PNG Fix Miraculously Resolves Longstanding Design Issues

The issue of PNG and IE have existed ever since I started designing for the web several years ago. Moving into the Drupal realm, it was a major issue when dealing with dynamic, sleek designs. For those of you who don't know the issue transparencies can be used with the PNG-24 file format. However, while IE allowed for PNG-8 transparencies, it failed for a long time to deal with the more sophisticated PNG-24 alpha transperency feature. With IE 7 they resolved this issue, but unfortunately so few people have moved to the new browser. Ideally everyone would adopt something like...

Adopting Drupal for the Website of Your Church, Synagog or Temple

We've now been approached by quite a few different religious communities who are looking to build an online community through Drupal. A number of us are Quakers and so we have built sites (mostly volunteer) for Friends organizations we're affiliated with. We recently launched a website for a United Church congregation looking to build its virtual community. We were happy to see that the national United Church site is using Drupal. It is really a natural fit since the religious communities that have flourished are those that reach out to their membership and bring them a reason to come together...

Upgrading Websites The Right Way

I've come across two websites of interest that have been upgraded to Drupal recently and made the same fundamental mistake. So I thought it was worth while blogging about it in the hopes that it might prevent some other good site making the same mistake. The problem seems to be in not understanding that it is considerably easier to modify the old links on your own site than it is in the browsers, links & caches of users and search engines. Recognizing the legacy that your site has had is a critical mistake in upgrading a website. In both cases...

WIAM - One World Film Festival

Back in October OpenConcept contributed a very small amount to the World Inter-Action Mondiale film festival here in Ottawa. It's a great festival highlighting all kinds of world issues. This year's focus was on First Peoples -- First Stories. Was great to see that our clients were also supporting this festival: Assembly of First Nations , Collected Works Bookstore & Coffeebar, Halifax Initiative , MiningWatch Canada , Octopus Books , and Oxfam Canada . Events like this don't happen without the hard work of a lot of volunteers. Looking forward to seeing what's on the 2008 lineup which will take...

Internet Metaphors - No, It Really Isn't a Safe Space

I was talking to one of my clients the other day and he wanted to know if his website was like a car where you can put it in a garage for six months & know that you can come back in six months and just run it as you would the last time you started it up. I played with this metaphor a bit. We've talked about doing a car-free example as well in the past, but for the moment I'll work with this one. First, I want to differentiate the automobile from the skateboard. The skateboard is the...

Ottawa Non-Profit Tech Social Gathering

NOTE: There is a new effort to do this in Ottawa with Tech4good . It's been years now that I've heard of the Social Tech Brewing Company phenomena in Vancouver and Toronto. Apparently it's even spread as far as Australia. However November 1st marked the first meeting of its kind here in Ottawa. George Irish & I have been discussing this ever since he moved up from Toronto, but we finally set a date and a Facebook group to try to coordinate the network. The response from the Ottawa progressive geek community was more successful than we had anticipated. We...

MMP - We Lost! Now What?

2,704,477 voted to support the outdated and undemocratic first-past-the-post electoral system. How did such a sensible political decision get overwhelmingly rejected by voters in Ontario? The only exception to this was a small pocket of people in downtown Toronto. The late advertising (people so didn't understand the question) and bland structure oriented material put out by elections Ontario certainly didn't help much. But the fear, uncertainty & doubt that the opponents spun up was really quite amazing. Wikipedia has a nice snapshot of the decision. I asked the good people at Fair Vote Canada if they had any examples of...

Design Like You Give a Damn - Architecture for Humanity

I was happy to stumble across the Architecture for Humanity Cafe Press Store earlier today. It sells funny t-shirts that promote the organization with simple text like "Design Like You Give a Damn", "Running for Humanity" and "This Building is esthetically Displeasing". I had heard about this group first through Cameron Sinclair's TED Prize presentation on a open source architecture to house the world. Architecture for Humanity is a a nonprofit that helps architects apply their skills to humanitarian efforts. It's interesting also to think about what could happen if we all worked collaboratively on projects like the Open Architecture...

One blogpost for Burma - A Campaign for Democracy

Went to a protest last night in solidarity with the pro-democracy protesters in Burma. I was partly brought to the protest by facebook as I got a number of invites to events in the coming days with it. 'Support The Monks' Protest in Burma' - Facebook group has certainly been useful. It's been interesting to see the circulation of news items being re-posted on Facebook on this issue as people are desperate to find out what is happening in Burma. Interesting to see the celebrity involvement as Jim Carry's video pleads the case for action. Not sure why it would...

FSM Schools in Ontario?

I do think that a single education system in Ontario would be better funded than the present split system which allows for Public & Catholic schools. Right now tax payers are allowed to choose which school system they want their tax dollars to support, but there is no option to support a unified system. I did enjoy this little video on the subject put up by the Greens: It is interesting how humor can be used so very effectively on the net to drive home a point. The Flying Spaghetti Monster , the deity of Pastafarianism, was created in response...