Urban Vancouver

A feast of Drupalish delights was enjoyed in Berkeley, California at the weekend. I was lucky enough to attend - for me it had the added bonuses of getting to see the beautiful Berkeley campus for the first time, enjoying warm Californian weather when it's already quite cold in Vancouver, and spending some balmy evenings hanging out in San Francisco, a city I've been crazy about since a 3 month stint working here when I was 20.

Anyway, back to Drupalcamp itself. Day One began with breakfast courtesy of the wonderful Chapter Three peeps, which included delicious vegan donuts and great coffee. Then the event kicked off with Tao Starbow welcoming us all and handing over to Earl Miles for his keynote talk on what he has learned about user experience issues over the past few years (and with his work on Panels, and especially on Views, he has learned a LOT). I then attended a session by Adam Kalsey of WorkHabit on building APIs for your modules. One of the main points he kept drumming home to us was that if we developers don't document our modules, we ...basically... suck. It was an excellent session and since there had been so much talk about the importance of documentation for Drupal, I asked Adam afterwards if he wouldn't mind adding the main content of his presentation to the Programming Best Practices page I initiated in the handbook with senpai and aj045 a couple of months back - he said he'd be delighted to :-)

Lunchtime saw a bunch of us heading across the campus to get to Telegraph Avenue for a delicious Indian meal and some lively Drupal discussions and then I attended four sessions in a row but they were such high quality that I wouldn't have missed a single one of them. There was Tao Starbow's talk about AJAX and JSON, a subject that is of course dear to my own heart. Then Matt Cheney of Chapter Three presented a talk on Panels 2 that was full of eye-openers for me - it's a module I've been making heavy use of in a current project, not having had much experience with it prior to that, so I was intrigued by some of the tips and tricks this seasoned Panels user had to share. After that, Adam Kalsey presented on Drupal performance tuning, covering issues from module bloat to database indexes to code efficiency to the use of CDNs to opcode caching and server tuning. And more besides! Awesome stuff. And as if that wasn't enough awesomeness for one day it finished off with a talk by Earl Miles about the Views 2 UI, and being - like most Drupalers - a very big fan of Views, this was a rare treat.

By that stage it was time for evening refreshments and most of us headed to nearby Jupiter for some free beers on Sun (thanks, Sun!) and had a fine time indeed.

Sunday got off to a later start (thankfully ;-) and had fewer sessions but again those that I attended all held many points of interest for me. Neil Drumm gave a session on data imports using Jobqueue and Import Manager modules, which I am definitely going to look into in the very near future. The one and only chx presented on the Form API and amused us with anecdotes of how he has tried to get the html standard for forms changed by the w3c so that they're not so ridiculously hard to work with on the server-side. And Scott Mattoon of Sun presented on Drupal efficiency and some of the tools they provide developers with to monitor this - something else I will definitely be looking into very soon, thanks to the DVDs they provided of OpenSolaris and NetBeans.

As with most Drupal events I've attended thus far, the best part of it was getting to meet so many other drupalers - putting faces to d.o handles, as it were. In particular, it was wonderful to finally meet Dmitri Gaskin in person after we had missed out on co-presenting in Szeged together when his school commitments prevented him from attending. And also I finally got to meet Marco Carbone of Advomatic, whose Slot Machine module for advanced content scheduling I had done some work on earlier this year.

BADcamp 08 was a most excellent event - a huge thank you to all the organisers and presenters for making it such a valuable experience!

It's a baby beta named Ægir - say "eager"

Today, Drupal rockstar and the  Raincity Studios super-developer and South African Emissary, Adrian announced the release of Ægir 0.1 Beta1. Named for the Norse God of the Seas, this evolution of Hostmaster is a critical part of Bryght's hosting environment.

The hardwork of Raincity Studios and Koumbit software engineers, and other contributors, is helping take mass Drupal hosting to the next level and you can join the fun - start at the Ægir hosting system group.

Added this release:

• Drupal install profiles - can be localized to provision sites in various languages
• Improvements to the comprehensive inline documentation
• Installation wizard to modify and/or simplify the user interface

User-interface refinements, non-critical ancillary features, and a Drupal 6 version are on the immediate roadmap.

Ægir is made for mass hosting

Brielfy, here's what Ægir is and how it works:

Ægir is a new set of contributed modules for Drupal that aims to solve the problem of managing a large number of Drupal sites. It does this by providing you with a simple Drupal based hosting front end for your entire network of sites. To deploy a new site you simply have to create a new Site node. To backup or upgrade sites, you simply manage your site nodes as you would any other node.

To non-techies, this release allows organizations needing batches of similar sites  to be up-and-running, quickly and easily, for a minimal investment. The sites can be centrally-managed for patches, security updates, and new modules or themes.

The open source nature allows companies and organizations to use, extend, and then contribute back, to make the software even more "real-world" capable.

Personally, I can see this being a powerful tool for school districts, muncipalities, sports leagues, record labels, and inter/national organizations. One site to rule them all!

Required geekery

Here's what you need to play with Ægir at home:

• A Unix-based operating system - no Ægir for Windows
• Full access to your server or machine
• A web accessible Drupal directory with a hostname

Then, proceed to the overview wiki entry to assemble the components or, if you are savvy, download the complete Ægir package.
Contribute

Chime in at the Drupal hosting project to share your experiences, report bugs, fix patches, write documentation, etc. 

Bonus

It's an "Aesc": To type the character "Æ" on a Mac, use option+shift+apostrophe - cool eh.

More about Ægir: Adrian Speaks About Ægir at Drupal Con Szeged.

Image: "Ægir, Rán and their nine daughters prepare a huge vat of ale" from a 19th century Swedish translation of the Poetic Edda - via Wikipedia.

Designed for Campaigns

No matter which side of the USA/Canada border you live on, it's impossible to ignore the political campaigns in full swing. Regardless of your leanings, no doubt the campaigns with polished social media strategies are enjoying advantages. Indeed, this is the first election cycle which 'Web 2.0" tactics are mandatory rather than merely optional or an after-thought.

Because Google (and the other search engines) efficiently index mostly all the pages within a site, visitors can obviously enter a site via hundreds of different on ramps. While this means the visitor may easily find the information they seek, the organization's time-sensitive objectives might not receive enough attention.

To rise above the noise, the savvy campaigner needs to transmit their message in a method in which people will receive and react to it with a clear and easy call to action.

New Drupal tool

A new module developed by Raincity Studios' Makara Wang will help the many politico sites using Drupal to harness their Google-juice and funnel their visitors to a desired actionable task.

The module is called "Roadblock" - a term which usually denotes a unwanted traffic snarl, but in this case, the roadblock is designed to focus the visitor's participation and funnel them towards a specific action.

Real-life application

The first use of the module is at political organization COPE's "Take Back the Power" site. Regardless of the site entry point, the visitor is presented with a pre-determined landing page. In this case, a page about their current campaign to prevent the sell-off of public hydro-electric resources to private interests.

Lori Winstanley, COPE's Director of Strategic Campaigns explains the reason for using Roadblock to energize their campaign,

“With a limited amount of time to influence policymakers’ decisions on this important topic, we needed to focus the attention of all the site’s visitors and encourage them to contact the Premier’s office. Of course, then they can explore other content on the site but the Roadblock module helps us get the most important message out to all visitors without a big hassle.”

More

Learn more about the Roadblock module

Meet Production Developer Makara Wang, the module's developer

See all of Raincity Studios' Drupal contribtutions

Return to the Bay

This weekend is the 2008 iteration of Bay Area Drupal Camp held at U.C. Berkeley, Saturday and Sunday, October 11th and 12th.

Along with the info at Badcamp.net, the schedule is Google-doc'ed and will give you a sense of what's in-store.

Notably, Earl Miles creator of Views, Panels will kick off the learning fest with a keynote on Saturday morning.

My pal Dmitri is presenting on Simple Test (along with Florian Lorétan), CCK and jQuery (along with Amit Asaravala), Tao Starbow will show you how to make your own Wikipedia, Chris Bryant discusses managing site configurations and Keiran speaks about the Acquia buzz.

Alas, the event is full so if you slacked, you are almost out of luck, ...  in true Drupal fashion, some geeks are organizing an overflow event so everyone goes home happy.

BAD Flashback

Last year Francis, Erik and I (DaveO) headed down to enjoy some autumnal California sun and learning.

I recorded a handful of podcasts with some interesting Drupalists {William on accessibility, Dmitri on module making and Colin on innovative projects}. Plus annotated a few presentations from the academic halls of the impressive campus and back to Vancouver.

Beer Tip

If you go to Berkeley, be sure to visit the Jupiter for excellent microbews, woodfired pizza and live music.

Community First

Keeping up with Raincity Studios' international community participation endeavours, RaincityStudios CEO Robert Scales and Production Chief Francis Pilon represented the RCS at Montreal Drupal Camp.

This camp featured more "birds of a feather" informal workshops allowing Drupal ninjas to delve into niche topics at a deep technical level.

A beautiful city from all accounts, M. Scales was sure to enjoy some smoked meat sandwiches from the legendary Schwartz's while there (photo evidence) along with "Hanging out at Drupal camp Montreal all day! Talking aegir, collaboration and hosting with/for the French community!"

Here's what M. Pilon has to say about the trip:

Drupalcamp MTL was fantastic. In fact it was one of the most interesting one, in terms of dynamics, I have been in a long time. I have to admit that I find the BOF format far more interesting than the lecture style so commonly found in these types of meetings.

I was please to find that Drupal is well and alive in Montréal. Of course, it's always a pleasure to put faces on some of these d.o usernames.

As far as sessions went, as usual the range of topics and levels made it so everybody could learn something and contribute too. We had a special cross-Atlantic session with our friends over at Drupalcamp Paris.

Thanks to the great participation of the attendees and generous sponsors (especially our friends a koumbit.org) this event allowed me to get in touch with the "cream of the drop"! 

What's next? 

Raincity Studios' Ambassador, Kris Krüg will be speaking at Journée INFOPRESSÉ in Montréal Mardi 11 novembre 2008 à l'Ex-Centris where M. Krüg will be presenting his remarks in English.

Bryght en Français

Continuing on with Raincity Studios' efforts to spread Drupal around the world, the Bryght Drupal hosting platform is now available in French!

From the order form to the install profile, Francophones around the world can now order, configure and host web communities in their preferred language.

Stop by Bryght.com/fr and sign-up for a 30 day free test drive and/or choose a no-cost/ad-supported site en Français or ... of course, choose English or Mandarin Chinese.

Bryght adds Mollom

The Bryght news doesn't stop with the French release! The scourge of junk comments is now obliterated with the addition of Mollom, a community filtering system designed to thwart unwanted comments.

This technology (developed by Drupal founder Dries Buytaert) is baked-in all new Bryght sites and will help content publishers avoid the hassle of gardening their comment queue.

More on the way!

With an international team of dedicated technologists, Raincity Studios is committed to making Drupal easy, no matter which language you prefer. What's up next? More install profiles, more languages, and more tools. Stay tuned.

Grant Event on Monday

Raincity Studios is hosting the Vancouver stop for NewsChallenge -  a project by the Knight Foundation. The event is at the RCS HQ at 1 Alexander St. in Gastown on Monday, October 6th from 7-9PM.

The event features web veteran Susan Mernit who is driving the NewsChallenge project for Knight. Follow knc08 on Twitter to get micro-updates on their tour.

To attend, you must RSVP so check out the NewsChallenge Meetup Facebook event and/or Upcoming listing for NewsChallenge to express your attendance.

Get a Grant

Basically, this is a worldwide campaign to grant $5 Million to digital media experiments and which will innovate journalism. Certainly, Drupal, CMS, RSS (and other acronyms) are all part of the mix of tools which contemporary journalist use to spread their message in an engaging and participatory manner. The press release tells more about the big picture.

To get your hands on the grant to create your revolutionary project, start at the online entry form at www.newschallenge.org. Apply through Nov. 1, 2008 and wait until Spring of 2009 for the announcement. In the meantime, you can peruse projects in the works now at the (Drupal-ized) NewsChallenge Garage.

What's NewsChallenge?

NewsChallenge is a project of the Knight Foundation focused on funding innovative journalism/news publishing project. Here's how they describe themselves on the NewsChallenge website:

We’re giving away around $5 million in 2009 for the development and distribution of neighborhood and community-focused projects, services, and programs.

If you have a great idea that will improve local online news, deepen community engagement, bring Web 2.0 tools to local neighborhoods, develop publishing platforms and standards to support local conversations or innovate how we visualize, experience or interact with information, we’d like to see it! You have the opportunity to win funding for your project and support within a vibrant community of media, tech, and community-oriented people who want to improve the world.

There are three rules to follow to apply to the 2008-09 Knight News Challenge:

   1. Use or create digital, open-source technology as the code base.
   2. Serve the public interest.
   3. Benefit one or more specific geographic communities.

... and The Knight Foundation?

In brief, a fund created by the Knight brothers, the Foundation offers grants and programs, including mentoring, to encourage freedom of expression in the press and in communities.

They blog about their efforts and here's the blurb from the Knight Foundation's site:

We are a national foundation with local roots. We choose, as the Knight brothers chose, to seek opportunities that can transform both communities and journalism, and help them reach their highest potential. We want to ensure that each community's citizens get the information they need to thrive in a democracy.

And we ask, as we evaluate opportunities and grants, "Is this truly transformational?"

Because grant making requires a sound financial base, we preserve the Knight brothers' gift through prudent investment and careful management.

Drupal Camp Montreal

In the wake of Drupal Camps in Victoria and LA, BarCamp Vancouver and of course DrupalCon in Hungary, the undaunted Raincity Studios crew is now heading east to La Belle Province for Drupal Camp Montreal.

Raincity Studios' CEO, Robert Scales and Production Director, Francis Pilon are both making the trip to their home province of Quebec to collaborate with Drupalists this coming weekend, Oct. 3rd and 4th.

Bryght en Français

With a French version of the Bryght Drupal install profile in the works, I suspect they'll have a chance to share with Francophone Drupalists seeking hosting and configuration in their preferred language.

Drupalists Koumbit are hosting the event and have a great plan in mind. They describe themselves as "a non-profit organisation which promotes the use of free & open source software by community groups in Quebec, Canada ..." Sounds very cool.

Koumbit are working closely with our man in Africa, Adrian, on the development of Ægir - the evolution of Hostmaster - the open source Drupal mass deployment project which is at the heart of Bryght Drupal hosting (see Adrian's presentation at DrupalCon).

Scales in NYC and LA

The details of the Montreal event are below but ... after the camp, Scales keeps rolling.

After spending Oct. 1-6 in Montreal, he is in NYC Oct. 6-9 to meet with clients needing the Raincity Studios' fairy dust sprinkled on their web publishing projects.

He'll be available for tweetup/goodtimes in NYC on Oct. 8th, then heading to Los Angeles on special assignment to "Save the Plankton" then on to San Francisco.

To arrange a meetup, follow Scales' updates via Twitter, travel plans via Dopplr, friend him on Facebook and/or follow his Flickr photostream and Youtube just for kicks.

Montreal Camp Details

Here's a bi-lingual overview and details from Montreal Drupal Camp at Koumbit.org:

Nature of the Camp

• less panel oriented than the bigger events / moins orienté vers les panneau
• BOF oriented / plus orienté vers les session thématique en petit group
• have some pre-annouced topics but allowing people to add them as we go... that
• being said, the actual schedule would only be established on the spot / avoir certain sujet déterminé à l'avance, mais l'horaire finale sera déterminé sur place
• have sessions oriented toward mobilizing coders around projects (some defined before hand, others to be determined) / avoir des sessions orienté pour mobiliser les codeur autour de projet (certain déterminé à l'avance, d'autres à l'évènement lui même).
• demo sessions / sessions de démonstration
• be sure to provide "skill level" ratings for sessions / indiquer le niveau de compétence requis
• try to make sure that people can be in environments where people can discuss code or not! / essayer de s'assurer que les gens puisse se retrouver dans des environnement ou il peuvent parler de code ou non.
• Business fair: help clients find a provider / Foire d'affaire pour aider les client à identifier des fournisseurs
• free (based on sponsorships) / gratuit

Timing and Duration / Date et Durée

• Friday, October 3rd from 9:00-17:00 + supper and drinks
• Saturday, October 4th from 9:00-17:00 + supper and drinks

Note: Possibility for extended coding/documentation sessions on Sunday if there are enough people interested (otherwise, that can always be done more informally at some internet café or something).

Camp Support

Raincity Studios is proud to support Drupal community activities and encourage *you* to organize a camp in your area if there isn't one yet. Here's a wiki-guide about Organizing Drupal Camps by Jacob Redding. Also interesting: Montreal's camp planning wiki page.

Photo credit: Scales by Right Antler (Moosehat blog)

In a few short weeks, I have taken in BarCamp Vancouver, Drupal Camp LA, Digital Identity World, Drupal Camp Victoria and Drupal Camp Seattle.

I am still amazed by how groups that I once thought of as being separate; activists and geeks are now seemingly thriving together under the same roof are encapsulated within the same people. There still exists the ever present conflict between contributing to opensource, community and wanting to create a nest egg.

While the opensource environment allows for the greatest "American" dream, by giving people the tools and opportunities to achieve the highest heights that they aspire to. In order to do that, to allow for the best minds to create, freedom and creativity are absolutely necessary as well as sharing and passing knowledge to others. However sometimes the need to create ones own personal nest egg can divide attention and effort in a community that should waste no time.

While I do feel a little wiser from the talks that I have attended and the people that I have talked to, I may have more questions than ever. Here are some of the highlights of the various events:

DrupalCamp Seattle

Met with the terrific CivicActions folk, including Gregory Heller, Robin Barre:

Heard Angus Pratt on install profiles, Deployment with Greg Dunlap, the BOF on internationalization with Robin Barre was quite informative, as was the Media Mover presentation.

Drupal Camp Victoria

The van that 10+ people including myself was on was great fun. The van was driven by capable Ryan Dempsey, I learned about crappy internet in Australia, church owned businesses, and other trivia.

A quick 30 mins presentation on development environments that I was to give, became a 2 hour exchange of information between the participants. I heard TJ HolowayChuck on JQuery, Nedjo Rogers and Dale McGladdery on Translations, and also talked to Nedjo a little about Drupal Core Search, where he has submitted a patch for core search in Drupal 7

Digital Identity World

Fanciness abounded, with lunch and breakfast provided, swag galore. A noticeable absence of Dick Hardt was mentioned a couple of times, once even by a keynote speaker from Harvard University Doc Searles. Doc's presentation on VRM managed to get the gears in my brain moving in different ways.

The curious relationship between infocards and openid was evident, with many believing that they would work together rather than be competitors. However an "assassination piece on OpenID" as Ping Identity's Scott Kveton called the New York times article, was prominently displayed on the front page of the Info Card Foundation. It gets curiouser, as I heard from a Microsoft person who mentioned that one of the initial adopters of information cards, where it has gained traction is when signing on to MyOpenID.com

why???!!!

OpenID speakers / supporters seemed to be less noticeable from this big business event, shortly after though, the OpenID mailing list seemed to be on fire in a good way. Europe appears to be going the way of SAML, and Japan the way of OpenID.

SimpleSAML PHP looks very interesting, as it supports many protocols (SAML 2.0 as a Service and Identity Provider, Shiboleth 1.3 as a Service and Identity Provider, A-Select as a Service and Identity Provider, CAS for remote authentication, OpenID Provider and Consumer support) with an award given to Andreas Solberg. I especially liked his "Go Opensource" closing remark after accepting the award from the Liberty Alliance. Especially after I heard that it caused some rolled eyes in the audience.

One of the people that I managed to hear, meet and talk to, was Pamela Dingle of Nulli Secundus. She has done great work to forward Info cards. While I may not be as much of a fangirl of infocards, I respect her work. Other notables present were Will Norris of Vidoop, Charles Andres of the Information Card Foundation, Doc Searles of Harvard University, Philip Windley, Scott Kveton, David Recordon and Dale Olds

Drupal Camp LA

The biggest drupal camp ever so far. Organized by the fabulous Crystal Williams, who is now residing in Seattle, and the vice president of professional services at WorkHabit, kudos to this amazing lady.

Workhabit showed up in full force, with a keynote by Jonathan Lambert. His speech on thinking big, and doing good did strike a chord within me, I could not help but wonder about the balance of doing good for the community versus doing good for one's own pocket. His workhabit team members assured me that Jonathan's speech came from a deep and sincere place to do good.

The Asynchronous data processing presentation by Ethan Kaplan and Shaun Haber from Warner Bros was quite impressive. Drupal in Python, drupy by Brendon Crawford showed how much could be accomplished mainly by just one person. Drupal stars from young (the charismatic Dmitri Gaskin) to experienced (Victor Kane) were also available to push forward the quality of Drupal.

Launch Party Vancouver, MobileCampVancouver, National Digital Media Day (and others I'll leave out in the interests of brevity) and now BarCampVancouver2008. September continues to be action packed with events and conferences. BarCamp Vancouver kicks off with a party at WorkSpace (wines sponsored by Farmstead, thanks) this Friday September 26, 2008 and then starts at 9:30 a.m. at Granville Island on Saturday September 27, 2008. Get your creative, tech, hat on and throw your hat in and "dis-coordinate" a session. Newbies, old hands and everybody in between all welcome! Some great session ideas after the jump to whet your appetite but as per the unconference stylee the schedule won't be finalized until the schedule jam Saturday morning at 10 a.m.

A sampling of BarCampVancouver 2008 session ideas that strike my personal fancy:

• PhotoCamp will be led by Kris Krug and others
• Hobo 2.0
• WordCamp - all things WordPress
• ShortTermOlympicVancouver2010RentalsForBigBucks.com, teehee!
• GampCamp2008

Visit National Digital Media Day September 25
Visit National Digital Media Day September 25

National Digital Media Day is tomorrow! Lots of events Canada-wide. I'll highlight some in Vancouver after the jump.

1. A Kiss mobile mass mob at the Vancouver Art Gallery part of a nationwide flashmob kiss (rumor has it that Raincity's Kris Krug is leading an informal photowalk of The Kiss)

2. A FREE evening party (RSVP on Facebook or at newmediabc.com) at Radical Entertainment

3. National non stop blogging day led by Rebecca Bollwitt (Rebecca's blog post about it)

and many many events organized by Lynda Brown-Ganzert with the help of Jon Husband among others. Keep up to date on the happenings on the 25th and the awesome content generated by Canadians as part of National Digital Media Day by surfing to IRefreshForContent.com

When Raincity Studios crafted the SPIN magazine site, we didn't expect to see it appearing anywhere aside from well, ... SPIN.com. However, this online music magazine turned community has popped up all over the place.

Anecdotally, i noticed it on screens at SXSW but that's no huge surprise since SPIN was there, ... but when i saw SPIN in a video showing off those new schmancy Apple 3G iPhones (recently released in Canada), I almost sneezed out my coffee with surprise!

The Steve Jobs-esque narrator (well he's wearing a black, mock turtleneck anyhow) was showing the myriad features and then *Wha-zam!* right on the web browser was our familiar project - SPIN - looking just fine in the iPhone screen.

As it turns out, the iTouch demo includes SPIN as the example page too demonstrated by another black-clad Apple-ite.

Sure exposure like this is just a fleeting moment of glory and fun, (and no, i don't think a mystery box of goodies is coming from Apple anytime soon ;-)). However, it is nice to see Raincity Studios work "in the wild" doing it's job of communicating to audiences and looking good while doing so.

Props to my colleagues who did the heavy lifting and cheers to SPIN and Apple.