I did a talk at the Word Camp Gold Coast held at Bond University on 5 and 6 November 2011. The topic of my talk was the blog post series that I’ve done on Building a Web Presence for your Community Group using free or very low cost tools.

Most people belong to some form of community or sporting group – what is their website like? Do they have a domain, with email addresses like president@mycommunitygroup.org.au? Do they have a central location for all the documents required for the efficient running of the group? There are so many reasons to have a Web Presences, the question should be why they don’t want one. Too expensive? Too difficult? The great thing is that these two excuses are now just that – excuses. Cost and “tech savvyness” are not an impediment to setting up a cool looking web site, a domain and email accounts.

So here are the things you need:

1. A Domain – eg a .com.au or .org.au or .asn.au name that has the name of your community group. There are a few rules to getting a domain name ending in .au so have a look at my post on Domains for Community Groups.

2. A WordPress.com Website – this is a breeze to set up and get going – the hardest thing is choosing the theme to represent your community group. See my post on Websites for Community Groups. This also shows how to link your Domain name to your WordPress.com website. This bit costs US$12/year.

3. Google Apps for Your Domain – This handles all the back end functionality like Email, Documents, Calendar etc as well as the logins for your committee members. See this post on Email for Community Groups. This also shows how to link Google Apps to your WordPress.com site. Google Apps is also where the events Calendar for your community group lives. You then show that calendar on your WordPress.com website by embedding it in a page or a widget on the sidebar.

4. Mailchimp – this not only a fantastic tool for sending out email marketing, it is also a tool to keep your membership database – and it’s all for free if you have under 2000 members or list subscribers (+ email limits). See this post on Event Management and Emails for Community Groups. This post also covers off using Eventbrite for events and CRM systems if you need more for member management than Mailchimp offers.

As an aside, if you are running a Not for Profit community group, then also consider going the whole hog and getting Salesforce for your CRM and back end systems (it can probably handle most things except accounts). Salesforce gives licences for 10 users for free. You will of course need to invest some time, money and effort to set it up, and you can contact me to help with this.

And whilst we are on the topic of back end systems, one thing that I did not include in my talk is the wonderful Saasu – a full Cloud based Australian Accounting system, that is free for up to 20 transactions per month, or very reasonably priced for larger businesses, and is just far superior to MYOB in every way, in my opinion.

Some of the other tools mentioned in my talk are Wufoo forms, and I’ve written a post about the minor issues with using Wufoo together with Mailchimp and WordPress, especially for Member details forms. For simple forms like sign up for a newsletter, the combination of the three tools is great.

The other great tool I mentioned is Screen Steps. This is a great tool to create structured help content for your end users. Use this in conjunction with links to the great content in the WordPress.com support website to create some great help documents.

If you have any ides for other free or very cheap tools to use for getting an Web Presence for your community or sporting groups, then please add a comment. Or if there is anything I have not mentioned then please ask in the comments also.

Again, this must be something that I’m just not getting… I’m sure that Office on the WP7 should be one of the best features of the phone.

It seems that unless you have SharePoint there is no way to get documents on and off the phone whilst on the go is via email. Isn’t that taking collaboration of documents back to about 1990?

Microsoft has released the fantastic new features of Office Live being able to collaborate on documents via the cloud (either editing them on the web or editing in Office 2010).

There seems to be no way to sync anything from Office Live to the phone (without maybe syncing it to the desktop, which is not the point, as it’s note entirely mobile).

All I can seem to do is download a document from the email, save it onto the phone, edit it and then email it back.

I think (hope) that Office Live will come to the WP7 and when it does it will be very useful to those of us that don’t use SharePoint on a day to day basis. Until then it is a bit limiting.

It is also quite disappointing that there is no way to add heading styles to the “Word” document. Not that I would be writing a whole document on the WP7 phone (especially without the Swype keyboard). But one of the reasons I still use Word over Google Docs is the keyboard shortcuts to do heading styles, to quickly create structured documents.

What Word does have is good commenting, so you can make notes on a document (but only if it has been emailed or synced from the desktop of course).

I can’t wait to try this out once it is connected to the cloud via Office Live.

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As a geek who uses windows, I often get asked why I have a TiVo DVR rather than use Windows Media Centre as a Home Theatre PC (HTPC).  There are a number of reasons, which I shall try to explain.

Firstly, I do have WMC – it is one of my 3 dual tuner DVR’s that I have. I have my old faithful Toppy, my newer TiVo and now my main PC with Windows 7 Ultimate. As my Windows 7 box is in the office, not the lounge room, I don’t use it much for WMC use, and I’m still not convinced about it being a total TV watching solution. Here’s why.

About 5 years ago I first bought my Toppy – the Topfield 5000PVRt*.  It was at the time, the best DVR out there, and I would still recommend it in certain circumstances. I also bought at the same time my beautiful Loewe CRT TV which is SD only and only has 3 rear Analog inputs, but it still have a great screen (speakers not so much). At that time Plasma was still very expensive and cheap LCD’s were not yet readily available. (If I was to buy now, I would probably buy one of the beautiful new LED TV’s).

* (Note that link shows a model with a 250GB HDD, mine has only 80GB).

So, I watch a lot of TV, and I don’t have Foxtel (I would watch waay too much TV if I had Foxtel). I have a friend who has Foxtel with the original Foxtel IQ box, so I have played with it quite a bit.  The Toppy made so much of a difference to my TV viewing that I very rarely watch any live to air TV any more. Even if I am watching TV at the time, I will usually record it and start watching about a half hour in, so I can fast forward through the ads (there is no in-built ad-skipping on the Toppy* or the TiVo).  And there are so many shows that you can just fast forward through most of it and just watch bits of – it makes TV viewing very time efficient. (*IceTV now says they have Ad Skipping).

A few years later the TiVo sort of came to Aus via the OzTiVo community and the first version of the WMC came out (years of watching Sex and the City and seeing Miranda’s TiVo love, meant that I knew I wanted a TiVo). I thought about dabbling in OzTiVo and did have a WMC on Vista, but I’m not a hardware geek, and I don’t want to build a box from scratch, and the WMC was a bit flaky. I want a reliable device that works all the time, records what I want it to record and just does TV. I don’t want to have to pull out a Keyboard and Mouse in the lounge room, and I don’t want to have to re-boot my TV viewing device on a regular basis (it may be better under Win 7, granted).

The Toppy worked with XP, I could link it to my PC, sort of link it up with IceTV, sort of transfer TV from the Toppy to the PC (it required so much effort to get it viewable on the PC, it was not really worth it), sort of watch photos on the TV. But when I switched to Vista it just stopped working, and I gave up. So I would just manually set recording times, like an old fashioned VCR, and rely on the substandard EPG available on FTA TV (Note: This has not changed. The state of the standard EPG’s in Aus is terrible).

But when the real, supported TiVo was released in Aus, I just had to have one. The fact that TiVo could learn what I liked and auto record TV for me, and record just by clicking on a show name in the EPG, and series record, and a 2 week in advance EPG were features that I had to have. I waited until it was a reasonable price ($610, but it is now in JB HiFi for under $500) and the Home networking kit was available (and did not cost $199).

So overall, I love AND hate the TiVo. It is still the best TV recording and watching experience out there (and still even better overall IMHO than Foxtel IQ). But things are changing on the DVR front and we now have new entries like PlayTV and the Telstra T-Box and PS 3’s new ability to watch IView.

Here is a Google Doc spreadsheet with some feature comparisons of the major devices, and some comments on the features I love and hate about each device. There is also a great comparison from IceTV here.

Overall, I recommend the TiVo as the number one choice for people who just want to watch and record TV and want a seamless plug and play experience. I recommend WMC (on Windows 7) to the Geek who wants full control over everything and is willing to spend the time setting it all up properly and does not mind having to reboot the PC occasionally. I recommend a Toppy to anyone who just wants  a VCR upgrade and who wants to consume and delete TV. And I would recommend a PlayTV device to anyone who has a PS3 and does not yet have any of the other options (assuming the PS3 is already internet connected).

Now that BarCamp is over, I’m having withdrawl symptoms. I really loved the interactivity and talking tech to other people. At my work I can talk about construction all day but as soon as I start talking tech people’s eyes just glaze over. So it was really nice to have a day and evening of talking tech all day. I think being a tech-head is a very solitary existence. Yes, we can blog, IM, read other blogs and think we are involved in what’s going on out there in the blogosphere, but are we really involved? Or is it just me, showing my age – I’m not in the IM / Myspace generation, so maybe others are getting enough personal interaction on line. Anyway I’m probably rambling by now, but I’ll finish off by saying, I want More. More interaction with other tech-heads like me.

I’ve recently realised that Barcamp is on the same day as Mardigras, which means that Taxis in the city will be non existent. That means that I will have to drive, and thefore not be able to drink… bummer… another night of having to be sober whilst all around are getting nicely merry. So that brings me to Sydney traffic. It seems like every time there is an event in Sydney, traffic is just ground to a halt. Last week, with the Ships and Dick Cheney I had 2 1hr 15min journeys home where usually it takes around 35 mins and only 20 or so minutes during school holidays. And later in the year they are even giving us a public holiday because George W is in town… (and it’s not because we want to go out to see George W, they want us out of the city, so Georgey boy can get around in the city). Sydney traffic copes really well in school holidays (that’s a whole other topic but, who are these people who don’t go to work during school holidays and what sort of job do they have that allows this!!!!), but it is general chaos most other days and when any event is on it just becomes extreme chaos. Sometimes I love living in Sydney, but sometimes I just hate it, and going out this weekend is going to be one of those times when everything I hate about Sydney is accentuated.

Well I may have had a fun day playing underwater hockey yesterday but after that and my regular 6k walk on Tuesday evenings, I’m stuffed. I’m achy all over and not in a very good mood. I think I will try to just focus on my work today and try to avoid people.

I just had quite a fun afternoon. Skipped work (ok, they let me) and went to a local girls school to teach the year 9 girls how to play Underwater Hockey. A while ago I decided I’m not fit enough to play but it would be nice to be able to pass my skills on to the up and coming players. I had lots of fun and I think the girls did too.

Well, I’ve taken the plunge and signed up for Barcamp Sydney this weekend. I am quite looking forward to it. However, I’m not sure about the very unstructured nature of it. I’m a very structured person and I hope that I don’t feel out of the loop a bit and end up just wandering around. I think I will take a taxi because it sounds like the dinner after will be a bit of a piss-up.