Welcome to Champlain Arts

Submitted by Jesse on Sat, 08/28/2010 - 14:53
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Champlain Arts is the new name for North Country Consulting.  Don't worry: you don't have to change bookmarks or email addresses because everything redirects and should get you and your messages to where you want to be (which is here). The name change reflects the broader range of activities that are going on. We've morphed from a development company that focused on object-oriented programming for Macintosh computers to a generalized consulting business and now to working on a variety of new technologies including iOS apps, Drupal website development, books and training on new technologies and our old standbys--Mac OS X and FileMaker on all of their platforms and devices.

How Tos

How Tos from around the site presented in reverse chronological order (latest first). Click the category (Apps, FileMaker, Bento, etc.) to find more information about a How To and other information in that category.

Latest News

Crowdsourcing: Pro and Con

Submitted by Jesse on Tue, 08/31/2010 - 08:25
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Crowdsourcing is one of the most contentious topics in the world of charities today. The term was first used by Jeff Howe in a 2006 Wired magazine article, and it has become part of the digital/social conversation. (There's more at http://northcountryconsulting.com/crowdsourcing.)

Crowdsourcing is part of the idea behind contests for charities such as Pepsi Refresh, Chase Community Giving, and (as announced in a commercial on the Emmy Awards show) the Clorox Power a Bright Future contest. All of these have the same basic pattern:

Creating ePub Books Using iWork Pages

Submitted by Jesse on Sun, 08/29/2010 - 09:17
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The August 2010 update to iWork lets you export a Pages word processing document to ePub format. That means you can add it to your iTunes library and synchronize it to iBooks on your iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch.

This document provides a step-by-step guide to creating those ePub files and managing them. You'll also see the differences in the various formats: this document is downloadable in Pages, PDF, and ePub formats.

CNET: What's Next for "Check-In" Apps?

Submitted by Jesse on Fri, 08/27/2010 - 15:44
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John D. Sutter points it out in this article: automated check-ins.

Here's a strictly northeastern US observation: by the time we're all hunkered down in the short, cold winter days, we'll be able to make our forays into the blizzards faster and more effective.

Crowdsourcing, the Wisdom of Crowds, Social Media, and a New Section of the Site

Submitted by Jesse on Sun, 08/22/2010 - 09:31
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With Wired magazine wondering if the Web is dead, Facebook launching Places for a new era (they hope) in geolocation, and the interest in projects such as Pepsi Refresh, Chase Community Giving, and the Knight News Challenge a new section of the site seems in order.

If you've been following us for a while, you may have noticed that there are two main focuses to the site:

  1. Community development and nonprofits (that's what I do with my non-technical time).
  2. Technologies such as mashups, Facebook, mobile computing, Drupal, Mac OS X, iOS, and FileMaker (those are the topics I write about in my books).

Crowdsourcing brings those two strands of thought together, so there's now a section on this site under Community & Roundtable for crowdsourcing links and articles.

According to Wikipedia, it was Jeff Howe who coined the term in an article for Wired in June 2006. He wrote, "It’s not outsourcing; it’s crowdsourcing." Large numbers of people -- particularly large numbers of people communicating over the Internet -- can focus on problems in order to find a solution. That wisdom of crowds has recently been applied to the evaluation of causes and projects (see Pepsi Refresh,  Chase Community Giving, and Knight News Challenge)

If the concept is new to you, here are three of the major references that you can catch up with:

Wired: The Headline is Dead! Long Live a New Thought!

Submitted by Jesse on Sat, 08/21/2010 - 09:25
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X is Dead! Long Live Y! is a great title for an article not least because it can provide a great graphics jumping-off point. It is so great that Wired has used it for their September issue: The Web is Dead. Long Live the Internet.

They've used it before, as you can see from a simple search of the Wired site. Here are some -- not all! -- of the X is Dead! Long Live X! Wired articles.

Automotive

Keeping Up to Date with Us

Submitted by Jesse on Fri, 04/17/2009 - 14:29
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There are RSS feeds all over the site so that you can subscribe to updated content. The main RSS feed is at the left of most pages in the Subscribe section. You'll also see smaller RSS icons at the bottom of many pages; they let you subscribe to a feed for that page. For example, if you click a tag for an article or story (they're at the top, preceded by "in"), you'll see all the articles and stories that have that same tag. And, at the bottom of that page, there's an RSS icon that lets you subscribe to any new articles with that tag.