Not long after I started teaching at RIT, I had my first overachieving student. These are the students that really make me love my job--and keep me on my toes. Ross, a freshman, was already hard at work writing his own XML parser, and had better web coding skills than most of the upperclass students I'd met.
Unfortunately, Ross didn't stay long at RIT. (And in retrospect, Ross, I feel like I should have worked harder to keep you there.) Once he'd left, I didn't hear much from him...until I started blogging. Earlier this year, he turned up in the comments of my blog, and I've been able to keep track of him a bit on his own blog, Ross Notes.
In his comment on my last entry, he mentioned LocalFeeds in a way that made me think it might be his site. A quick whois lookup confirmed it. Nice job, Ross. I'm glad to see you're still building cool things in your spare time. :)
And if you haven't seen LocalFeeds (and added yourself to it), you should. It's a great way to find weblogs in your geographic area, and let them find you. Tools like this, that begin to blend virtual and geographic communities, are wonderful additions to the social software world.
It's funny how so many interesting people in our life end up turning up again.
I've never had you as a student (I'm CS), though I'm pretty sure I saw you at the recent CS/IT social event at RIT. Either that, or it was a connection through Mike Axelrod. Whatever the case, I ended up seeing blog postings about the event I attended - which goes to show that localfeeds truly is a powerful tool.
Now if only more RIT professors used the technologies it uses, it'd be much easier to keep up to date on the RIT world.
Thanks, Liz- that means a lot.
Be sure to stay tuned to Localfeeds in the next few weeks- I've got some interesting things on the horizon...
I'll be dropping the occasional hint at localfeeds.com/news/