Working the Wiki

I've been listening to some very interesting podcasts lately on Open Source Conversations , the best have been focused on the concept of the wiki. The most inspiring have been Mitchell Kapor's Wikipedia and Knowledge Communities and the panel discussion with Josh Bancroft , Ned Gulley and a few others, available in the podcast's archive, Wikis in Enterprises - Wikimania 2006. It's been a week or so since I listened to Mitchell's talk. Couple things that struck me from this was the fact that despite the fact that Wikipedia is having a huge impact on how we work, and how...

Progressive Podcasts

I'm often on the lookout for good podcasts with content on social justice issues. There is only so much time to keep on top of events in the world, it is important to be listening to the right sources. So far the ones I like are: The Rabble Podcast Network - especially I read the News Today (oh boy!) CBC's Podcasts - especially Dispatches and Ideas Public Radio International's Radio Open Source has been very reliable As has a more technology oriented Open Source Conversations What are some other ones out there that have been beneficial and have at least...

Flickr & Creative Commons - Getting Traction from your Photos

This past summer I posted a picture (or three) on Flickr of a laptop I ran across while swimming in the Ottawa river upstream of a local beach. You don't often run across laptops in the river, but and figured that it was unique enough to photograph between yanking it out of the water system and tossing it in the trash. The ecological problems with high tech toys are considerable with batteries and the heavy metals that are used in the construction. Greenpeace is one of many groups looking at pressuring computer companies to be more environmental responsible. Disposable tech...

Efforts to Provide More Representative Web Polls

Web polls are a great way to engage with your visitors on a simple issue and get their feedback/support. Generally only a small percentage of the visitors to a web site will do anything that requires their input, however with the right question polls can be very effective. Where they have failed however is that too many polls have been hacked by users who want to unduly influence the results. Historically there have been three main ways to ensure that web polls aren't hacked by people trying to influence a decision online. The simplest one was to just store a...

I Liked the Statistics Trends Module

Seems like I may have become the informal maintainer of the code base for the statistics trends module. As the patch I produced last year brought it to work with 4.7. And now I've made it work with 5.1. I just like being able to visually see the recent history of traffic to the site. The main difficulty of upgrading this module was realizing that the function format_plural seemed to require a @count, rather than %count.Hope this comes in useful.

Jack has confirmed you as a friend on Facebook.

I just recently set up an account on facebook , as an old friend sent me an invitation. After checking to see if Jack Layton had a page, and adding him as "a friend". I decided to check out the popularity of our political leaders on this platform (as of March 20th). Now organizations are using this service in different ways, but it is interesting to compare popularity. Jack has 175 friends.The central NDP group has 1,054 membersStéphane has 3332 friends.The central Liberal group has 351 membersStephen has 497 friends.The central Conservative group has 1,360 membersElizabeth May doesn't seem to...

Explicit Type Module

Well I got irritated earlier today because when editing nodes, it isn't always easy to see what kind of node type you are editing. I'm not the first person who thought it would be more usable if Drupal showed the node type when editing a node. You get the title nice and clear, but sometimes when troubleshooting it is actually important to be able to quickly see if something is a blog, a page, a story, a category or a container. In any case, I did what you're supposed to do and submitted a bug report . Got a super...

Canadian Blood Services - What to do?

The closest I could make this tied to the work of OpenConcept was by pointing out that PDF's, although useful, are not a replacement for good old html. Having the donor form online is good, but having it in a text form would be easier for people to review in the way that is easiest for them. Having it in this way would also help to have the information translated and distributed in a great many languages so that people who have French or English as a second language would be more comfortable confidently giving blood. My main concern is...

The $100 Laptop

Last week some of us at OpenConcept were fortunate enough to play with a prototype from the One Laptop Per Child Project at an after hours gathering. Like many other people who have had a chance to look at it, there are pictures tagged with olpc that we've posted to Flickr. We couldn't help but check out how future compatible our new standards compliant design is, and indeed it looks great in a cutting edge browser, even in portrait mode . Andrew Clunis, one of our developers, volunteers with the OLPC project and has been a keen advocate for many...

Bullfrog Powered Websites

Ever since hearing about Bullfrog Power I've had these visions of thousands of frogs jumping around within little hamster wheels generating power. However, no need to call the SPCA , the electrons aren't being driven by our amphibian friends. Rather, OpenConcept has signed up with an innovative company which is gathering individuals and organizations willing to pay a premium for clean energy. If you live in Ontario, which most of our team does, you can buy 100% green electricity from this new company which buys it's power "exclusively from wind and low-impact hydro generators who meet or exceed the federal...