Steve Jobs was the Thomas Edison, Alexander Graham Bell, and Leonardo Da Vinci of our time. He has inspired, currently inspires and will continue to inspire entrepreneurs and round pegs in square holes everywhere. Read more – ‘Here’s to the crazy ones’.
Mayor Bob Cashell of The City of Reno has issued a proclamation for Reno’s first Hack4Reno event. The document does a great job of explaining why Hack4Reno exists and we’re very excited to be putting on the event. There tends to be some reservations within tech/startup communities to work together with their cities but this [...] Read more – ‘Building a more informed & engaged city’.
Reno is about to get hacked, in a good way. Reno Collective has partnered with the City of Reno in order to put on the first Hack4Reno event in downtown Reno. For 24 hours, teams from all over Northern Nevada will set off to build apps, websites, services and tools that help make Reno a [...] Read more – ‘Hack for Change in Reno’.
Reno-Tahoe WordCamp is in just over a week! This event will sell out so if you haven’t signed up yet, you can register here. There is a whole lot of awesome planned for the weekend including the WordPress Genius Bar, great speakers, and the opportunity to meet a lot of WordPress users, developers, and designers. [...] Read more – ‘Let’s get WordPressin’’.
Below is a talk I gave at Las Vegas WordCamp in Fall 2010 on building web app mashups with WordPress and the options available for doing so. Read more – ‘Your Web App is in my WordPress!’.
I needed to integrate a client’s landing pages into Salesforce.com and having never used Unbounce before today, I figured we would just add the HTML web-to-lead form into the landing page and the job would be done. Unfortunately, doing so would circumvent Unbounce’s own forms and compromise any reason for using Unbounce in the first [...] Read more – ‘Leadhooks: Unbounce and Salesforce Integration’.
We had a great regrand opening/anniversary/celebration party last week and we gave a little talk about what we’ve done so far and where we are going with coworking, innovation and community building in Reno. Check out the slides below. Read more – ‘Slides from Reno Collective Party’.
Update: To vote for Reno Collective in the Lean Startup Challenge, please tweet this article with the hashtag #leanvote65 and your vote will be counted! Thank you for all your support. This post has two purposes. The first is as an entry for the Lean Startup Challenge and secondly, to provide our members and the [...] Read more – ‘Coworking as a ‘Brick and Mortar’ Lean Startup’.
I’ve studied motivation and game mechanics as a personal hobby for some time and took a class at UNR on Serious Games, which I’m pleased to hear has evolved into a minor on Serious Games. In my research, I’ve been thinking a lot about reward and value systems, both intrinsic and extrinsic and a big question [...] Read more – ‘Gamification: Losing the forest for the trees?’.
I’m really enjoying 750words.com for writing my daily entries. My stats as of today: “Colin Loretz has written a total of 6,393 words and completed 8 days.” I’ve heard that it takes about 22 days for something to become a habit. It’s been only 9 days since I made my goal of writing everyday and I ended [...] Read more – ‘‘Becoming a Better Writer’ Status Update’.
Reno-Tahoe WordCamp 2011 is happening June 4-5! For more details keep your eyes on http://2011.reno.wordcamp.org/. Stepping Back While I organized RTWC 2009 and 2010 with the help of a great number of volunteers, the building of Lively Labs is my primary focus right now and I am happy to pass on the WordCamp torch to [...] Read more – ‘Reno-Tahoe WordCamp 2011 in June’.
One of my goals for 2011 is to focus on writing, specifically to further develop how I express myself rhetorically. To do this, I’m writing and reading more (a lot more). Reading More To track my reading, I’m using Shelfari (sign up and add me!) which allows you to track the books you’ve read, books [...] Read more – ‘Becoming a Better Writer’.
We’ve had great success working with Reno.rb to put on monthly Hacknights at Reno Collective. The hacking is starting to heat up as all of the hackers/devs who have attended have gotten to know one another over the last couple meetings. For this month’s hacknight, I worked with Robert Bousquet on communicating RFID data to [...] Read more – ‘Hacknights!’.
Process Magazine featured Reno Collective, Co+Hoots, theHIVE, Collaboratory and Gangplank in their Winter 2010 issue. Check it out here. Below are the questions we were asked. Tell us about your location. is the part of town and/or physical location particularly conducive to the whole ideal of coworking? We’re currently in the building we opened the Reno [...] Read more – ‘Reno Collective featured in Process Magazine’.
Future of Web Design NYC folks who want to meetup for a group dinner, find me outside of New World Stages. I’m tall and wearing a black dress shirt do I should be easy to find but text me if you have trouble. 775-303-8027 The plan as of right now is an italian place called [...] Read more – ‘Informal Post-FOWD Dinner!’.
There have been a lot of questions about whether or not this toolkit and the application will be available so I wanted to get the latest word out there. When I announced this app and the Force.com toolkit, I anticipated the app would be available within a matter of weeks or even a couple months. [...] Read more – ‘Why the Basecamp API sucks (an update on Basecamp for Salesforce.com)’.
South by Southwest 2011 will take place in Austin, TX in March and each year the conference sessions are submitted by people all over the country to present on topics including web apps, entrepreneurship, social media, and more. This year I submitted a presentation with Eric Jennings from Loopshot called “Beyond Mashups: Connecting Web Apps [...] Read more – ‘Vote for my presentation at SXSW!’.
Reno-Tahoe WordCamp 2010 is in 9 days! Here are the shirts for this year’s event, designed by Diego Sabogal. Only the first 150 registered attendees will receive a shirt so sign up now! Read more – ‘Reno-Tahoe WordCamp Shirts’.
Here is video from the presentation I did at the Orange County WordCamp 2010 discussing specific methods for using WordPress as a content management system, including when WordPress is best for your site and how you can optimize your WordPress use for a complete site. Video provided by Blaze Streaming Media Read more – ‘WordPress as a CMS on WordPress.TV’.
Here are my slides from my presentation at OC WordCamp this weekend. It was a great event and I hope everyone learned a few things! If you’ve never been to an event like this and you use WordPress, or are interested in learning more about the platform, look for a WordCamp in your area. The [...] Read more – ‘OC WordCamp: WordPress as a CMS’.
Here is my goal list. The 100 things (I have 11 empty slots) that I hope to limit my personal possessions to by May 10th (1 month from now) Macbook Air iPhone Ray Bans Chrome Bag Carryon Bag 22” Monitor Boxers (all counted as 1) Socks (all counted as 1) Undershirts (all counted as 1) [...] Read more – ‘100 Things Goal List’.
I consider myself a minimalist. I do my best when my life isn’t cluttered. However, if you look at all the things I have own, all the things stacked in my closet and my garage overflowing with crap, you would have a hard time agreeing with me. 100 Thing Challenge So the big question now [...] Read more – ‘minimalism’.
I submitted an application to Google’s Summer of Code last year on building a CMS Theme Framework for wordpress and I’m back at it this year. An IDE for WordPress Plugins & Themes My proposal for GSOC 2010 is an integrated development environment for WordPress to allow for integration between the code editor, publishing, developer [...] Read more – ‘WP Builder: An IDE for WordPress Plugins & Themes’.
It’s a busy time in the world of WordPress. The Lively Labs crew will be out and about for various WordCamps over the next couple months. We use WordPress heavily as our content management system of choice for most projects and are always glad to be involved and contribute to the community. April 24th: Orange [...] Read more – ‘WoW: World of WordPress’.
Annie Vranizan and I presented ’50 Apps to Fuel Your Online Business’ at the Nevada Interactive Media Summit last weekend. I’ve posted the slides here and you can find the full list of 50 apps and their links on Annie’s website. 50 Apps to Fuel Your Online Business View more presentations from Colin Loretz. Read more – ‘50 Apps to Fuel Your Online Business’.
We are looking forward to using this at Reno Collective for handling payment for daily drop-ins. Our monthly members can be setup for automatic payments but as of right now, our drop-in payments are mostly cash based. Read more – ‘Square for iPhone’.
Formatting dates has always been the bane of my existence and tonight, I couldn’t figure out how to calculate the day of the week based on a date when coding in apex on the Force.com platform. I found this wikipedia article: Calculating the day of the week and used it to build the following function. [...] Read more – ‘Calculating the day of the week in Apex code’.
So much has happened in the last couple months of 2009. In chronological order from September through today: I was working. Created an LLC called Reno Collective for a coworking space. Worked freelance on the side. Spent a lot of time building a social network for Vivanista. Started dating a wonderful and talented individual. Went [...] Read more – ‘A Little Bit of Personal Planning’.
2009 is wrapping up but it comes with some very exciting news. I’m very pleased to announce that Lively Labs is now open for business. The core team consists of myself, Ed Adkins, and Chelsea Otakan and we will be providing Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) development and consulting using Salesforce.com, the Force.com platform, WordPress and the iPhone. [...] Read more – ‘Life just got a little livelier’.
Calendars and I are something that have never quite gotten along. I’ve tried using everything from iCal on my mac, the calendar on my iPhone, Google Calendar, Backpack Calendar, and to-do applications like Things or ToodleDo. With each system, I would eventually just resort to using a piece of paper or a notebook to track [...] Read more – ‘My Calendar Syncing Solution’.
9/27/2010 UPDATE: Read what’s going on with this project here For the Force.com developer hackathon, I developed an integration toolkit between 37Signals‘ Basecamp application for project management and Salesforce.com. This little bit of work earned me the top prize in the Dreamforce 2009 Hackathon so a big thanks to Salesforce.com for putting on the event. [...] Read more – ‘Introducing my Unofficial Basecamp + Salesforce.com Toolkit’.
I’m heading out to San Francisco this week for Dreamforce 2009, this year’s Salesforce.com User & Developer conference. Some of the things I’m particularly looking forward to: Dreamforce Tweetup Developer certification exams to become a certified Force.com Developer Force.com Hackathon: David Schach and I are teaming up on Wednesday night to develop a “killer Force.com [...] Read more – ‘Off to Dreamforce 2009’.
ColinLoretz.com is finally being redesigned. (Insert parable about a shoemaker’s children being shoeless or something here). I have a new website in the works that I plan to publish next week to showcase all of the many things I do in both work and personal life. Many of you are probably reading this through an [...] Read more – ‘Changes are coming’.
I have returned from my second year at Burning Man. It was a much needed escape for me considering how many things I have going on right now. Recap and pictures to come! Read more – ‘Putting together all the pieces’.
“You see this goblet?” asks Achaan Chaa, the Thai meditation master. “For me this glass is already broken. I enjoy it; I drink out of it. It holds my water admirably, sometimes even reflecting the sun in beautiful patterns. If I should tap it, it has a lovely ring to it. But when I put [...] Read more – ‘"Every moment with it is precious"’.
Here is the slide deck for the presentation I gave at Ignite Reno #2 on July 16th at Amendment 21. The video will come soon! Ignite Reno: Diagnosing Technology as a Mental Disorder View more presentations from ColinLoretz. Read more – ‘Ignite Reno: Diagnosing Technology as a Mental Disorder’.
I have a lot of things going on right now so I thought it might be a good time to get it all out in writing, for my own sake as well as to share it with all of you. Now that I’ve graduated, here are the different areas of my world: Twelve Horses I’m [...] Read more – ‘What am I up to now?’.
It’s easy to have a lot of meetings without any thought to money and the cost associated with that time. This was a link shared by Lance Ennen in an O’Reilly Webinar, “Radical Career Success in a Down Economy.” Meeting Cost Ticker Read more – ‘How much did that meeting cost?’.
This past weekend I completed my first-ever century cycling ride by participating in the Tour De Nez. Steve James convinced me to do the ride and I’m glad I stuck with it. We were a little disappointed in the turn out, less than 30 riders showed up combined for the full 100-mile century and the [...] Read more – ‘Tour De Nez 2009’.
Ignite Reno #2 is coming up on the night of Thursday, July 16th at Amendment 21. Wondering Ignite Reno is all about? Watch the intro video to find out! Check out presentations from the last Ignite Reno. Read more – ‘Ignite Reno #2 coming in July!’.
Shaving is usually something everyone hates to do. Who really enjoys scraping a piece of sharpened metal across their skin? My own experience has been less than pleasant. I’ve tried probably a dozen different brands of razors but all of them have been common safety razors with multiple blades. The razor I “enjoyed” most was the [...] Read more – ‘A better shave using a single blade safety razor’.
LOCAL COMMUNITY LEADERS AND CITIZENS WALK WITHOUT SHOES TO RAISE FUNDS NEEDED TO PLACE SHOES ON ORPHANS IN KENYA Hundreds of individuals and community leaders are gathering to support the Think Kindness organization in sending over 7,770 gently used shoes to AIDS orphans and refugees in Nyeri, Kenya. Brian Williams, youth motivational speaker and president [...] Read more – ‘Hundreds to Walk a Mile Without Shoes’.
Think Kindness has collected over 2,500 3,800 pairs of shoes and now we need help delivering them to Nyeri, Kenya, where they will be personally placed on the feet of children in need. Many of these children have never owned a pair of shoes. Join me on June 7th at the Manzanita Bowl at the [...] Read more – ‘Take the Walk to send shoes to Kenya!’.
Did you create your resume using a Microsoft Word template? Stop right there. Really. Stop. Please. I’ve been using LinkedIn (sign up if you haven’t already!) for quite a while to keep track of my academic and professional history and while I frequently send people there to check out my qualifications, I always kept my [...] Read more – ‘LinkedIn as your living resume’.
Everyone wants to love and be loved. That special person breaks us out of our day-to-day routine, makes each day brighter and the very thought of them brings a smile to our face. “Love is of all passions the strongest, for it attacks simultaneously the head, the heart, and the senses.” - Lao Tzu [via [...] Read more – ‘SIGNS’.
Our last seminar on serious games was quite enjoyable. Dr. Pippa Avery asked us to brainstorm a serious game that we would like to make. Our class consists of individuals with fairly diverse backgrounds including computer science, digital media, traditional arts, journalism, and myself, the lone business/marketing student. My experiences and coursework through the College of [...] Read more – ‘Creating a Serious Game’.
Want to help save the planet? @edadkins and I created Globes for the Globes (NSFW 18+) to help spread tips that will help the earth. Ed already wrote about why we made the website, which you can read here. I wanted to quickly talk about what went into making it happen and why we used [...] Read more – ‘Earth Day: The Tech behind Globes for the Globe’.
I was curious to take a look at my Twitter usage over time and found TweetStats, which provides graphs on usage by month, day, time of day, popular keywords, etc. Clearly, my usage (or addiction) of Twitter has steadily grown over time. I’d be curious to see how this has grown in relation to the number [...] Read more – ‘My Twitter Stats & Cloud’.
WordPress as a Content Management System I currently use WordPress for many of my projects. Want to start a blog? WordPress is a perfect fit. Do you want to build a website on WordPress? WordPress can do that too. However, because WordPress was originally designed as a blogging platform, there are quite a few tweaks [...] Read more – ‘A CMS Theme Framework for WordPress’.
Hasan Elahi was invited to UNR as a part of the Church of Fine Arts’ Visiting Artist Lecture Series. His work is a product of a personal experience he had with the U.S. government while trying to reenter the United States from Africa. He had been placed on the no-fly list and was detained in [...] Read more – ‘Blending Art and Data’.
“You take the blue pill and the story ends. You wake in your bed and you believe whatever you want to believe. You take the red pill and you stay in Wonderland, and I show you how deep the rabbit-hole goes.” - Morpheus Read more – ‘Will you take the blue pill or the red pill?’.
I presented the following presentation at the first-ever Nevada Interactive Media Summit last week. My presentation consisted mostly of demonstrations in Adobe Flex Builder but if you plug the code below into Flex, you should be able to follow along. A video of the presentation should be available soon. Adobe Flex: Creating Widgets for the [...] Read more – ‘Adobe Flex: Creating Widgets for the Desktop & Web’.
Like the morning sun your eyes will follow me As you watch me wander, curse the powers that be Cause all I want is here and now but its already been and gone Our intentions always last that bit too long - Full Moon by Black Ghosts Read more – ‘Full Moon’.
Our topic of discussion last class was two-fold: “what is art?” and “what is a computer?” The multidisciplinary nature of our Serious Games class includes art, computer science and journalism so it is important for all of us, coming from different backgrounds and experiences, to understand a little bit about the other fields of interest. So what [...] Read more – ‘What is art?’.
Interaction is key. Art and digital media are very important components of gaming. A game can have a great concept but fall flat on its face without some sort of digital representation, whether it be images, sounds, or even physical feedback such as vibration, that allows us to interact with the code that runs the [...] Read more – ‘Art in Serious Games’.
I started promoting Reno Ignite about a month ago and even with all the details I provided, the number question I have been getting is "What is Reno Ignite?" Read more – ‘What is Ignite Reno?’.
“Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?” “That depends a good deal on where you want to get to,” said the Cat. “I don’t much care where…” said Alice. “Then it doesn’t matter which way you go,” said the Cat. - Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland Stop and reflect. [...] Read more – ‘Where are you going?’.
I’m now a member of the Adobe Student Rep program and will be promoting Adobe Flex and AIR to the students and colleges for building Rich Internet Applications. I see a lot of opportunity for using Flex/AIR in both the Computer Science and Journalism departments and will be raising awareness across the campus through demonstration [...] Read more – ‘I'm now an Adobe Student Rep for Rich Internet Applications’.
I’m about to move out of my apartment and I’ve been on the hunt for where I will end up next. With work and school, I haven’t had a lot of time to drive and look around for a new place but I have been able to check out a lot of places via the [...] Read more – ‘Toolkit for House Hunting on the Web’.
David Heinemeier Hansson at Startup School 08 on The A Secret to Making Money. His presentation is to the point and reinforces the direction I’m heading while working on my own web app in the little “spare/free” time I find. Quite inspiring. Share and annotate your videos with Omnisio! Read more – ‘Secret to Making Money from Startup School 08’.
I spent a few hours going through these steps with a friend of mine, Glenn, who is starting to learn Ruby on Rails. He wanted to install MySQL so we decided to do it from source. Glenn was trying to install MySQL using Dan Benjamin’s tutorial at Hivelogic. I found the same steps that Dan [...] Read more – ‘Installing MySQL from source on Mac OS X Leopard’.
It’s been just over 4 weeks for my 30 day slow-carb experiment, with one more day to go. Overall, I have not been able to stick to the diet religiously but have used its basic principles (such as not drinking my calories and avoiding simple carbs) for nearly every single meal. The original claim was [...] Read more – ‘[Week 3 & 4 Update] 30 day slow-carb experiment’.
Reno Collective is now live at www.renocollective.com. Ed Adkins and I will be adding much more content over the next couple days with our press releases. It will be the home to any of our announcements as well as general coworking and microbusiness news. It is a great feeling to see how far we have [...] Read more – ‘Reno Collective website now online’.
A List Apart has opened their “Survey for people who design websites” survey for 2008. This is the second annual survey distributed by A List Apart and the results are pretty useful for determining where graphic design, web design, and development fields are going and how they are performing. The survey results are always published [...] Read more – ‘The survey for people who make websites’.
I’m now on week 2 of the 30 day slow-carb diet experiment and I’ve managed to stick to the plan with little deviation but eating at work has been one of the most difficult parts. It’s easy to grill something up when you’re sitting back at home but its quite another story at work. Sticking [...] Read more – ‘[Week 2 Update] 30 day slow-carb experiment’.
Want to brush up on your writing? Writing a lot, by starting a blog or keeping a journal can certainly help but Kurt Vonnegut believes that good writing comes from good ideas and saying exactly what you mean. How to Write With Style by Kurt Vonnegut [via Jason Santa Maria] Newspaper reporters and technical writers [...] Read more – ‘How to write with style’.
It’s been one week since I started the 30 day slow-carb diet experiment and I have some things to share. The first thing I tried to do was create a log to track everything I was eating. This failed after the first two days and signifies a barrier than many people face when trying to [...] Read more – ‘[Week 1 Update] 30 day slow-carb experiment’.
If you haven’t heard of coworking – then you probably work in a cubicle. It’s ok if you do, so do I. At least for now. Coworking has been defined as many things by the people who participate but the Coworking Wiki defines it as: Coworking is cafe-like community/collaboration space for developers, writers and independents. [...] Read more – ‘Coworking is coming to Reno’.
The word diet certainly has a negative connotation. Now I don’t necessarily need to lose weight but I know my youthful metabolism won’t last forever. I’m interested in this experiment for the benefits of physical performance and lifetime health. Tim Ferris, of Four Hour Work Week fame, claims that “it is possible to lose 20 [...] Read more – ‘30 day slow-carb diet experiment’.
I’ve had trouble regularly updating the blog in the past but a few things have happened this summer that will and have changed that. Of course, Robert Payne says, “I’ll believe it when I see it!” Part of this problem has been a lack of focus. I do a lot of things everyday and love [...] Read more – ‘A summer of changing content’.
I’ve been working with Salesforce.com for just over a year and it is no where near the same system it was when I started working at Twelve Horses. In the past year, I have seen the CRM evolve to include a full developer platform, Force.com, with Apex code allowing developers to create complex business logic [...] Read more – ‘Inspired by the Force, the Force.com platform that is’.
Freedom of the press is guaranteed only to those who own one. – A.J. Lieblin This quote is listed on MagCloud, an HP Labs research project that allows anyone to publish a magazine by uploading a PDF. The service uses HP Indigo technology that allows for printing on demand in high quality color on 80lb [...] Read more – ‘Magcloud grants anyone the freedom of the press’.
Tour de Nez is back! I didn’t get to ride last year but I’m going to be at the alleycat/messenger race tonight at the Grand Sierra Resort. Come by to watch or race: Grand Sierra Resort June 18, 2008 Registration/Teams: 5:15pm Messenger Race: 6:00pm The race is for three-person teams: 1 mile closed circuit 2 [...] Read more – ‘Tour de Nez Messenger Bike Race Tonight’.
Kingsley Joseph asked an interesting question on Twitter today that had me thinking about optimizing business processes: “what does CRM mean to you? most definitions I find on the web are next to useless” Kingsley2 He had quite a few responses, mine was as follows: “@kingsley I would define CRM as any system used to [...] Read more – ‘Optimizing business processes before technology’.
Adobe has released a suite of web tools that allow users to collaboratively write, share, and publish documents online. The tools include Adobe Buzzword, ConnectNow, Create PDF, Share, and My Files. The features for each are below: Buzzword Shared document authoring Ability to export to PDF Rich document styling Adobe Connect Now Screensharing: Share your [...] Read more – ‘Collaborate with Adobe's Acrobat.com’.
Some of the Twelve Horses crew attended the Rich Internet Application Dev Shed 2008 this week and since we would be out of the office both Thursday and Friday, we wanted to hit the road without missing a beat. We rented a van, setup our laptops, and drove five-hundred miles with a fairly speedy WiFi [...] Read more – ‘Create a mobile WiFi hotspot for roadtrips’.
The Twelve Horses gang is in Salt Lake City for the RIA Dev Shed. Check back more today for live updates. I’m currently building a Flex/AIR application at work that allows us to integrate with Salesforce.com in order to manage projects and employees. 1:30: Listening to Louie Penaflor. He is presenting on Flash Media Server [...] Read more – ‘Rich Internet Application Dev Shed’.
My business plan for Voxspot.com has made the final round of the undergraduate Governor’s Cup Business Plan Competition, hosted by NCET. I will be doing an oral presentation at John Ascuaga’s Nugget on April 21st and winners will be announced in Las Vegas at Green Valley Ranch Station on April 25th. I will be talking [...] Read more – ‘Finalist in Nevada Governor's Cup 2008’.
Download the photoshop project photos. I will be teaching Adobe Photoshop next week at UNR. The focus will be on creating images and mockups for marketing materials like presentations, brochures, and websites. The course is open to anyone, just come ready to learn! Some Photoshop tutorials will be posted here after the workshop. When: April [...] Read more – ‘Photoshop for Business Students’.
