Toys for Tots is a national program of the Marine Corps Reserve that distributes toys to needy children each Christmas. The local chapter works through every school (public and private) throughout Humboldt and Trinity Counties. It’s quite a logistical feat to identify and contact each family, provide a count of the number of eligible children in each community and note their gender, age and location where their toys will be distributed. Previously, this was...
I returned from Drupalcon in San Francisco on Thursday and have spent the last few days catching up with work and life. I’m just starting to sort through all my thoughts on this great conference. First, I wish I could have attended even more sessions. But fortunately, they were all recorded and are already available on archive.org. Additionally all three keynotes were excellent and inspiring both in terms of Drupal and for the open...
Drupal,the open source content management system that we use almost exclusively for building web sites, is now being used to run the official White House web site, whitehouse.gov. For the general public this will mean little as they won’t see any visible difference in the site. But it’s great news for us, the Drupal community and the open source movement as a whole. But it’s also an interesting political statement by the current administration...
I’d heard from some people that work at Humboldt State University that they are moving their web sites to Drupal. But a link from a friend on Facebook (thanks Grace!) confirmed it. Not only are they moving to Drupal, but they are installing the LAMP stack (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP) on the servers. So it looks like HSU is embracing open source big time. This is such a good move considering all the budget...
I’ve been back from D.C. a couple weeks and I am still trying to distill everything I experienced at Drupalcon. With three days of intense sessions, Birds of a Feather gatherings, discussions and keynote speeches I have yet to find a way synthesize everything. In fact, I was so excited by some of the things I learned, I am frustrated by not bing able to implement them. OK, it’s only been 2 weeks, so...
My hotel is only 5 blocks from the Verizon Convention Center in Washington, D.C. So it’s an easy walk in the cold morning sun. But today, day 2 of Drupalcon, as I got to the Convention Center door I realized I forgot my pass to Drupalcon. So I hiked back to the hotel, and the back to the center. 15 blocks already today. So far this morning I’ve been to a session on the...
The Redwood Technology Conference will hold its first annual North Coast Technology Conference on March 14 at the Humboldt Bay Aquatic Center in Eureka. RTC board member Daria Topousis has a Tech Beat article in the Times-Standard today that covers the Conference pretty well. I’m doing a presentation on open source content management systems and tools like Joomla, WordPress and Drupal. I will focus mostly on Drupal as I will have just returned for...
What a strange sounding title to a post. But this is just to point out that the new site Recovery.gov released to track the recovery plan is built with Drupal, a content management system and framework that we have been using more and more. In fact, we’re in the process of making our own site over in Drupal, and we’ve just become a partner with Acquia which proivdes professional support services for Drupal users...
My wife has been an Obama supporter from early on in the primaries. I stayed neutral during that period, but since each party has settled on their candidates the choice has become easy. The McCain campaign was shaky to begin with and now appears almost pathetic. But if you still need convincing and you’re in to tech (and who isn’t these days?) there is a web site specifically to help along your convictions. Here...
Back in the 70s I lived in Berkeley and had a great time. It’s surprising how little things have changed, at least as far as I’ve wandered from my motel on University Ave. Of course, back then there were no cell phone stores or Macintosh stores. And lots of the restaurants have changed. But the streets themselves feel much the same, the buildings look familiar. I haven’t been down Telegraph yet, though, and back...
We recently completed an upgrade to the Redwood Technology Consortium web site. A few years ago we converted the site from a proprietary Cold Fusion system to the open source Drupal platform. We felt it was time to upgrade since the site was running on a 4.x version of Drupal. 5.x had been out for a while and all the modules we needed had also been upgraded to the current version. While we were...
Last Monday Erik V. Kirk, famed SoHum blogger, spoke at my Rotary Club (I can’t believe I’m in a Rotary Club, but there I am). His talk was a fun mixture of tech naiveté and insights in to how blogging information can spread and come back to the blogger in unexpected ways. What he thought was an obscure journal of life and ideas in an obscure part of the world, seems to have been...
After about a year and a half of struggle we finally unveiled the third version of the Prosperity! Network’s new web site. The saga of this project is a good example of design by committee that is the death of many projects and results in cost overruns on many others. In spite of some valiant efforts to define the goals and features of the site from the beginning, the project kept morphing. There literally...
There are a lot of open source projects that are starting to attract big dollars. Drupal has recently pulled in $7 million and MySQL was just purchased by Sun for $1 billion. And now WordPress has attracted $29.5 million. This is an exciting transition for these entities that have produced tremendous software that we have been using for years. This blog is powered by WordPress, we have developed several sites using Drupal and all...
