Hi. My name is Dan Gilleland, and I'm contributing to metaPost by developing a provider that will work with the Announcements module that comes packaged in DotNetNuke. First, I'll give you a little background on who I am, and then I'll talk a bit about how I got involved with metaPost and the Announcements provider. Who am I?
I'm a full-time IT instructor in the Computer Systems Technology program (CST) at NAIT (Northern Alberta Institute of Technology). I primarily teach either Java or VB.NET courses (sometimes both in the same term), but my main background is C++. I can do C++, C#, VB.NET, Java, SQL, XML/XSLT, and a smattering of a few other items such as JavaScript.
Actually, if I go back all the way to my high school days (late '70s - early '80s), I started coding good old Basic on some TRS 80s (when Basic had line numbers and long before it was Visual). I even competed in the first Alberta-wide computer programming competition, where I tied for 7th place (I should have tried harder). After high school, I taught myself some assembly language programming for my Commodore 64 (can you say "geek"). Although I really enjoyed programming, I never really wanted a job in computers because I couldn't see myself coding all day long. In fact, even though I didn't know what I wanted in a career after high school, I was pretty sure that the two things I didn't want was to be a programmer or a teacher. Go figure....
In the mid '90s, I decided that I did want to work full-time with computers after all. I had worked with a Macintosh, was captivated by the graphics & ease of use, and was very frustrated with using poorly designed text-based PC programs in my low-pay job. I went back to school and got my diploma (CST, NAIT), and tried getting into industry around the time that it started to get really soft. After a short time in industry, I applied to teach in the CST program and voilà - here I am.
What am I Doing Here?
In March, 2008, I volunteered my efforts to write a metaPost provider for the Announcements module. My interest in metaPost began when I was searching for a way to publish content from MS Word to a DotNetNuke portal. When I found metaPost, it turned out to be the "missing link" in a publication chain I've been looking for over the past six years.
I came across DotNetNuke near it's inception (DNN 1.10, I think it was), and have been working with it ever since. At the time I found DotNetNuke, I was searching for some kind of framework that would help me in creating/publishing/managing the gamut of content (notes, exercises, examples) that I was making for my students. I needed something that was web-based, extensible, easy to maintain, etc., etc. So, when I found DotNetNuke, I knew I had something good!
But, I still had a problem: Publishing notes was a bit of a burden, mostly because of images (I use a lot of them). Through DotNetNuke, I was able to use all sorts of modules to publish content (Ventrian's News Articles is my favourite), but for every image I wanted to use I had to create the image (usually a screen-shot), save it to a file, upload it, and then embed it in my module's content. With all these steps, that can become a lot of work to create the content, let alone maintain it. And then there was the problem of making drafts, opening them to refine them some more, not having undo/redo, etc. Hey, it was still pretty cool, but too many steps made it too cumbersome.
Well, in late February, I thought I would look in my copy of Word 2007 to see if I could publish content, like I could with OneNote to SharePoint. Yes, there was a Publish, but it was through certain protocols and to only a limited number of 3rd party sites - but I was wanting to publish to my DotNetNuke site. So I did a search for DotNetNuke + "publish to blog" and came across the metaPost module.
When I first got it installed & working with Windows Live Writer, I actually got the shakes! WOW! This was the missing link I was looking for! And it worked for the News Articles module - BONUS!!! I was so hyped on it, that I didn't actually get to sleep until 4 AM the next morning, but I was too excited to do anything productive in that time.
After calming down a bit over the next few days, I got thinking about how it would be great to post to the Announcements module using metaPost, and since I was in some e-mail contact with Don Worthley by that time, we got talking about it and here I am.
So, that's a bit about me and how I came to work on the metaPost for Announcements provider. I'll probably try my hand at a couple more providers once I've got this one done, and I'll blog more about the planned release of the Announcements provider in the next few weeks. Now you know the "rest of the story", and I hope to write more on metaPost in the future.