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The Omaha Linux User Group changed locations to a more downtown location and in general had a pretty good year in 2005, IMHO. User groups are at least as relevant as Linux usage in local companies, which is pretty strong in Nebraska, as evidenced by the informal Omaha Linux company list. Merry Christmas everyone.

There's a nicely compiled list of Linux companies in Omaha. My experience is that companies in midwestern cities are slightly less eager than big cities/big co's to jump on the bandwagon when it comes to purchasing high-dollar solutions from Microsoft and the like. The local user group is pretty active too.

I taught a one-semester PHP and MySQL basics course a while back and you may find the materials there helpful. If I had to distill the most important parts down for non-coders, I'd emphasize confidentiality, integrity, and availability as the most important properties of an information system.

Cancelling the registrations is the hard part, as it means that an individual would have to be able to log back in. This means that the ticket-holder needs to have some password or other unique method for doing so. Perhaps consider handling this with a special cancellation link with a per-user hash that gets emailed to each ticket holder along with their confirmation. This requires email integration, not impossible obviously, but something that you'll want to give architectural consideration. If you come up with a detailed specification for your project submit it with your contact information to contact.phpconsulting.com, and I'll quote you on it.

For the basics, there's an online course that I put together for an undergradute class last year here: PHP Consulting training.

I have a unicode converter that works really well. It will put your email address into a form like:

& # 105;& # 032;& # 100;& # 111;& # 032;& # 105;& # 116;& # 032;& # 116;& # 104;& # 105;& # 115;& # 032;& # 119;& # 097;& # 121;

For the past three years or so, the spammers haven't caught on to this, and they are unlikely to do so given the few people who take the effort to put this measure into place.

P.S. It's not just mailto links that are being harvested here. They'll scrape anything with an @ or a "at" or ...

I built something fairly similar to this, but it needs threading. The idea is a mysql-based email discussion archive. See olug.phpconsulting.com is an example of a mailing list that is archived. It is only a few short steps to add web-based posting. You have to be careful, though, when building web-to-email interfaces, for the obvious reasons.

You might consider starting with phplist and then adding custom features for each list (QUAKE-ALL, SC-EQPAGER3 etc.).

If you want it customized for you, consider asking these guys. ;)

I colocated two servers for about three years at Communitech until about two months ago when I saw the writing on the wall and started looking around. Was told unofficially that Communitech would be shutting down in May, but I've seen no public acknowledgement of any deadline. After looking around both in Kansas City and Omaha, I signed on a cabinet for a year at: Axiom Integration. Nice data center, good prices, and I've got room to spare so look me up at phpconsulting.com. and get in touch. Because I now have surplus rackspace, I'll beat any colo price out there.

I program in PHP. I have four children. I've been more productive programming in PHP than any other language. Ask my wife... :)