Summersault Blog

When Summersault was first starting up and were sharing office space with the folks at Infocom, a local ISP now defunct, I remember the talk at the time about creating a wide-reaching local area network in the Richmond area that would allow network traffic flowing from one local organization to another to be routed directly, instead of taking the default circuitous route through the organization’s ISP, the national level point of presence, and then back down through the destination’s ISP. It seemed like such a good idea, and though Infocom did some peering with Earlham and RP&L, the local power company, things never really moved beyond that as far as I knew.
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In our ongoing effort to make technology more accessible and less intimidating to the average citizen, we’re teaming up with the Uptown Innovation Center to present TechTalk, a monthly forum where members of the Richmond/Wayne County Community can come to learn about practical uses of technology. Bring your questions — no item is too small or too novice! We want to help you get the most that you can out of the technologies that you use.

This month’s TechTalk forum is a “Free For All”! That means we’ll have a panel of experts in various areas of technology, talking casually and answering questions about everything from hardware to desktop software to using the Internet and more. Come ask any question you want and we’ll do our best to help you out and point you in the right direction. Or, just come join in our discussion about practical uses of technology in our community.

We are currently offering two sessions this Thursday, March 24th, for your convenience, at the Uptown Innovation Center (814 East Main St):

12 PM - 1 PM (bring your lunch if you want)
5:30 PM - 6:30 PM

If you have technology questions, I hope you’ll join us!

Even in a small office with only 6 people, there are still lots of opportunities for schedule conflicts and confusion. Even when it was just Mark and I, we often longed for the ability to share our personal and work calendars in a way that would make scheduling meetings more efficient. For a long time, it seemed that the options available to us involved either spending thousands of dollars on enterprise-level commercial software, or sacrificing ease-of-use by jumping through a mile of hoops for the most basic features.

With the emergence of some open industry standards for the storing and publishing of calendar information, however, we’ve come a long way toward making multi-platform calendar sharing a reality. This entry describes our setup in the hopes that someone else might find it useful.
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After not having much luck creating a reliable VPN connection from my home office to the Summersault office network, I was looking for a middle-ground solution that would at least let me access internal website addresses that are otherwise protected by our firewall (e.g. corporate intranet, system status monitoring pages, etc.). Read the rest of this entry »

Welcome to the weblog for Summersault, LLC. This is a place where our staff, and sometimes our clients and colleagues, can share bits and pieces of knowledge, opinion, and humor related to our work in the world of website development. Enjoy!