Drupal
Angela Byron wins the Best Contributor award at OSCON
photo by James Duncan Davidson
On Tuesday night at OSCON, Lullabot's Angie Byron was inducted into the Google-O'Reilly Open Source Hall of Fame for Best Contributor. It's great to see Angie's contributions be recognized not just within the Drupal community, but the larger mindshare of the Open Source community as well. When Leslie Hawthorn, Google's OS Team Manager, stood at the podium to introduce the award, she said: "The recipient of this award is always a source of inspiration". And she is right. If you've ever uttered the words "How do I contribute?" to Angie, you see a wave of excitement come over her as she moves in a little closer, cracks open her laptop and before you know it you're writing your first patch, your first documentation, your first simpletest. It goes on and on.
Angie is a Best Contributor because she inspires countless others to take that jump into Drupal when the first step is otherwise feeling too scary to take. Congrats Angie, you totally deserve it.
Drupal for NGOs, Campaigns and Activists
Thanks again for organising the Greenpeace meetup, I found it very useful.
Quoted in 24 hours - Buzz Bishop's "Head in the Clouds" article
Buzz Bishop put a request for cloud computing experts. I'm not exactly an expert, but it is something that I've been looking into more deeply lately (see my cloud links on del.icio.us). And, of course, I'm advising TrevorO's startup, Layerboom, through Bootup Labs.
Anyway, I ended up writing a fairly lengthy set of answers to questions that Buzz sent across, some of which made their way into his article in today's 24 Hours -- Head in the Clouds. Thanks for the opportunity, Buzz!
Files from July 22 Drupal for NGOs meeting
Hi all!
Thanks again to Tracy Frauzel and Greenpeace UK for hosting us last night, to Owen Pringle of Amnesty International and Jenn Sramek of CivicActions for presenting on http://amnesty.org, to "the Bens" - Steele and Alexander - of Comic Relief for presenting on http://www.sportrelief.com, http://www.sendmyfriend.org and http://www.dubble.co.uk, and to Josh Wiese of Every Human Has Rights for joining us by phone from San Francisco and agreeing to take us international :)
Drupal freelancer needed
Uh. Holy crap...
http://google-opensource.blogspot.com/2008/07/and-winners-of-2008-google...
http://drupal.org/webchick-wins-best-contributor-open-source-awards
I have lots I'd like to say about this, but am a bit overwhelmed just at the moment. Suffice it to say, my sincerest thank you to everyone who nominated me for this award, and to O'Reilly, Google, and the Drupal community in general for being so unbelievably awesome.
DrupalCon Szeged Session Proposals: Aggregation, Context and Spaces, Messaging and Notifications, and Drupal Talent
We're getting excited to come over for DrupalCon Szeged in just over a month. This will be the fifth DrupalCon that Development Seed has attended, and it always amazes me how much these conferences show off just how fast this community is growing and how far Drupal has come as a platform. We've looking forward to talking about some of our latest work to add and refine functionalities to Drupal. Here's a quick summary of the sessions we've proposed to lead. If you're interested in these topics, please vote for them!
Spaces and Context Modules: Tools for Site Building: The Context and Spaces modules are two relatively new tools in Drupal's aresenal that make it easier to build complex websites. In this session, Jeff Miccolis will talk about both modules' approach and show developers how they can be used and extended. He'll also show some examples of the modules in use on community portals, sites-within-sites, and intranets. Vote here.
Messaging and Notifications Frameworks: At DrupalCon Boston, Jose Reyero introduced the beta versions of these frameworks. A lot has been done to improve them since, and in this session Jose will talk about the upgrades, specifically in how they handle subscriptions, notifications of events, and the various delivery methods for sending messages. Another focus of this session will be to discuss the shift way from email only delivery methods to multi-platform methods. Vote here.
A New Aggregator for Drupal 7: Drupal's core aggregator is getting a revamp in Drupal 7. In this session, Aron Novak and Alex Barth will talk about why this step is needed and what you can expect from the new core aggregator. Aron began this work as a Google Summer of Code project last summer and this summer has continued to finetune it. The result is a simple yet extensible and efficient architecture that should serve Drupal well. Vote here.
Attracting and Retaining Drupal Talent: At the rate Drupal's popularity is growing, we're finding that there just aren't enough developers to meet the demand. Web shops and organizations are coming up short in finding the Drupal talent they need to build and run the online tools they want. This session will look at ways to beat out the hiring competition to find and retain Drupal talent. Eric Gundersen will talk about how Development Seed has grown our team, and Kris Krug from Raincity will share his experiences and lessons learned.
You can vote on all the sessions (including BoFs) you want to see at DrupalCon Szeged here. See you in Szeged!
New Drupal 6 Theme Nearing Release
Been working on the new drupal 6 design for this blog. Its taken longer than normal, because i'll be adding it to drupal's contributions. Haven't named it yet. Probably will go with something along the lines of "green nerd hippy", but am still not sure.
The theme aims to be a slick, two column layout, that is flexible enough to be used as a base theme.
The priorities in the theme are:
Understanding Drupal DVDs are now shipping
The Understanding Drupal DVDs are pressed and we have received them at our shipping facility! All pre-ordered DVDs have been shipped out and should be arriving this week. You can choose between a DVD, a High-Definition digital download, or the "Grab 'em both" option, which gives you both the immediacy of the HD download and a physical DVD that you can use to introduce Drupal to clients, friends, and family. You can order your copy today from the Lullabot store.
Understanding Drupal is designed to serve as a fundamental foundation to people new to Drupal by providing an introduction to Drupal's concepts, capabilities and terminology. It's the first video in the Lullabot Learning Series. Future tutorials will cover topics such as Administering Drupal, and intensives on the Content Construction Kit (CCK) and Views modules, Theming, Drupal APIs, and more.
And for those of you have yet to acquire a Lullabot t-shirt, we're also selling shirts in the store. Pick one up and wear it while you watch your DVD. The DVD will make you smart. The t-shirt will make you sexy!
Wanted: Drupal support engineer
One of the things we're building at Acquia is a Drupal technical support center where customers can call for help with Drupal questions. We're busy setting up a phone system, a bug tracker, a customer tracking application, a knowledge base and more. We already have some great technical support people on board, but we're looking for more Drupal talent to staff our support center.
Specifically, we're looking for people that have the rare combination of mad Drupal skills (both Drupal configuration and Drupal development), a diagnostic mind, and what we call, the support DNA. Do you have what it takes and do you want to learn how to build a support center from scratch? Apply here.
Or be the first to refer someone who makes the cut, and we'll gladly mail you a check for $1,000 USD to $2,500 USD depending on the situation. See our technical support job page for details on our bounty program.
Week in DC Tech: July 21 Edition
The lazy days of summer haven't hit the DC tech community yet. There's another interesting and full week of technology ahead for anyone in search of good conversations, fellow techies, and air conditioning. Here are the events we're hoping to attend this week. For a full list of what's happening in the DC technology community, head on over to DC Tech Events.
Tuesday, July 22
12:15pm - 1:45 pm
3G: Mobile Media in Motion: The Media Future Now group will be meeting over lunch to talk about the new 3G mobile network and other advances in mobile technology and what it means for mobile media and communications strategy in general.
Wednesday, July 23
7:00 pm
Drupal Hosters
Rogers Hijacks Domain Name System, Puts Yahoo! Ads on Google's Subdomains
Rogers, a huge cable internet provider in Canada, has decided to hijack all unregistered domains, and replace them with Yahoo! advertisements. This means Rogers users who type in a domain that doesn't exist, are now getting Yahoo ads instead of the normal "not found" error.
Interestingly, Rogers also decided to do this with subdomains. So for example, example.google.com now takes you to the following advertising:
I wonder how Google feels about that? Of course, this doesn't just affect Google. As I mentioned, every possible domain that isn't already pointing somewhere is affected.
You can see the IP hijacking in progress here:
BlogHer Presentation: Open Source Participation: How to advance to the next level
Here's the presentation that Marianne Masculino and I did about how to contribute to both WordPress and Drupal:
It was really cool to see the overlap between how WordPress does stuff and how Drupal does stuff, and all the ways the communities are similar and how they're different in how they work. Also, Marianne was really awesome and nice. :)
Thanks to everyone who turned out to see it... It was great to meet you! :)
Also, I found a "live blogging" version of the session at http://www.sparkplugging.com/marketing/blogher-2008-open-source/.