Quick MarsEdit Sample

Well, just looks like text for the most part with a simple HTML adding option. Looks like it has a lot of potential. Was nice to see that Drupal was an optional blog type you could choose from. Unfortunately without a built in WYSIWYG editor it did seem like it would just make more sense to stay with Flock. It also messed up because it published this draft article to the OC homepage and inserted the content type as mgifford rather than as a blog. Kinda fascinating what happened with this application.

A Campaign with Too Many New Ideas to Ignore - Catch The Flame

I had to write a quick note about the new Catch the Flame campaign since it's done a good job of incorporating some ideas from the mobile community and mapping communities that were innovative enough to draw attention to. That and it's a great campaign to pressure the IOC to respect workers' rights. There is just so much merchandise produced for the Olympics, it shouldn't be done through unjust working conditions. They are bringing viral campaigns to a new level by encouraging people to literally pass the flame via their mobile phone. I'm not sure how many people will do...

Badware Prevention and Website Security

So everyone knows that the Internet has people out there looking to gain control of your computer using some innovative new malware program that they developed. There are all kinds of reasons to do this, most recently I heard of malware that was targeting Tibetan solidarity NGOs in order to track their communications with people within Tibet. So although sometimes lives are on the line, most of the time though it is just to grab credit card information or to use your computer as a spam bot. The Internet is a great way to distribute things, including Trojan horses, and...

Day Two Summary - DrupalCon Boston 2008

Once again we've been learned a lot, met a lot of great folks and explored some excellent opportunities for the future. The optimism of the conference participants about working together is certainly contagious. Well, it is amazing how valuable bandwidth is when you've spent a couple of days trying to access it (mostly without success). Neither the conference center or our hotel room has had reliable access. At this point we've established some work-arounds which will help, and by the 4th day of the conference I am sure that these will be worked through. The Internationalization presentation was interesting for...

Open Source Boot Camp & a Drupal Deck

This fall we've gotten more involved with the Talent First Network and some of their initiatives to promote open source in Ottawa. We've got a part-time intern through them and are quite interested in the opportunities being generated by this team. Tonight Jonathan & I presented on Drupal/CiviCRM/CCK at the open source boot camp, a series of talks to introduce Carleton University students to other opportunities for employment. There was a good showing and we fortunately weren't the first presenters. Kamal lead a nice presentation on different open source licenses which ws good. It seemed to me when preparing or...

Macintosh Usability Notes -- Training My Father to Use His Laptop

Well, it has been about 19 years since my dad really used a computer at all. At that time it was a cutting edge XT or something like that, and he used it to type up and arrange chords/lyrics on his song books. He was reasonably good at that time, but that was before mice were standard on anything but a Mac. All one needed at that time was a greenish screen, a keyboard and a really fast 2400 baud modem and you'd be set (with the noisy CPU there of course). So last month he bought himself a 2nd...

You Can't Ignore the Web in 2008

I got called today from the folks at Canadian Select Farm Foods earlier today, and like many people, I like the idea of having a closer connection to where my food is grown. I've had a couple phone calls from these folks, often asking if I received their meat in the mail (such a shocking concept), but saw them as just having a bit of a disorganized sales team more than anything. According to their friendly sales folks they sell all different kinds of meat products and seem to be offering you the ability to bulk buy Ontario meat which...

Sample Page - Standardizing Content Input With Drupal

Since we started developing Content Management Systems (CMS) in 2000 we have wanted to give our clients control of their content. Since that time we have found that most organizations do not have very fancy formatting requirements and just need a few key systems that people can use which allow them to mark up their documents in a way that makes it easier for everyone to read. The standards have changed in the last eight years, but the best practices today use style sheets and semantic html to attach meaning to the markup. This allows both search engines and other...

Great Things About Drupal 6.0

Drupal 6.0 was just released yesterday and we're pretty excited about this as we've been watching the latest release evolve over the last year now. We wanted to highlight just a few of the enhancements we've seen over 5.x: Better i18n Support - it's gotten so much better since we started working with it back in 4.6, but issues like menus & internationalization will work much better now Built in Teasers - A lot of folks like the ability to define custom teaser pages like we had set up for our old CMS Back-End.org. This will help with the migration...

Why We Only Develop Open Source Software

We've had a couple exchanges with clients lately where they wanted us to develop code for their Drupal site, but they wanted to own the code outright and not have it licensed under the GPL. I thought I would outline here some of the reasons why this is problematic for us and why it isn't part of our business practice. The first thing is that realistically in most open source software if new features are developed they are rarely done from whole cloth. With Drupal, we might need as little as 200 lines of code for a new module. To...