Clearspring - Your Content. Everywhere.

Hi, my name is Justin Thorp and yesterday was my first day as Developer Community Manager at Clearspring.  Upon entering our office complex in the morning, I was greeted by our local fire fighters.  Our office was without power because apparently a tree  fell on a nearby power substation.

When you’re a Web-based startup like Clearspring, it’s pretty hard to get any work done when there’s no power.  So what do you do?  You setup a mini-golf course around the cubicles and offices.   It was fun and a great way to get to know some of my co-workers.

Here at Clearspring, I’ll be taking over the community responsibilities from Will Meyer who is now focused on the core platform engineering.

Over the next few weeks and months I look forward to getting to know as many of you as possible either here on the blog, on the forum, or even in person.

The crew here at Clearspring HQ are working hard on making the best widget platform.  I’d love to hear any feedback or thoughts that you guys have about how we can make it better.

Feel free to get a hold of me personally.  Drop me a comment on this blog post or e-mail me personally at justin AT clearspring DOT com.

Any of you have any crazy first day on the job stories?

We’ve been working like crazy to create the most powerful tools to help widget developers distribute, track and monetize widgets. As you know, however, there is a massively growing community of folks creating widgets and it’s getting harder for us to keep up! Because we know developers are the key to making great stuff, we thought the only smart thing to do was find a developer whose whole life was devoted – well – to working with developers!

We’ve been talking to folks for a while, looking for the perfect person to help us with our developer community. It has been a long process, but we’re happy to announce that the search is over. Welcome Justin Thorp to the Clearspring team! He’s our new Community Manager and is an all-around geek (this is good). Justin has been deeply involved in bringing together the East Coast tech scene, is the organizer of many a local tech event, the architect of some super-cool “government-goes-web 2.0″ projects, and a great guy.

Anyway, more to come on this shortly and look for him at a developer meet-up near you. And, yes, he will be in the Valley a lot.

WidgetDevCamp DC, a chance for developers and all kinds of geek types to get together to talk about widgets and other portable web apps, is finally here.

This should be a fun time, and a good way to geek out while its cold outside. Hope to see you there!

We’re proud to say that there’s another super-cool big-time widget on the Clearspring platform that we’re particularly excited about — Dilbert!

The button in the upper-right corner lets you grab it where you want it (courtesy of Clearspring’s in-widget sharing tools). Not only is it Dilbert, which is great, but its a really well-designed widget as well. The Dilbert blog has an official announcement.