Technology blogs

Got mad web engineer skills? Comfortable with HTML5, CSS3 & PHP? Built any mobile apps? Want to work at Yahoo! and lead the global social bookmarking battle? You might be the perfect fit for the Delicious engineering team.

As you know, Delicious continues to lead the way in Social Bookmarking. And with some exciting new features and opportunities coming soon, we need a new teammate to join the crew and help create new experiences for our users. We’re a small team that still iterates like a start-up – we just happen to do it within a big company. This gives the Delicious team a tight family vibe but access and support from a leading global internet company.

If this sounds like something you want to be a part of, jump on careers.yahoo.com, search for ‘foosball’ (don’t ask) and look for Req# 32524.

Psst! If that sounds like too much effort, feel free to click here instead… ;)

We know a number of you are website owners and interested in Web Analytics. We’re hoping that those of you which are interested in web analytics are aware of the excellent Yahoo! Web Analytics service and it’s blog. Today the Yahoo! Web Analytics blog posted an article about their usage of the ‘ywa_support_resources‘ tag.

Check out the ‘Social Bookmarking with Delicious and YWA‘ article to see what they’re doing.

As our community grows, it is imperative that we preserve the things that got us here; namely, keeping Drupal a fun, welcoming, challenging, and fair place to play. The new Drupal Code of Conduct (DCOC) states our shared ideals with respect to conduct. Think of this as coding standards for people. It is an expression of our ideals, not a rulebook. It is a way to communicate our existing values to the entire community.

Our friends at Ubuntu have blazed a brilliant trail in this area. They use Drupal as their CMS, and in turn we have embraced their Code of Conduct. This code of conduct is essentially identical to that used by Ubuntu, except that the name of the project has been changed, and the conflict resolution process has been removed since we don't have one.

The DCOC has been under discussion for several months on groups.drupal.org and discussed further at Drupalcon Conpenhagen. Folks who are interested in talking more about the DCOC should do so in the Drupal.org Policies group.

The short version:

1. Be considerate
2. Be respectful
3. When we disagree, we consult others.
4. When we are unsure, we ask for help.
5. Step down considerately.

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I imagine what Rackspace gets out of this is, that if successful, they will at least have some sort of leverage with Amazon. Amazon is a machine. Amazon executes to perfection and they release new features at a relentless pace with no signs of slowing down. They don't leave much of a door open for others to get into the game. With a real open cloud alternative it might allow a lot of people to play in the cloud space that would have been squeezed out before.

What Amazon can't match is the open cloud's capability of simultaneous supporting applications that can run seamlessly in a private cloud hosted in a corporate datacenter, in local development and test clouds, and in a full featured public cloud.

OpenStack is the first development in the cloud space that hints at a future where there actually are more than half a dozen big platform / cloud providers (aka Hosting Apocalypse).

What does Rackspace get out of it? Well, they don't get obliterated and/or don't have to try and be a VAR on top of someone else's stack. This open source approach allows them a chance at controlling their own destiny.

What are other large hosting / data center providers doing? Nothing much - riding out the end of shared hosting and getting sold to by VMWare, from what I can see.

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This past March, I decided it was time to put my skills as a Drupal developer to use and launch a new online business. I knew early on that I wanted this business to be product-based, and after several weeks of playing with different ideas, I settled on selling premium Photoshop layer styles. It was the perfect opportunity to combine my love of photography and Photoshop with my passion for web development and Drupal.

Several months of product development later, StyleWorks was born. The site runs on Drupal 6, and integrates with FastSpring for e-commerce capabilities.

After iterating through several hundred designs in Photoshop, I finally had the look I wanted to go with, and it was time to make it come alive in Drupal. But first, a key decision had to be made: Start from scratch, or go with Zen?

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In 2009 Appnovation Technologies was asked to design and develop a Drupal based community and e-commerce website called Cargoh. The driving idea behind the site is to create a “social marketplace” for independent artists from all over the world to be able to showcase and sell their products and services. It features community tools such as forums, an internal messaging system and events section.

Cargoh.com was founded by Paul and Cariann Burger when they noticed the lack of avenues for independent artists, designers and musicians to get their work to the world. They realized that some of the most talented people in the world were making them coffee in the morning at the local coffee shop. They set out to change that by creating a super accessible, highly affordable and unbelievably feature rich venue for artists, designers and musicians to sell the things they create. Above that, they wanted to create the world's best online shopping mall for all the uniquely independent products in the world. So from those two missions, Cargoh.com was born. The world's most exciting social marketplace for independent creatives!

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Let's get straight to the meat of this post: I accepted an offer letter earlier this week, and as of September 1st, I'll be joining the team at iQmetrix.

Now, most of you won't have heard of iQmetrix. I think they're going to be known as a great Canadian success story. Here's a bit of background about the organization.

The company is privately held, around 10 years old, and started in Regina, Saskatchewan. They scratched their own itch at Jump.ca – a wireless retailer AKA store that sells cellphones / mobile plans / accessories etc. – and wrote their own software for CRM, point-of-sale, and so on. The productized version of this became iQmetrix, and they went on to grow until today, there are wireless retailers using the software in every major mall in North America.

So the entire executive team packed their bags back in Saskatchewan, pulled up stakes, and moved out to Vancouver with their families to found the corporate head office here. And now it's time for iQmetrix to kick into growth mode.

We're seeing the first non-phone devices like the iPad coming into wireless retailers, and the app store model for software sales is going crazy. There will only be more devices, more accessories, and more things that your wireless retailer will be selling, and that Main Street America will want to know more about.

Is the wireless retailer going to become like the local computer store? Perhaps - that didn't exactly turn out well. And the story is different in Europe of course, where many countries already have many more wireless retailers or SIM card vendors than we do here.

The other angle that iQmetrix has is around interactive retail. This is another new term to me, and as I've been digesting what it means and how to explain it, the analogy I've come up with is this:

Right now, advertising in the offline world is on a continuum somewhere between billboards and Minority Report.

That is, a range of technologies and products from physical billboards and signage in malls and along highways at one end, to the future of personalized, digital, local offers as seen in Minority Report (touch interfaces included, of course) at the other end.

At the billboard end, there is relatively boring evolutionary technology like digital billboards that aren't interactive and are still broadcast. 

Closer to the MR, revolutionary end of things, we have personalized, direct offers, with the recent news of the Shopkick install into Best Buy stores perhaps being one example. Sites like Foursquare and Twitter might be something that we include on the right hand side of the continuum - there is lots of revolutionary change & experimentation happening here (the Foundry Group's HCI Theme fits in this space).

I think that the current buzz-tag "O2O" (Online 2 Offline) is related - Groupon is held up as one example in a recent Techcrunch article, but I actually believe this is just a (rising) trend of small businesses adopting technology / advertising solutions that are web-based, and so we are seeing a shift of dollars.

In any case, it should be obvious that I'm excited about the opportunity. I have a lot to learn about this new space, but it feels like an area that is starting a decade long change that mirrors the growth of the web in the mid-90s. I will be bringing some startup, web native, and community experience to the table, and to continue to tell the iQmetrix story.

Thanks to Kerem Karatal for reaching out to me while I was sitting on the bench after Bootup, and thanks to the exec team at iQmetrix for hiring "title TBD". I'm looking forward to what we can all accomplish together, and I'm happy to be keeping the Vancouver community as my home base. 

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Founded in 1991, The Cara Program is a Chicago-based non-profit that empowers men and women affected by homelessness and poverty with the skills, confidence and resources to secure and sustain quality jobs and achieve long-term success. Since their founding, they have placed more than 2,500 individuals into full-time, rewarding positions with leading Chicago area companies such as ABM Lakeside, The Hilton Hotels, JP Morgan Chase, Sodexho, and more.

The Cara Program sought a redesign of their static website, one that engaged visitors by quickly delivering key information that was clear and concise, and could be easily maintained by Cara staff. Being a non-profit website, they also needed a way to accept donations, recruit volunteers, allow visitors to join their mailing list, and recruit sponsors and employment partners. In addition to being able to simply accept donations, they wanted to eventually “empower” donors to use social media and/or other outlets to spread the word, champion their cause and help others donate or otherwise support. The ability to share some content also needed to be a feature on The Cara Program "child" program websites: Clean Slate, Quad Communities and Career Pathways.

Duo Consulting was chosen to implement their goals and Drupal was the platform chosen.

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It's time for another update from DrupalCon Copenhagen! This time around we have updated information on the core developer summit, the unconference, and the code sprint.

First of all, we are happy to announce that the final version of the program is now available on the site. The few remaining slots in the schedule will be used for sponsor sessions and lightning talks. We'll try to keep schedule changes to a minimum, but if we do have to shuffle a few sessions around, this is the page to watch. Also, we'll make the entire program available as a PDF if you would rather keep it on your laptop or print a copy to keep in your pocket during the conference.

Now that the program has been finished, you can start planning your DrupalCon Copenhagen. Go to the session schedule and add all your favorite sessions to your personal schedule. You can see a list of your chosen sessions by going to your user profile and clicking the "My schedule" link.

If you're in Copenhagen on Sunday, August 22nd, and interested in helping improve Drupal core, you should participate in the Core Developer Summit. The summit will provide opportunities both for people to discuss changes to Drupal code and processes as well as people interested to move Drupal 7 closer to release. The summit will start wit three shorts sessions by Dries Buytaert, Sam Boyer, and Jen Simmons. After the kick-off sessions, the summit will break up into two groups, with plenty of space to be fruitful and get stuff done. All ideas are welcome!

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I've played with PostRank in the past (probably back when they were called Aide RSS). They're a Canadian company, based out of Waterloo, founded back in 2007 (CrunchBase entry). They're best known for their "PR" - ranking on blog posts to see if it is important. Since this is similar to what Summify is doing with their social news reader, I'm hoping there might be a connection here.

I dived back into it in the last couple of days because I got notification about PostRank Connect, which is a brand / influencer connector / tracker (as near as I can tell - it's not really "turned on" at the moment).

But PostRank analytics is what is live now, and it's great. Here's a screenshot of the front page of this blog, the default "Overview" tab in PostRank:

The top is the engagement value as tracked by PostRank - comments, tweets, delicious bookmarks, and so on that that post has generated. The bottom are page views from Google Analytics - you click a button, do the OAuth dance, and then connect in your existing Google Analytics account.

Most of the traffic to my blog is organic search from being around for 10 years, so you don't see massive spikes of pageviews correlated to engagement.

Here's another screen shot from the "analyze" tab, which shows you a compact view of posts to your blog, with engagement events and engagement points to give you an overview of how impactful each post is:

If you look carefully, you can see that the Twitter and Delicious links are underlined - you can click through and see more info about who has tweeted / bookmarked your posts. I'd like to see click throughs and info for all of them.

You can see more details about the PostRank Analytics service on the tour page, where you'll also find that it is $9 / month or $99 / year, although I've been told that with a "Connect" account, you'll get a free Analytics account.

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Drupal 6.18 and 5.23, maintenance releases which fix security vulnerabilities are now available for download.

Drupal 6.19 also fixes other small issues reported through the bug tracking system.

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.

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This post is part of a series to inform the Drupal community about the drupal.org redesign project, and the work the Drupal Association is funding to help get the redesign completed. If you would like to contribute to the redesign as a volunteer, see the community initiatives redesign page. If you'd like to contribute to the redesign financially, see the Drupal Association memberships and donations pages.

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With Drupal 7 down to 30 critical bugs, and Drupalcon Copenhagen just around the corner, it's only a matter of time before Drupal 7.0 ships. We want to make sure our Drupal 7 documentation is in great shape for this fantastic new release, and the Documentation Team could really use YOUR help getting there!

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PulpMX.com was launched in early 2009 as a place for well-known motocross columnist Steve Matthes to post his musings about the sport and its history. Originally conceived of as a modest site, it was built in early 2009 using a stock theme with a handful of custom images, the FCKeditor and IMCE modules to provide a built-in visual editor, and little else. Over time it had grown organically as needs developed: CCK, Filefield, and SWF Tools for posting audio interviews in a built-in player, for example. In early 2010 PulpMX also took on discussion forums from a site that was no longer able to host them, so an existing phpBB installation was also imported.

The site was developing a growing following and it was becoming obvious that it needed an overhaul to better reflect the character of the site, and provide more cohesive and initiative navigation among the quickly expanding areas of the site. Says Steve:

Originally I had gotten Tooth and Nail to design me a basic site for blogs and photos, what they gave me was way better than I had thought I needed. The traffic and the new media things that I was doing (podcasts, slide shows and a live internet show) demanded that I get something new and fresh. I was now big-time I suppose.

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Get ready to meet and learn from the top Drupal developers, designers and architects from around the world.

Save €31 and get your DrupalCon Copenhagen ticket now at the current price of €279, because on August 16th at 8am CEST the ticket price will go up to €310 + VAT.

Go to the DrupalCon Copenhagen site to buy your ticket for the conference.

Your ticket includes:

• 94 sessions spread out over 3 days
• Ad hoc BOF (birds of a feather) sessions
• Access to the Core Developer Summit and the post-conference code and documentation sprint
• Access to the ChX Coders Lounge where you can hang out and code all night
• Access to FooBar, the official bar of DrupalCon Copenhagen
• …and, last but not least, a chance to meet your fellow Drupalers

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In mid-2009, TopNotchThemes started building Fusion, a theme system that would pave new ground for Drupal themes. Along with this new technology, we started dreaming of our ideal website where products could be deployed automatically, customers had access to a much more friendly account area, and of course a brand new look and feel for this new line of themes.

Our current Drupal 5 website at TopNotchThemes.com (to remain active until remaining themes are ported to Fusion) is showing its age and does not have the control we need in order to be able to adapt content and features as our visitors demand.

Launched this spring, FusionDrupalThemes.com is not only a showcase for our products, but a wonderful showcase of community and commercial synergy. It integrates Ubercart, Organic Groups, and the Project module suite to create a feature rich platform for selling code-based products.

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Jason Santa Maria wrote a long post called A Real Web Design Application, where he talks about searching for a tool that has the creativity of Photoshop with more of a native understanding of the web. It's a good read, and the comments are over 250 and counting.

I remember talking about how Dreamweaver is dead as part of my 3 Stages of Dynamic Systems talk at Web Directions North 2008. And yet, just the other day I met with someone that was doing a content-based startup and had built hundreds of pages with Dreamweaver templates.

Today, I tend to still reach for OmniGraffle for prototyping, site maps, and so on. On the other end of things, I'm still using a basic text editor for coding (Smultron). I love the team at Balsamiq, but I just haven't been able to get over my distaste for AIR apps. I don't use Photoshop, because I'm design-disabled :P

In any case, I found two interesting tools in the comment thread that might at the very least be Dreamweaver killers.

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Steve Parks wrote an article over at Drupal Radar about "elephants" (aka large global IT / services / consulting) shops like Capgemini starting to adopt Drupal and what that means for smaller shops.

Jo Wouters from Krimson left a comment that made a couple of good points. The first part of his comment was that adopting Drupal is a strategic choice, where community was part of the value of adopting Drupal in the first place. I'm quoting the last bit of his comment directly:

Some anecdotal evidence: we are working on a proof of concept for one of the elephants. The spreadsheet they provide us to calculate budgets, has fields for all traditional costs (debugging, project management, contingency, …) and for this project they added an extra field with the label “Community 10%”.

via drupalradar.com by Jo Wouters, Krimson

(emphasis mine)

Budgeting for "community" is absolutely the right thing to do. I've spoken for years about the concept of "Community ROI" (return on investment).

It's very much the language of business - that investing in the community will see a return. Many from the community side find the language of business problematic - we do this because we love it. I've tried to be more pragmatic: having a sustainable business means that you can be funded to continue to do the things you love. In any case, it's clear that these strategic decisions see the value of the community, and see the return in investing in it.

There are, of course, many shops that don't contribute to Drupal. Sorry, writing case studies doesn't cut it - I'm looking for links to patches, module maintainership, contributing handbook documentation, and so on. That, and as I just wrote, actively contributing patches back as part of the client development process. I honestly believe that any shop that doesn't follow community practices as part of developing a site is doing their client a disservice.

Of course, if you don't have experience doing this, it can be hard to get started. Especially, it can be hard to "sell" to clients. One concept I've been tossing around is a line item labeled "Platform Maintenance". If your shop absolutely can't get past the mental hurdle of selling community involvement, then explain to clients that you add (some percentage / some hours) in order to keep their website future proof, secure, more maintainable, etc. Take this time and follow best practices for patching / features for contrib as part of development. Take the time and bundle a module or feature and post it to Drupal.org (the client gets a sponsored by link on the page -- Drupal being a high traffic website, this counts for a lot).

Back to the elephants. We've been lucky to build a critical mass of community before larger players arrived. The Drupal community has always been an ecosystem. There are larger players and smaller players, but we all orbit around the Drupal.org community space. The actions of Capgemini and others are showing that they are stepping up to be part of the ecosystem, which is fantastic. It means, for smaller players, that they need to step up their game when it comes to business planning and other aspects that many have just "grown into".

I'm interested in how you / your shop "sell" Drupal community and/or open source. Many shops have a standard "what is Drupal / why is it awesome", but it tends to focus on features or perhaps low cost. What are the specific open source points that you sell? How do you budget it - do you just work it into your cost, or show line items to clients?

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Patches that we write for drupal.org modules are submitted to the issue queue, and we refer to the patch’s location on drupal.org in the make file. This has made us much better contributors to other people projects as it makes being involved in the issue queue a normal part of development, and it encourages us to only patch contrib modules where it’s likely that the patch will be accepted. When a patch gets a review, we make changes, upload a newer version of the patch to drupal.org, and update our make file.

via developmentseed.org

This is actually a quote from Jeff in the comments on the article Drush Make Files for Production Drupal sites, but I thought it was definitely worth highlighting on its own.

In this particular case, using make files actually codifies the decision to integrate closely with contrib modules and actively improve them / add features as needed for a particular project.

I've followed this practice for years, albeit without make files. Patches go in a "patches" directory in version control, with the patch file named with both the name of the module and the node number of the issue on Drupal.org.

An additional process is that if a patch is needed, you run it in the issue queue on Drupal.org, but you also have an internal ticket that links to that issue. You don't close the issue until the patch has been accepted into the mainline of the module. Then you can remove the patch, update the version of the module you're using, and your clients' website is one step closer to easier long term maintenance and updates.

And yes, being involved in the issue queue SHOULD be a normal part of developing Drupal websites.

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The Deutsche Aids-Hilfe (DAH) is the leading German non-governmental organization that deals with the concerns of people living with HIV/AIDS and helps raise awareness of effective HIV prevention techniques.
As the governing body for more than 120 local AIDS service organizations, it supports this work at many different levels.

The DAH website, aidshilfe.de, is one of the organization’s main communication channels. It offers information on HIV and other sexual transmitted infections and covers the field of counseling for private matters. The website also provides contact information for local self-help-centers, a broad selection of free information material, workshops, community features, etc.

Work on the aidshilfe.de project was supported by many partners. Christoph Schüßler designed the website, which was implemented in Drupal by Berlin-based Werk21. The new aidshilfe.de is a step forward toward a future-proof system that features an attractive new design, interactive features, user-friendly community functionality and great usability.

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