.:MattTopper.com:.

So I’ve been missing from here, email, etc for a while but I’ll address that later, for a sneak preview of why you can see my new disclaimer on the right hand side of this blog.  If you’ve been paying attention to the guys over at AppsLab (and who wouldn’t be), you’ll have noticed that they added some new functionality to Oracle Mix to nominate and vote on sessions for this years Oracle Open World.  Not too long after the launch Jake mentioned that they needed some new ideas on how to review the submitted sessions.  I had an idea to create a wordpress widget that lists all the sessions in a random order.  It took me a little while squeezing it out while life got in the way, but here it is:

Download mix-oow-2008-widget

If you want to check it out you can see it running in the sidebar of every page on this blog.  It’s a pretty generic plug-in, if you want to stream any feed from mix it should be pretty simple to modify, just remove the parsing for votes in the code.  The installation is pretty simple:

1. Download the code and extract the zip file
2. Upload the folder to your <WP_HOME>/wp-content/plugins directory
3. Log into your blog administrator page, go to Plugins and active the Oracle Mix OOW 2008 Voting Plug-In
4. Then add the widget to your sidebar (Design->Widgets)
5. Edit the plug-in in your sidebar for your personal options

In the options you can change the title, width, height and background color of the widget to match your own personal flavor.  There is also the option to have a large display which adds a vote button ala mix, cache all of the entries for a set period of time (speeds up your pages), and modify the RSS URL.

I’ve tested this with Firefox 3.0 RC1, IE 6.0 running on WordPress 2.5.1.  Because of the limitations in the RSS feed being returned we only scroll through the latest 20 submissions but its definitely a nice easy way to see whats going on in the mix.

Feel free to leave feedback, bugs, etc. in the comments.  I’ve got a bunch of blog articles lined up and a post on my new gig, but we’ll save that for later.  See everyone at OOW 2008.  If you want to say thanks, check out my submissions for OOW on mix and please vote if you like them:

• Oracle and Startups : Solutions, Scalability, and Speed

• Good Old Fashion Coding Competion

BTW- I’m in CISSP training the week of ODTUG so I’m going to have to miss it this year, but don’t worry Dan Norris will be covering my sessions for me.  He’ll probably do them better than me anyways.