Technology blogs

I'm at Cloud Camp Vancouver today. It's at the Discovery Parks Vancouver venue where we had Barcamp Vancouver 2009. The Twitter hashtag is #cloudcamp #vancouver. I'll be doing updates throughout the day.

read more

The Drupal.org redesign continues to progress. This is great news and a morale boost for everyone involved.

Since our front page post on February 3...

• Over 20 enthusiastic new volunteers have come forward to lend their expertise.
• Several experienced professional Drupal project managers have been added to the project management team
• We have produced two new theming documents for mark-up guidelines, and style guidelines. This will help the theme implementation teams standardize their implementations.
• Contributors can sign into the new *.staging.drupal.org subsites (groups, association, api, localize, etc.) in additional to the main site now.
• We continue to need expert resources with knowledge of drupal.org data sources to assist with custom Solr development
• Trellon has checked in an alpha dashboard and we now have a beta version of the main Download and Extend page.

Once the major blockers are cleared, we will push forward with engaging the MVP implementation volunteers that signed up last year.

read more

I'm kicking myself because I've been taking far too narrow an interpretation of "an open source approach". I've been focused on getting people to release data. That's the data analogue of tossing code over the wall, and we know it takes more than a tarball on an FTP server to get the benefits of open source. The same is true of data.

Open source discourages laziness (because everyone can see the corners you've cut), it can get bugs fixed or at least identified much faster (many eyes), it promotes collaboration, and it's a great training ground for skills development. I see no reason why open data shouldn't bring the same opportunities to data projects.

And a lot of data projects need these things.

I've been saying for a while that open data is a sort of new frontier. Open source is relatively wide spread and there is a general low hum of understanding about it in many places. For me, I sum it up by saying to people that they need to understand that their "code is worthless".

The next step is coming to understand about open data, and why we should care. Why we should convince people that their "data is worthless".

read more

As you know, people from all over the world use Delicious. Although our interface is still English-only (thinking about new languages for the roadmap but nothing concrete yet), you’ll see that our bookmarks, tags and comments appear in many different languages.

Today, we have a brief note to our Australian users that sign into Delicious with a Yahoo! account.

You guys have been selected for a dry-run of the initial integration of Delicious and Yahoo! Messenger. If you move your mouse cursor over any link in your conversation window you’ll see the Delicious logo appear. Click that and we’ll open a ‘Save’ window for you.

Now you can easily save links to review later without interrupting your instant message conversations. Yah!

What about the rest of us? Once we gather some data, have a few cups of coffee, cram in some Foosball action and ensure we have enough machines to handle the traffic, we’ll enable the feature for other English versions of Yahoo! Messenger.

What else are we working on? We can’t tell you, it’s a secret. :p

It doesn’t have all the API’s needed and it’s missing a good chunk of the functionality we believe it needs, but we’re getting so many requests for the Chrome extension that we’re going to make this available sooner than we originally planned.

The core ethos here was to create a light save and bookmark retrieval process that matches the no-bulk mentality that was taken with Chrome. There is no sidebar. If you click anywhere on the page while the Save frame is opened, it’ll disappear. Some error messages are missing. These are relatively minor issues, but ones we plan to address in the very near future. However, we do most definitely want to hear from you. What rocks, what sucks, what do we need to add and whats going to happen in the last episode of LOST? We’d like feedback on these in our forums.

To install the extension, click here using Google Chrome.

To give you some insight on how this extension came to be, here is the lead engineer Vivek to give you the background:

Yes. We are available on Google Chrome!

That’s true. Delicious has added a new add-on to its belt and that’s for Google Chrome. It’s been a marvelous journey being in the ‘recommended’ list of Firefox Extensions and enjoying the luxury of being downloaded by more than 5 million Delicious lovers. Now it’s time to catch up with the latest browser!

“This missing Chrome plug-in is the main reason I haven’t switched completely from Firefox.” – Delicious user

All the Delicious users who feel the same can now enjoy the availability of Delicious bookmarking on Google Chrome with this add-on. The Delicious add-on for Google Chrome was initially developed as a hack at one of Yahoo!’s in-house hack events. The story goes like this…

“I always believed the hack event is a great platform for developers to demonstrate their ideas that have potential to become a product. I wanted to take advantage of this platform and started by actively participating in the in-house hack events. In 2007, I presented a hack called ‘Delicious on Mobile’ and I could see the product m.delicious.com shaping up.

In 2009, I had a strong feeling that we needed to increase our presence so that we could reach out to a wider audience. So I came up with two different hacks, one of them was ‘Delicious Compact’ which was written in .NET Compact Framework and it would run on all the latest Windows Mobile Devices.

Secondly, I read about Google Chrome and thought let’s build an add-on for this new browser. Since the extension API was under development, I had to use the Dev Channel builds of Google Chrome to experiment. The add-on I developed was simple, just a Delicious button in the address bar (page action) which would open a new popup window containing the Delicious Bookmarklet with current URL information being prefilled.

I was lucky enough to have good Product support at Delicious who encouraged this idea and we started working on a full version of the extension. As the APIs were under development we had to wait until they became available to provide the best possible features for the Chrome extension.”

Sync your Delicious Bookmarks

Now you can sync your Delicious bookmarks in Google Chrome using the add-on. All you need to do is just login to Delicious and all of your Delicious bookmarks are there!

Get your Delicious bookmarks right there in Omnibar

Once all your Delicious bookmarks are synced up you will notice them popping up in the Omnibar. i.e. the address bar of Google Chrome. You don’t need to search for your bookmarks separately as they will come up when you start typing matching words in the address bar.

Bookmark with a button

Now you can bookmark a URL on Delicious just by clicking a Tag button present beside the address bar. You can share the URL on twitter as well as with your friends using the same Tag button.

Regards,
Vivek

I'm fascinated by tools and experiences that let us "DIY". Whether it's using blogging tools to easily put content online, or cooking things from scratch, I like the fact that many things that seem hard or specialized are in fact things that anyone can do. With the Espresso Book Printing Machine, publishing a printed copy of a book has just joined that list.

Oscar's Art Books in Vancouver is one of only a handful of places in Canada that has an "EBM". The Espresso is made by a company called On Demand Books. They're looking to sell the machines to bookstores, universities, and other places where "like minded" people gather.

read more

Drupal 6.16 and 5.22, maintenance releases which fix issues reported through the bug tracking system, as well as security vulnerabilities, are now available for download. Drupal 6.16 also fixes other smaller issues.

Upgrading your existing Drupal 5 and 6 sites is strongly recommended. There are no new features in these releases. For more information about the Drupal 6.x release series, consult the Drupal 6.0 release announcement, more information on the 5.x releases can be found in the Drupal 5.0 release announcement. Drupal 5 will no longer be maintained when Drupal 7 is released. Upgrading to Drupal 6 is recommended.

read more

As promised we’ve just pushed live a few more changes that we’ve wanted to give you for a number of months. There are loads of minor UI and performance tweaks that most of you won’t notice, but there are some small things you might notice. Some of the minor changes include things like the ability to ‘Hide’ your fans list should any of them have embarrassing usernames, plus the ability to sign in as another user from the web-based save interfaces and main site. For those in the know, we’ve also added rel=”me” to the public profile URL, plus a plethora of other tweaks and fixes. Some of the larger changes include:

Hotlist
For those of you which have been with us for a while, the ‘Hotlist’ is back! Yeah, yeah, we know it never really went away but calling it ‘Popular Bookmarks’ when we already had ‘Popular’ just confused matters. Now the best of the best have the right name, and more importantly you can paginate to see previous items from the Hotlist! No more waking up in the early hours to ensure you don’t miss the great content surfaced by friends from Oceania or the late night coffee crew. All that historic content is now just a page away.

People
As you will have no doubt noticed, we’re gradually moving away from treating the ‘for:’ data as tags. It’s essentially a send event, and we’re moving towards reflecting that in the interface. The latest change sees them move from the list of Tags along the side of a users bookmarks into their own ‘People’ tab. This makes it much easier to find and filter by those users, and ensure your tag list isn’t cluttered with recipients.

Nothing super critical in this release to be sure, but the sheer number of minor tweaks necessitated a release. The next release will be more of the same with a few surprises here and there.

Enjoy!

Drupal 6 Attachment Views, by me, J. Ayen Green, is my second title from Packt Publishing. It is aimed at Drupal web site developers who want to build more functionality and interaction into their views, but aren’t ready quite yet to take on panels. As a reader of drupal.org, you can receive a 15% discount (see below) and benefit the Drupal Association!

I wrote this to be a fun, informative, hands-on learning guide. It uses actual case study that was developed in parallel with the book’s writing. This guide presents purposeful and interactive examples that build on each other. Clear, concise instructions and practical examples help you to learn quickly to use this exciting feature of views.

read more

Over 400 session submissions have been submitted for DrupalCon San Francisco, which will be held April 19-21, 2010. We need your help in deciding which of those sessions will be included in the conference program. Please come review the list of sessions and vote on the ones you'd like to see most.

Voting ends Monday, March 1st at 23:59 PST.

DrupalCon is a community-driven event. You've shared with us a vast array of exciting new ideas, proven recipes for success, case studies, best practices, new solutions to old problems, and other gems of knowledge. Now help us narrow down the selection. Your opinions are what shapes what happens at DrupalCon. Remember, every vote counts!

If you're a business, organization, or individual interested in helping to sponsor DrupalCon San Francisco, opportunities are still available. Contact us via the Web site, via e-mail at fundraising@drupal.com or phone at 415-894-9320 today!

read more

The Augusta Chronicle, the flagship newspaper of Morris Publishing Group, recently relaunched its website on the outstanding Drupal framework.

Morris first began using Drupal in 2005 with the launch of BlufftonToday.com, a blog-centric community website coupled with a free daily newspaper. In 2006 it adopted Drupal for both news and blogs at SavannahNow.com, the website of the Savannah Morning News. Both newspapers won Digital Edge awards for innovation in user participation.

Since then, the digital media arm of Morris Communications, Morris DigitalWorks, has developed a robust digital newspaper platform built on Drupal 6, to eventually power all 13 of its daily newspapers. Morris also uses Drupal for its radio stations and Skirt.com, a national specialty site for women.

Morris has made a commitment to make their online platform a dynamic arena for reader participation and contributions. Readers are encouraged to comment on stories and blogs, and, on some papers, are encouraged to create their own blogs on the site. Journalists are expected to post news online immediately and to interact with the public, and they need to be able to do it without learning HTML or tools such as FTP. These requirements made Drupal a natural choice.

read more

Drupal 7 is moving along nicely, and is becoming increasingly stable. We just released a second alpha release, fixing a number of critical bugs, following our initial alpha release in January. Alpha releases are to give Drupalistas something to download and test, so they can report and help fix bugs.

When will we switch to betas? We will switch to betas when the upgrade path from Drupal 6 to Drupal 7 is working. Once we hit beta, we will become increasingly strict about accepting any more changes and we'll also commit to making HEAD to HEAD upgrades work.

Finally, we'll start rolling release candidates once the number of critical bugs is zero (or close to zero). To help us focus on critical bugs, we're working on adding a 'major' severity level to our ticketing system, making the options 'critical', 'major', 'normal' and 'minor'. 'Major' bugs would be really bad, but not necessarily block a release. For example, bugs that don't prevent Drupal from working, or that only affect a fraction of the Drupal population would be prioritized for fixing in follow-up releases. Critical bugs are those that badly break Drupal, or that are a major regression compared to Drupal 6.

read more

In early 2009, the Archdiocese of Saint Louis determined that it needed to upgrade its website, mostly for security concerns. After investigating a move from Joomla! 1.0.x to Joomla! 1.5.x, the Archdiocese determined it would be more cost effective and a more future-proof decision to migrate the over 49 individual Joomla! sites that comprised www.archstl.org into a single Drupal installation.

This upgrade/migration provides many benefits, not the least of which are a better end-user experience, a better administrative experience, and much improved page load and search indexing performance. In addition, Drupal's structure and content presentation provide much greater flexibility in design and information structure, as well as SEO (search engine optimization) than other popular CMS frameworks that were investigated.

read more

Our first Drupal 7 alpha version was released just over a month ago. Today, we're proud to announce the release of the second alpha version of Drupal 7.x for your further testing and feedback. The first alpha announcement provided a comprehensive list of improvements made since Drupal 6.x, so in this announcement we'll concentrate on how you can help ensure that Drupal 7 is released as soon as possible and is as rock solid as the previous Drupal releases that you've grown to love!

The most notable change for developers is moving $form['#field'] to $form_state. This makes field forms more resilient to form_alters and debugging became a lot less tedious. Comment body became a field and new fields can be added to comments through the field UI module. And congratulations to the docs team and associated helpers for their outstanding work in enhancing and correcting lots of API documentation this release.

We've also fixed a number of issues since the previous alpha, most importantly one that caused all files to be deleted after six hours. Oops. :P This is a great time to reiterate...

It is important to note that this alpha version should not be used for production sites. We've resolved most errors reported so far, but there are outstanding known issues (including security issues) and most likely some problems that have not been reported as of yet. It is expected that there will be at least one more alpha version followed by a few beta versions and at least one release candidate before Drupal 7.0 is finalized. You can help us reach the final release date sooner by testing this alpha and providing feedback.

read more

From the earliest days of the Internet, many firms have tried to build community sites for medical professionals. Large sums of money were expended on technologies, and expectations around these feature-rich sites became very high.

So when a longstanding client, Jobson Healthcare Information (JHI) in New York, wanted to build a community website for America’s 200,000 pharmacists, we at ISL Consulting took it on as a welcome challenge. Given JHI's strong position in the market – they publish the most popular professional magazine for US pharmacists – we knew there would be no shortage of domain expertise or marketing prowess. The question was whether Drupal would permit us to build an affordable yet world-class website with everything from e-commerce to personalized pages, an elaborate friend activity notification system and other community features medical professionals have come to expect from professional sites.

read more

Attention all brilliant Drupalists: if you want to get your session in for 2010's North American Drupalcon — today is your last day. Go to sf2010.drupal.org/node/add/session and get yours posted. After submitting your great idea, be ready to rally some support for your sessions, because on February 16th voting will begin.

If you'd like to pre-game for voting, go ahead and check out the sessions page. You can filter by topics to help find the proposals which interest you. Select the session and use the handy bookmark feature to remember your favorite sessions for when voting begins.

Voting runs from Feb 16th to Mar 1st. All accepted speakers will be notified on March 5th. Final Schedule to be posted March 15th.

We are looking forward to making San Francisco 2010 the most innovative DrupalCon ever!

Drupal 6 Performance Tips, by Trevor James and TJ Holowaychuk, is a newly-published title from Packt Publishing aimed at Drupal beginners, developers, designers, and webmasters who utilize the Drupal content management system to create robust websites. It provides crucial performance-related information for Drupal users of all experience levels, including module contributors, webmasters who simply configure and maintain Drupal websites, and even themers.

The book contains basic and advanced topics on Drupal performance that will appeal both to the Drupal novice and the advanced user or developer. With this book you will learn how to maximize and optimize your Drupal 6 framework using best practice performance solutions and tools. The book covers how to vastly improve performance through upgrades, caching, configuring and optimization using core and contributed modules.

As a reader of drupal.org, you can receive a 15% discount (see below) and benefit the Drupal Association!

read more

Photo by Robert Scales

There, I said it. I really needed to get that off my chest. It's 2010. We don't have hoverboards, but we sure as heck should know how to run large scale interactive websites.

I think I have some unique perspective on this. I'm a technologist that has been experimenting with cutting edge code and devices for over a decade. I was at the 2006 Olympics in Torino, where we put on a symposium around "The Olympics and Web 2.0".

The ticket sales site crashed in Torino back in 2006. I didn't expect that it would crash horribly in 2010.

In Torino, we were using Nokia phones, ShoZu, and cheap Italian 3G connectivity to take pictures and upload them to Flickr in realtime. I remember Darren Barefoot watching from back home. These were isolated incidents.

Today, just hit reload on the #van2010 tag on Twitter, and you'll get a constant stream of on the ground and watching from afar commentary. With links, photos, and hashtags a plenty. This may very well go down as the first "Internet" Olympics with this kind of activity.

But I think we blew it. The "we" being CTV, CBC, and most definitely VANOC initiatives. OK, perhaps I shouldn't expect much from top down IOC controlled bodies who believe in the "magic of television".

read more

Can you believe that there are only 64 days left until DrupalCon San Francisco?! Starting April 17th, more than a thousand (we think it will be more than two thousand!) people will be converging at the Moscone Center in San Francisco for a great program of Drupal sessions, and we are really looking forward to seeing what happens when the community gets together at another one of these fabulous events. Session proposals have been open for almost a month and there's a lot of great stuff in there.

If you want to submit a proposal but you haven't, you still have time! Visit the session proposal page, and put your hat in the ring, but you better act fast! After Monday February 15th, we're closing session proposals so that on the 16th, we can open up community voting and let all of you tell us which of the sessions you would most like to see. Voting will continue until March 1st, 2010. If there is a session that you really want to see at DrupalCon, rally support and tell all your friends to vote.

On March 1st the DCSF planning committee will begin work on session selections. Your votes will play a huge part in which proposals get the strongest consideration. Speakers will be notified on March 5th whether their sessions have been accepted or not. The DrupalCon daily schedule will be posted on March 15th at http://sf2010.drupal.org/conference/schedule.

read more

Vital Signs 2.0 (VS) is an educational citizen science project consisting of an extensive Drupal website created by Image Works in Portland, Maine for the Gulf of Maine Research Institute (GMRI) and funded by the Hewlett Foundation and a generous in-kind donation of services by Image Works.

The VS project provides students, teachers, scientists, and citizen scientists with the tools to monitor environmental conditions throughout Maine. The project includes a structured central data repository, tools and protocols for identifying, mapping, tracking and analyzing the occurrence and spread of invasive species into and around the state. Beginning in fall 2009, these resources and supporting programs are being utilized on the laptop computers provided to all Maine middle school students and will be made available to all interested parties starting early 2010.

The project's site is composed of 13 original custom Drupal modules, approximately 2 dozen Drupal core modules, more than 40 contributed modules, Google Maps and other web services. In order to give back to the community that made this project possible, we are releasing the full source code for the website under the GPL license and adding it to the Drupal.org project repository.

read more