I just got back from the first Misoula BarCamp, and I think it was a success. We had about 18 people show up, which I think is very good for the first one. One attendee ( a fellow Rails developer ) came all the way from Helena. There were also some people that I was hoping/expecting would be there that weren't so hopefully they'll come to the next, whenever that is. There was a great mix of technical and non-technical discussions and presentations (I gave a little Rails demo). At any rate, big shout out and thanks to Harold for putting the whole thing together. I don't think anybody who went was the least bit disappointed in doing so, despite missing out on the first really nice spring weather in a couple weeks.

Thanks to my new Missoulian RSS Feed (what? huh? move along, nothing to see here... next post on that subject) I just found out that Presidential Candidate Barack Obama is having a free rally at the Adams Center Saturday morning. I'd be there even if it was Bush III, I mean John McCain. This is history in the making folks!

And on a completely unrelated note, Missoula is having it's own BarCamp on April 26th (also a Saturday). What's a BarCamp? According to Wikipedia....

The official site for Missoula's contribution is at http://missoulabarcamp.org. Registration is required. Early registration recommended. I hope to see a great turnout of Missoula's Tech Professionals.

Well, it was a little more work than I'd originally anticipated, but 5Valleys is now both my personal OpenID server and a consumer for visitors wishing to use OpenID to identify themselves when posting comments. I used the ruby-openid gem, but otherwise wrote all my own code, trying to stay as RESTful as possible (OpenID itself isn't particularly friendly to REST practices), and getting a thorough understanding of the internals before my presentation at next week's Missoula Web Discussion Group meeting. If you have an OpenID, go ahead and post a comment to try it out. Hint: if you have accounts at any of these sites, then you've got an OpenID you can (hopefully) use here, or anyplace else that proudly accepts them.