for North Sails, and we needed a CMS platform in which to develop a network of over 30 sites worldwide.  The sites needed to share a design framework in addition to having the abilities to share content and control usage of media assets across the entire network.  Given one limitation – it had to be a Microsoft-based solution – I ended up with Dot Net Nuke, and I hired Embolden Design here in Providence to do the development.  I worked with them to define several key areas of functionality that were lacking at the time and had them build custom modules to support them.  These included areas of media management and placement, tagging of content using predefined libraries of terms, and a bit more.  The system did turn out well, and it presently drives many sites in many languages quite successfully.  But I have to say that the development environment and feature set were not what I’d hoped for.

After leaving North for a position at (add)ventures as their Director of Interactive/Technology in 2007, I had the chance to revisit my exploration of Open Source CMSs in order to standardize our work on a single, more capable platform than what was in use when I started.  I’d done a lot of research, and these three CMSs (WordPress, Joomla!, and Drupal) were the only real candidates that got any amount of coverage in the enterprise IT press.  WordPress at the time was still very blog-focused and not a comfortable fit as a general purpose CMS, but Joomla and Drupal were fairly evenly matched.  Or so I thought.  What I did find was that while the admin experience in Joomla was quite good, its core (and contributed) functionality was no match for what I found with Drupal.  Within a week or two, I’d found and configured pre-existing functionality and modules that equaled or surpassed work that I’d contracted to have built for Dot Net Nuke at a seriously significant cost – all for free.

I’m not going to insinuate that there’s no learning curve with Drupal.  Or say that the admin/site owner experience is natively great.  But after a couple of weeks and an initial project or two, I haven’t looked back.  The admin experience gets better all the time and with a little effort can be as good as anything out there.  And capabilities?  Well, project number two was CVS Caremark’s corporate site, which handled 6-7 million page views per month and had over 20,000 registered users getting automatic updates emailed out regularly, and it only needed one custom module.  Since then I’ve worked on dozens of projects ranging from online ticketing for Newport Polo (with Rubic Design) to numerous client sites and have developed an entire platform for independent school sites for Schoolyard.  The power and flexibility of the platform and the tremendously supportive nature of the community are unparalleled in my nearly 20 years of web experience.  Need zip-code-based proximity searching?  There’s a module for that – and I had it configured and running on a site with several thousand locations nationwide in about 3 hours.  Need to import 3,000 news stories from an export of another CMS?  Sure thing – check out the Feeds module and in about half an hour, you’re all done.  Want to have a network of related websites that share a common theme with a style sheet override for individual needs?  I did that for the nation’s largest healthcare company several years ago, and not only would you not know they’re in Drupal, but you’d never know they were sharing a code base.  Common code or core features never get in the way of thoughtful, considered design.

The bottom line for me is that Drupal has made the best tool for creating web sites I’ve found.  Having that solid foundation and about 10,000 modules in the community frees me to think about strategy and design challenges posed by my clients rather than spending endless hours and weeks writing the functionality or wrangling the system to do what I need it to do.  I just get to do great work for great organizations.  So that’s my story – and I’m sticking to it (I suppose I’d better be – I’m writing this while on a plane to London to present at DrupalCon!).

-Jason Pamental, Web Strategist, Designer, Technologist: http://thinkinginpencil.com

Platform Architect: Schoolyard http://schoolyard.com

See our posts on Joomla and WordPress.

Joomla is an open source content management system (CMS), founded in September 2005 as a fork from Mambo. Joomla is one of the three most popular open source content management systems in the world. It powers nearly 25 million websites, or 10.3% of marketshare of the top one million websites, boasts 500,000 forum posts, and has thousands of contributors. Over 2,800 government websites from 204 countries use Joomla. Indeed, it is more likely that a government has Joomla running in some part of its website system than it is that the government is a member of the United Nations.

Joomla is a completely independent project, powered only by its volunteers. There is no major corporation contributing to Joomla or backing it in any way, as is true with WordPress and Drupal. Joomla’s annual budget is less than $400,000 per year, largely derived from Google AdWords and donations. No one is paid for their work on the Joomla project at this time.

Furthermore, there is no “benevolent dictator” in the Joomla project. The community is governed through three entitites, including the Production Leadership Team (PLT), the Community Leadership Team (CLT), and the board of directors at Open Source Matters (OSM). The PLT’s job is to set the vision and direction for the project’s software. The CLT governs the community, including Joomla’s websites. OSM is responsible for finances, legal aspects, and the trademark for the project. The three teams work together to govern Joomla and meet regularly to discuss the project.

What makes Joomla unique?

Joomla has made some interesting changes in the last year to its project, making it fairly unique among open source CMSs. First of all, the Joomla project now consists of two entities: a CMS, plus a fully independent framework. The framework is called the Joomla Platform, and it was released in July 2011. The platform may be used for many types of applications in development. The most notable development is eBay’s adoption of the Joomla Platform, as it develops an intranet system for measuring analytics.

The CMS is also in active development.  The CMS now undergoes releases every 6 months, with three releases occurring during each major development cycle, called a series.  The first two releases of the cycle (in this case, Joomla 1.6 and 1.7) are short-term releases, viable for a period of 7 months before reaching end of life. The third release (in this case, Joomla 2.5) is a long-term release, good for at least 18 months. Joomla 1.6 was released in January 2011, and Joomla 1.7 followed in July 2011. Joomla 2.5, a long-term release, is expected to be released in January 2012.

Following the release of Joomla 2.5, a new cycle of development will begin. Major changes will happen to Joomla with the next release, Joomla 3.0, which will appear in July 2012. A discussion of those changes is starting to emerge now.

Joomla 1.6 ushered in some major new features for Joomla, including a powerful access control list (ACL) system, nested categories, and improved templating. Joomla’s core output now supports HTML 5 as well. A fully accessible administrator template, Hathor, comes with this Joomla release. Hathor allows use of Joomla’s back-end by people with disabilities. It supports WCAG 2.0 AA standards, making this template essential for those with disabilities who must support Joomla administrators.

Joomla 1.7 has built on Joomla 1.6′s successes, squashing hundreds of bugs, adding a few new features, and completing the separation of the framework from the CMS.

What kinds of sites are good to build with Joomla?

Joomla is generally seen as standing between Drupal and WordPress from both a marketing and technical perspective – while WordPress occupies the low end of the Web site development market and Drupal the top end, Joomla bridges these two markets easily. Because of Joomla’s simple, friendly interface, Joomla is widely adopted by former WordPress developers who need a bit more power to build a given site but don’t necessarily have a full arsenal of coding skills. At the same time, in the hands of an experienced developer, Joomla can build a powerful site with thousands of pages, shopping carts, social communities, and more.

My company, 4Web Inc., has built small sites (5-20 pages) with Joomla, mostly so our clients can edit the sites without knowing HTML. More typically, the sites we build consist of hundreds to thousands of pages of content.

With a wide variety of both commercial and free templates and extensions available, it is possible to build a Joomla site without knowing HTML, CSS, PHP, or MySQL. However, if you want to go beyond the basics in Joomla, the best way to accomplish this is by learning hand-coded HTML and CSS, with an eye toward learning Joomla’s templating system.

What are Joomla’s strengths and weaknesses?

Joomla’s weakness, at this point in time, is its lack of multi-site management capabilities. There are some third-party extensions that allow for multi-site management, but I have not used them, and reviews of these extensions tend to be mixed. Without excellent multi-site management potential in Joomla, there is a major difference between Joomla and Drupal, since multi-site management is core to Drupal’s functioning.

One of Joomla’s strengths, however, is that over 8,000 third-party extensions are available. These extensions are useful – from the simple (creating dropdown menus in Joomla) and the beautiful (slideshows and photo galleries), to the powerful (shopping carts, social networking, and content construction kits) and the downright silly (the Simpsons Quote Generator comes to mind). Don’t see an extension you need? Joomla is built with the integration of extensions in mind, with tools that developers need to make this integration an easy and seamless process.

Joomla’s community is also a major strength. Many engaged, involved participants write code, squash bugs, write documentation, complete translations to dozens of languages, answer forum questions, and generally socialize with each other. Joomla Day events happen around the world with great regularity, typically organized by Joomla user groups, providing opportunities for developers to meet each other in person and collaborate. Two international Joomla events are planned for 2012, one in Europe and the other in the U.S.

I encourage you to take a closer look at Joomla. The community is strong and supportive, the tools are excellent, and the fan base continues to grow.

-Jen Kramer

For nearly ten years, Jen Kramer has been educating clients, colleagues, friends and graduate students about the meaning of a “quality Web site.”  Jen develops sites that are functional, usable, accessible, and supportive of business and marketing goals.  Through her full-service Web site development company 4Web Inc., she works with clients to build highly customized Joomla websites for a variety of small businesses, non-profits, government agencies, and educational institutions.

Jen is also a lynda.com author.  Her six titles include the very popular Joomla! 1.6: Creating & Editing Custom Templates and Joomla! 1.6 Essential Training.  In January 2010, Jen’s first book Joomla! Start to Finish: How to Plan, Execute, and Maintain Your Web Site was published by Wrox Press (a division of Wiley).  Her second book, Joomla! 24-Hour Trainer, a book and DVD combination, was published in May 2011. Jen is the manager of Joomla! User Group New England and she earned a BS in biology at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and an MS in Internet Strategy Management at the Graduate Center of Marlboro College.

 See our posts on Drupal, and WordPress.