Stories from the Open Gov Interview

mike — Sat, 06 Jun 2020 14:14:18 +0000

Stories from the Open Gov Interview

I had the pleasure of being interviewed by Richard Pietro as part of his Stories from the Open Gov podcast. Richard has gotten some amazing speakers on his show including Sir Nigel Shadbolt , Ashley Casovan , Nathaniel Heller , Melanie Robert , Rob Davidson , Tony Clement , Michael Geist , Lindsey Marchessault , Ryan Androsoff , Tracey Lauriault , Keith Loo , and Jesse Hirsh . You should subscribe to the podcast and listen to it on SoundCloud . We talk about a range of things here from accessibility to open government and open source, I hope you...

December 11th Accessibility Workshop

mike — Tue, 12 Nov 2019 16:59:43 +0000

December 11th Accessibility Workshop

According to Statistics Canada an estimated one in five Canadians over 15 years old has a disability. This slices through all sectors of our society and is a significant part of every community in our country. Often people with disabilities face problems with either the built environment (atoms) or digital tools (bits). Some struggle with both. Accessibility of digital assets (like websites, intranet sites, documents and videos) is complicated. People who are blind or or low vision come to mind when people think about digital accessibility, but it affects a much broader spectrum than just those with visual disabilities. People...

Personalization and a Panel at DrupalNorth

mike — Mon, 12 Aug 2019 22:01:12 +0000

Personalization and a Panel at DrupalNorth

DrupalNorth was held in Montreal this year. This event rotates between Canadian cities (so far only Toronto, Ottawa and Montreal). The goal is to bring together Drupal events across Canada and have one big one that can attract bigger presenters. I was lucky to present twice. Personalization My first presentation was Personalizaton and Building an Accessible Site, which you can watch on Youtube . The raw version of the slides is also available . The challenge I explore is that the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2+ have conflicts. A low vision user needs the exact opposite requirements most of...

Case Study: Canadian National Institute for the Blind (CNIB)

vsharma — Mon, 18 Mar 2019 20:09:47 +0000

Case Study: Canadian National Institute for the Blind (CNIB)

1. About Celebrating 100 years in 2018, the Canadian National Institute for the Blind (CNIB) Foundation is a non-profit organization driven to change what it is to be blind today. CNIB delivers innovative programs and powerful advocacy that empower people impacted by blindness to live their dreams and tear down barriers to inclusion. CNIB’s work as a blind foundation is powered by a network of volunteers, donors and partners from coast to coast to coast. The CNIB Foundation, Vision Loss Rehabilitation Canada and CNIB Deafblind Community Services make up the CNIB Group. 2. Facts CNIB Organization Size: Full Time (646),...

Inclusive design is a moral responsibility

cclark — Wed, 30 Jan 2019 14:57:52 +0000

Inclusive design is a moral responsibility

If you do a web search on ‘target audience’ you will be blasted with article after article on how important it is to know your audience. We have personas, user journeys and focus groups to learn about the people we want to influence. Everybody invests something in this elusive group of potential customers, clients or donors. Sometimes it’s hundreds of thousands of dollars spent across multiple agencies, sometimes its opinion based on the experience of a marketing director. Getting the right people to carry out the desired action at the right time is something we are all concerned with. There...

We all need accessibility features, whether we know it or not

cclark — Fri, 18 Jan 2019 19:47:53 +0000

We all need accessibility features, whether we know it or not

I do a lot of drawing on my computer and I enjoy it. It is also a part of my job. Like a lot of people in 2019, my work is mobile. My tools go where I go. As great as that is, there is a huge problem. On my laptop, you have to press on the trackpad with a fair amount of force to do something like drawing a curve in Adobe Illustrator. It is really aggravating. Did I find anything helpful in the trackpad settings? Nope! The solution, it turns out, is in accessibility settings. Enable dragging without...

A barrier free Canada is for everybody! Things to consider before your next site launch

cclark — Mon, 07 Jan 2019 21:22:33 +0000

A barrier free Canada is for everybody! Things to consider before your next site launch

This morning I woke up, grabbed a coffee, checked the weather on my phone, took a look at today’s news, paid a bill, read my email, checked social media then got down to work. For work, I checked online correspondence, reviewed a video, set up some remote training, did some research and fixed a bit of code on a client’s site. We are having company on the weekend, so I was coordinating that via text messages as well. All that before 7:30 AM. This is routine stuff for millions of people around the world. There’s nothing interesting about it. For...

My Appearance on AXSCHAT

mike — Tue, 06 Nov 2018 02:18:24 +0000

My Appearance on AXSCHAT

I had the pleasure of being on AXSChat talking about web accessibility and Drupal in October. It was actually a two stage process as Neil Milliken and Antonio Santo had a really fun video conversation on the Friday before. Unfortunately, Debra Ruh was not able to join us for the video discussion. That was captured and captioned and uploaded on the weekend. Then on Tuesday, October 23rd, we had an hour long Twitter discussion flooding the Twitterverse with questions about accessibility using the hashtag #axschat . You can watch the video here: But thought that it might be interesting to...

10 Tangible Things that the GC Can Do to Align Mandates & GovIT

mike — Sun, 04 Nov 2018 19:08:52 +0000

10 Tangible Things that the GC Can Do to Align Mandates & GovIT

Derek Alton wrote a tweet in the middle of October that caught my eye and got me to come up with some suggestions. "Moment of frustration: I love bringing people who I think are inspiring together to do fun shit that they could not do on their own. Right now I feel like I have been bringing people together to talk when what I really want to do is bring people together to act, to do!" I think of myself as a rather pragmatic guy so I suggested 10 tangible things that the GC can do . This is a...

Your Organization Using Drupal? Get a Drupal.org Account!

mike — Thu, 01 Nov 2018 17:47:44 +0000

Your Organization Using Drupal? Get a Drupal.org Account!

There are over a million Drupal sites on the internet. There is a huge range of organizations who use Drupal across all sectors of our economy. Unfortunately, when you look at Drupal.org you mostly see representation from the web industry. Web development shops, communications teams, and freelancers that make their living from building and customizing Drupal sites. It’s not that it isn’t amazing to have 100,000 plus developers in an online community working to make Drupal meet their needs. It is. But what we’re largely missing is those organizations that use Drupal to drive their enterprise, but don’t actively engage...

The Government of Canada's Open First Day

mike — Tue, 16 Oct 2018 18:37:24 +0000

The Government of Canada's Open First Day

The Government of Canada (GC) hosted Open First Day on Friday, September 28. It was a really interesting opportunity for hundreds of people in public/private sector to get together and share their experiences. I’d like to start by congratulating them on the title of the event. It wasn’t Consider Open Source Day or Learn about Open Source and Government Day. It Was Open First Day. Open Standards, Open Data, Open Source and Open Government. The site for this conference was also forward thinking as it was all built on GitHub . More and more government microsites are hosted on GitHub...

OpenConcept & the U.N. Sustainable Development Goals

mike — Sun, 30 Sep 2018 01:39:59 +0000

OpenConcept & the U.N. Sustainable Development Goals

I am often inspired by the work of Tim Frick and the team at Mightybytes . He recently published an article on Aligning Your Organization with U.N. Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) . I’m going to try not to repeat the work he’s done, but try to add to it. You should read his article. The world is facing some rather unprecedented challenges . A great many of these challenges caused by unfettered capitalism . This is made worse with belief that profit is the only goal business should pursue. Greed was turned into a virtue and self-interest given primacy. About...

Writing for a Broad Audience with Drupal 8: A11y & SEO

mike — Fri, 01 Jun 2018 13:54:43 +0000

Writing for a Broad Audience with Drupal 8: A11y & SEO

After writing this article I learned about IBM’s Content Clarifier from Hassell Inclusion . Something like this could be built right into the workflow of your content creation process. Accessibility (a11y) and Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is complex, but it doesn't have to be hard. If you have a good routine in place, you can write content that can be compelling for everyone. So much can come down to the KISS Principle "Keep it simple, stupid". Like everything else in life, there are a lot of exceptions. Much comes down to doing your best to learn how to do it...

Government Investment in Blockchain & Sustainability

mike — Mon, 28 May 2018 15:12:31 +0000

Government Investment in Blockchain & Sustainability

It's hard to avoid the blockchain if you are on the internet these days. Most folks have heard about Bitcoin , Ethereum or EOS because of speculative investments. Highly volatile cryptocurrencies have made some people very wealthy. It's all based on the idea of the blockchain . A public, distributed ledger that is next to impossible to alter. This makes it very useful for things that go beyond cryptocurrencies. Blockchain is a pretty amazing technology that will have some great applications. Unfortunately, the hype of this new technology is pretty exaggerated . So, I'm buying some gold. Not for an...

GDPR - May 26th Onward

mike — Sun, 27 May 2018 16:25:30 +0000

GDPR - May 26th Onward

The GDPR is in effect. The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) (EU) 2016/679 is a regulation in EU law that is now in effect. This affects all organizations that service European citizens. In North America, most organizations only became aware of it recently. The policies of the GDPR are quite broad and establish a bold Privacy by Design framework. Ann Cavoukian published the 7 Foundational Principles of privacy nearly a decade ago. At the time she was the Information and Privacy Commissioner of Ontario. Since this time the amount of personally identifiable information (PII) has skyrocketed. The impact of corporate...

Accessibility Widgets

mike — Tue, 22 May 2018 16:14:48 +0000

Accessibility Widgets

I've written on our decision to move ahead an accessibility widget in Personalization & Accessibility with Drupal . I thought it would be worthwhile highlighting some of the various options that are currently being used in a number of sites. I do now believe that they are an important part of building more accessible content. I wanted to highlight a few of the options for preference widgets because there are just so many and there are very few common patterns. Adding an accessibility feature is nice, but it is important that it is discoverable. Paralympic.ca Site Features: Nice simple visual...

Let's Rethink Procurement and Get Accessible ICT

mike — Fri, 11 May 2018 14:13:37 +0000

Let's Rethink Procurement and Get Accessible ICT

Everybody wants their website to be accessible. Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) is key for any modern organization. In the Government of Canada, it is a clear part of the Liberal Party's mandate . Setting a strong policy direction is critical, but then what? Most departments still see accessibility as a one-liner that can be added to an ICT contract. Then the responsibility for any shortfalls lies on the vendor. Sadly, this doesn't work. Accessibility is a journey, not a destination. Web accessibility is complicated, the ecosystem and use cases change over time. So what can procurement do to fix...

Privacy is a Big Deal!

mike — Wed, 09 May 2018 13:39:56 +0000

Privacy is a Big Deal!

The tech sector has undermined personal privacy in the constant pursuit of the latest shiny thing. Privacy is a core component of our democracy and is essential for free expression. Most have assumed that it is built into the online tools that they use every day. This isn't the case. The media coverage of Cambridge Analytica and Facebook how dangerous this is. The model of surveillance capitalism put forward by Google is now very advanced. Big Data & Artificial Intelligence gives businesses more insights than Big Brother dreamed possible. Many people are coming to the realization that some state regulation...

AI Won't Solve Our Accessibility Problems

mike — Fri, 04 May 2018 16:35:01 +0000

AI Won't Solve Our Accessibility Problems

There is a lot of excitement about AI (Artificial Intelligence). It shows promise to solve many problems, including some for greater digital inclusion. I see great potential, but also some significant limitations. We need a measured approach to machine intelligence to learn how algorithms can best help. The Google Translate Problem Let’s admit it. Google Translate is getting pretty good . However, it isn’t good enough to be as good as a professional translator. At some point, for some languages, we’ll probably get there. However, I still do not see a point that for legal documents that we would blindly...

Owning a .ee - why I Chose to Start a European Company

mike — Thu, 26 Apr 2018 13:57:18 +0000

Owning a .ee - why I Chose to Start a European Company

I have to say that historically, I haven't had a good reason to think much about Estonia. It's just the first of the Baltic countries that we covered in history class in high-school. It wasn't until the FWD50 conference in Ottawa where this really shifted. Siim Sikkut spoke about Estonia building up a digital government from the ground up. The contemporary Estonian government started only 1992, shortly after the WWW started. There were some bold leaders who decided to start not with what other countries had done, but to start digital. He mentioned e-Residency & the ease of starting a...

Personalization & Accessibility with Drupal

mike — Fri, 06 Apr 2018 18:11:34 +0000

Personalization & Accessibility with Drupal

Accessibility is complicated. There is no single site that is universally accessible. One of the best initiatives I've seen by an organization was the BBC with their My web my way accessibility section. Unfortunately, they have decided to archive it and stop maintaining these pages. It is unclear to me whether any of the personalization options defined here will continue to be supported or not within the BBC. I do think that sites could do more to help explain how their users can get the most out of their site. Most sites who do this put it alongside their Accessibility...

Office Waste Reduction

mike — Sun, 21 Jan 2018 19:46:27 +0000

Office Waste Reduction

I am a Quaker and I was going to meeting on Sunday and came in from the cold with a bit of a runny nose. I grabbed a tissue, used it and then threw it into the trash. I didn’t even think about it until a member of our community picked it out of the trash (along with some other garbage) and put it into the compost. She then went on to talk about how discouraged that she was about our ability to do something as simple as manage our garbage. I definitely agreed with her concerns, and yet I...

2017 Environmental Report

mike — Fri, 19 Jan 2018 15:35:55 +0000

2017 Environmental Report

OpenConcept is a Certified B Corporation . We understand that the economy exists within a fragile ecosystem. Capitalism is a powerful force but when it focused exclusively on profits it is also a serious threat to the future of humanity. We think that environmental reporting is something that all organizations should do to help us measure what matters. We put forward our first Environmental Report for 2016 just a few months ago, so this is mostly a matter of releasing our 2017 numbers: Natural Gas: 83 GJ Electricity: 34 GJ Water: 34k L Flights 10718 km or 990 kg of...

Actively Encouraging Open Government Engagement

mike — Mon, 18 Dec 2017 15:30:35 +0000

Actively Encouraging Open Government Engagement

I have been very encouraged by the growth of Open Government initiatives around the world. It’s done so much to help make governments more agile, responsive, accessible and affordable. Success of this model depends on a community of contributors, most of who who lie outside of government. This means that they also fall outside of the hierarchical chain of command. How the public sector engages with that community may well determine how effective these initiatives are. Supporting contributors Governments don’t have either the mechanism or capacity to give money to people who contribute good ideas to their policies or practices...

FCC vs the Internet: Canada Saves the Day?

mike — Mon, 18 Dec 2017 02:25:23 +0000

FCC vs the Internet: Canada Saves the Day?

OpenConcept’s sites have mostly been served from Canada. Like many others, we were concerned when the 2002 Homeland Security Act was put into place. Lots of organizations adopted our concern about what access the CIA, FBI, NSA would have on sites on American soil. This was an issue for us, but we certainly didn’t feel like these agencies would respect Canada’s border and indeed there might have additional restrictions within their territory. Despite our concerns, we decided to move our infrastructure to the cloud and chose Amazon Web Services (AWS) as they were clearly the leader at the time. They...

Becoming a Greener Company

mike — Fri, 17 Nov 2017 20:26:48 +0000

Becoming a Greener Company

When I started OpenConcept in 1999 it was with a keen awareness that we needed to make rapid changes to how Western Society was consuming the resources of our finite home. I knew that we would need to build collaboration between groups to ensure that we could hope to manage the challenges that we are going to need to face. I knew that technology was going to be the backbone of managing that enormous communications challenge. Because of my background and involvement in the environmental movement, OpenConcept has always had a pretty small footprint. Joining the Certified B Corporation community...

OpenConcept Moves to Carbon Neutral Hosting

mike — Thu, 16 Nov 2017 16:58:27 +0000

OpenConcept Moves to Carbon Neutral Hosting

OpenConcept is happy to have migrated our corporate servers into greener data centers. Currently all of our corporate servers are hosted by companies in Quebec that is almost entirely powered by hydro electric power. We have some dedicated servers with iWeb and are leveraging Amazon's new Montreal data center. In discussions with Certified B Corporations like Man Overboard and Mighty Bytes , I have learned a lot about the impact of the growth of data centers around the world. Man Overboard produced Serving.Green to raise awareness about the environmental impact of web hosting. Mighty Bytes has produced an EcoGrader for...

Bullfrog Power Helps Us To Reduce Our GHG Emissions

mike — Mon, 09 Oct 2017 20:33:37 +0000

Bullfrog Power Helps Us To Reduce Our GHG Emissions

With the climate chaos that we are seeing, it is clear that we need to do more to reduce our Greenhouse Gas Emissions (GHG) . Government and business leaders are getting behind the UN Sustainable Development Goals . These are 17 goals which are critical to our survival on this planet. Goal 13 is to "Take urgent action to combat climate change and its impacts", which is one I've been promoting personally for decades. In 2008, OpenConcept Consulting entered into an environmental partnership with Bullfrog Power , Canada’s leading green energy provider. Through this partnership, we pay a premium and...

Drafting a Procurement Policy

mike — Mon, 02 Oct 2017 18:46:06 +0000

Drafting a Procurement Policy

OpenConcept is a pretty small company and most of our services we consume are digital, so in the scheme of things, we have a pretty small footprint on our planet and our local economy. That being said, as Mahatma Gandhi said “Whatever you do will be insignificant, but it is very important that you do it." I just returned from my second B Corp Champions Retreat and I am even more enthusiastic about being able to leverage our small contributions to make a much bigger impact. I believe strongly in fixing the problems at the source, and many of our...

OpenConcept ranks in top 10% of B Corps on Positive Employee Impact

mike — Thu, 14 Sep 2017 13:47:08 +0000

OpenConcept ranks in top 10% of B Corps on Positive Employee Impact

We are happy to announce that OpenConcept Consulting Inc. has been recognized for creating the most positive overall community impact by the nonprofit B Lab . OpenConcept has been named a winner in the Best for Workers list, which means that in our B Impact Assessment we scored in the top 10 percent of more than 2,255 companies around the world. B Corporations are for-profit companies from around the world that have been certified by B Lab against rigorous standards of social and environmental performance, accountability, and transparency. The Workers portion of the B Impact Assessment measures how a company...

Building in Digital Accessibility - With an Ontario Example

mike — Tue, 13 Jun 2017 19:03:09 +0000

Building in Digital Accessibility - With an Ontario Example

Originally posted on LinkedIN in two parts. Building Digital Inclusion into Organizations There are an increasing number of organizations that are looking to make their organizations more inclusive to People with Disabilities (PwD). Some organizations do this because they are seeking talent, others because of ethics and still others because it is the law. There are lots of little steps that any organization could do to include more people with disabilities. This is a description of an approach for an organization that wanted to demonstrate leadership. Accessibility is a big field and although the physical environment is critical for some...

The Case for a Federated Open Departmental Web Strategy

mike — Mon, 12 Jun 2017 15:23:42 +0000

The Case for a Federated Open Departmental Web Strategy

Originally posted on LinkedIN in two parts. The Government of Canada’s Web Renewal Initiative has failed. It may not be public yet, but there really is no way to redeem this half-conceived initiative to centralize all government pages onto a single website - Canada.ca. This goal was lifted from the UK Government’s Government Digital Services (GDS). The goal of the GDS team was no less than digital transformation. Our government appears to have mistaken the alpha.gov.uk site as the end goal, rather than a platform with which to experiment with new ideas in government usability. The GDS is continuing to...

Inline Form Errors - What They Are and Why they Matter

mike — Mon, 05 Dec 2016 19:01:41 +0000

Inline Form Errors - What They Are and Why they Matter

This article was initially posted as a guest blog on The Digital Echidna Blog on December 2, 2016. Lots of organizations are working hard to see that their IT is accessible to their visitors and staff. Reducing barriers for effective two-way communications is really important for businesses that want to engage fully with their community. Unfortunately, many organizations overlook the many challenges with online web forms. Organizations who adopted Drupal 7 benefit from having semantic labels associated with their web forms automatically. This is a particular problem with custom built web-forms, but the Drupal community made an effort towards solid...

Drupal 8 - Accessibility Now; Supporting Continued Accessibility in the Future

mike — Fri, 02 Dec 2016 17:46:12 +0000

Drupal 8 - Accessibility Now; Supporting Continued Accessibility in the Future

This article was initially posted as a guest blog on The Digital Echidna Blog on November 29, 2016. So you’ve gone all out on making your website accessible. You considered accessibility at every stage of your project. You started by choosing Drupal. You then evaluated the wireframes for potential problems, took careful consideration that the colours had sufficient contrast, had your developers do regular accessibility checks with every sprint, brought in an external reviewer at the end of the project to evaluate your work, etc. It was the textbook example of how you should approach building a modern site using...

How small enterprises can leverage open-source to build for the enterprise

mike — Mon, 10 Oct 2016 12:32:22 +0000

How small enterprises can leverage open-source to build for the enterprise

This article was initially posted on August 31st, 2016 in ITBusiness.ca A few years ago I was told by someone at the Canada Revenue Agency (CRA) that they were looking for companies to do business with that were as big as they were, or slightly bigger. The CRA has about 40,000 employees. It is well established that the Canadian government favours working with big businesses. The phrase, “nobody ever got fired for buying IBM” is embedded in the thinking of most departments, although now it is Oracle, Adobe or Microsoft. Small business opportunities We know that small business delivers jobs...

Shortcuts to WCAG 2.0 AA Compliance

mike — Sun, 09 Oct 2016 13:43:38 +0000

Shortcuts to WCAG 2.0 AA Compliance

Recently I was asked if there were any products or services that would give users equivalent or greater accessibility than WCAG 2.0 Level AA. This is part of the feedback process for a report on web accessibility for state and local governments . In addressing this I wanted to make it clear that, at the root accessibility is about eliminating barriers to communications. Tim Berners-Lee saw the potential for the web being a great equalizer as it could allow people to communicate in a way which was completely inclusive. In practice, the web has evolved to provide barriers to 10-20%...

Leveraging Our Strengths 2016

mike — Thu, 29 Sep 2016 16:16:19 +0000

Leveraging Our Strengths 2016

I was happy to be asked to talk about Certified B Corporations as part of the 2016 Leveraging Our Strengths conference in Ottawa. With the growing focus on innovation in Canada, it felt good to be surrounded by exploring ways to adopt Social Innovation strategies. It is so encouraging to think about different models which we can organize in order to improve our world. Ottawa’s Impact Hub was one of the key organizers. I’ve always been impressed with the work of Hubbers and I sit on their Champions Circle to help support their great work. It was an event that...

Beyond CSR: Can Business be a Force for Good?

mike — Mon, 11 Jul 2016 20:18:19 +0000

Beyond CSR: Can Business be a Force for Good?

This article was initially posted on July 7, 2016 in the Green Ottawa: Gateway to a green, sustainable Ottawa . Are you an entrepreneur who would like to run your business in a way that also benefits society and the environment? Or are you a consumer who would like to deal with some of the most ethical, sustainable firms? “B Corporations” may be what you’re seeking. There are now 155 “B Corps” in Canada, including 72 in Ontario. My first experience with the concept of Fair Trade was in a church basement in the 70’s. It’s grown a lot since...

Real change is possible with software in GoC

mike — Wed, 06 Jul 2016 21:37:04 +0000

Real change is possible with software in GoC

This article was initially posted on July 5, 2016 in the Ottawa Business Journal . Justin Trudeau arrived at the White House in March for his first official visit as prime minister at the exact time as the White House announced its release of a draft policy for the U.S. federal government on reusable and open-source software . A coincidence, sure, but in this information age, it highlights how far behind Canada is in adopting a forward thinking open-source software policy. The U.S. government is very clear on this. “By harnessing 21st century technology and innovation, we’ve found new ways...

What's a Backup? (It's a Restore!)

mikem — Mon, 07 Mar 2016 22:55:11 +0000

What's a Backup? (It's a Restore!)

Backing up your data is a critical process for any business, and as computers become more ubiquitous in our daily lives it is critical for many of us in our personal lives as well. Quite often this has never occurred to a person, whether personally or professionally, and at first it may seem complicated; But it's not. A reliable and robust backup system really has two extremely important aspects: Your data must be replicated in a separate physical location, AND You must be able to restore from this off-site backup. That's all there is to it! These two principles, applied...

Adventures in GlusterFS

mikem — Wed, 10 Feb 2016 21:25:43 +0000

Adventures in GlusterFS

What is GlusterFS? GlusterFS is a distributed network filesystem. It acts as a file system which can be attached to a server for storage like any other, but using network sockets it can be configured in a variety of ways to distribute the files across a number of disparate servers simultaneously and in a fashion which is transparent to users. It can be deployed to replicate the same data across multiple servers (sort of like RAID mirroring), or bring together the free space of multiple servers into a single large volume (sort of like RAID striping), or distribute data across...

Web Accessibility, ATAG & Drupal 8

mike — Fri, 05 Feb 2016 19:30:17 +0000

Web Accessibility, ATAG & Drupal 8

Drupal 8 was released in December and it provides - by default - accessibility that is better than any other enterprise content framework. For the last 8 years we have been working on implementing defaults that are good for everyone, but this is only possible if you think about your website’s ecosystem. Adapting To The Ever Changing Web Web accessibility is a difficult challenge. When WCAG 2.0 came out in 2008, people hadn’t really starting thinking about how mobile devices would impact user behavior. Since then we’ve also seen the W3C release HTML5, WAI-ARIA and ATAG 2.0, which are huge...

Open* Collaboration & Innovation

mike — Fri, 05 Feb 2016 19:12:55 +0000

Open* Collaboration & Innovation

Open standards, open-source, open data, open government and open dialog. These are just some of the great benefits of the open web and why you should consider getting involved in the Open Source Initiative. It represents a real shift toward transparency that allows citizens to become engaged and can empower civil servants in their everyday work. The Open Source Community In Canada, the biggest success for open thinking was the Web Experience Toolkit. This project engaged existing open source projects like jQuery & Bootstrap to address the challenge of providing a multi-lingual, performant & accessible responsive interface. These are huge...

Green LAMP: Save energy and the environment by optimizing your website

mike — Wed, 03 Feb 2016 22:53:52 +0000

Green LAMP: Save energy and the environment by optimizing your website

This article originally written for OpenSource.com Optimized websites are better for the environment. Why? They are significantly faster, more usable, with content that’s optimized for SEO and user experience. This means that both computers and users spend less time waiting for the page to load. Back when I first was creating websites, back in 1995, the Internet was considerably simpler. People were using the web at that point, but it wasn't embedded in our lives like it is now. At that time the ecological footprint of the Internet was pretty small. Sure, there was already a network of computers that...

It's time for an open Canada.ca

mike — Thu, 07 Jan 2016 17:09:22 +0000

It's time for an open Canada.ca

This article was initially posted on Dec 22nd, 2015 in the Hill Times . If you have been on a federal government website in the past year, you may have noticed that it looks a bit different. Or you might not. The differences to the look and feel of the sites are a bit subtle for your average user. Almost all Canadians are unaware of the imminent plans to shift these sites to a proprietary content management system hosted in the US. The move from having government sites hosted in Canada and supported by Canadians, to being managed in the...

Measuring the Internet's environmental footprint

mike — Thu, 07 Jan 2016 15:01:31 +0000

Measuring the Internet's environmental footprint

This article was initially posted in on Dec 29nd, 2015 in the Ottawa Business Journal . Most of us are more connected to the Internet than ever before. Not only do we have phones, tablets, game consoles, and televisions that are connected , but we also use the net for shopping, civic engagement, social and archival purposes. New appliances, cars and devices use the Internet without many of us even knowing it. So much of our lives are tangled up in the Web, and all indications are that this trend is increasing by leaps and bounds. Many people are concerned...

Government and Business Can Cooperate for Greater Sustainability

mike — Mon, 04 Jan 2016 20:09:37 +0000

Government and Business Can Cooperate for Greater Sustainability

This article was written for the 2016 Masdar Blog Contest . I’ve been passionate about sustainability my entire adult life, all of which we have surpassed the earth's carrying capacity. When started my business, OpenConcept Consulting Inc. , my initial inspiration was to build collaboration within the not-for-profit sector. It was clear to me that many of the organizations world could be more effective if they were able to better collaborate. I saw open-source technology as a means to both advance their missions, and experiment with new ways of work together. Over the years we have done more work with...

Drupal 8’s Accessibility Advantage: ATAG Compliance

mike — Mon, 26 Oct 2015 16:00:13 +0000

Drupal 8’s Accessibility Advantage: ATAG Compliance

The W3C's Web Accessibility Initiative has recently (24 September 2015) released it's recommendations for Authoring Tool Accessibility Guidelines (ATAG) 2.0 . The process for releasing W3C guidelines is a long and arduous process. A Canadian institution, the Inclusive Design Institute , has taken a leadership role in creating these guidelines. If people were still hand crafting pages in raw HTML like I did when I started OpenConcept, this wouldn't be needed. Fortunately, almost everyone uses some editing tool to help them create web pages. Now I still do editing with a plain text editor, vi , much of the time,...

Tips for a Sustainable Drupal 7 & 8 Website

mike — Fri, 23 Oct 2015 13:58:19 +0000

Tips for a Sustainable Drupal 7 & 8 Website

Stephanie Daniels sums it up well, " Optimized sites are better for the environment. That’s because they’re significantly faster, more usable, with content that’s optimized for SEO and user experience. It’s my belief that Drupal has all of the tools in place to create sustainable websites…if you just know where to look.". If only I had Drupal back in 1995. That was the year I built my first website for a Fair Trade Retailer called Bridgehead. Back at this time, the Internet was a very different place. People were using the web at that point, but it wasn't embedded in...

Drupal 8’s Accessibility Advantage: Alt Tags & Defaults

mike — Fri, 23 Oct 2015 04:04:52 +0000

Drupal 8’s Accessibility Advantage: Alt Tags & Defaults

You may be familiar with the alternative text (alt) attribute that appears in <img> tags. The purpose of alt attributes is to provide a description of the contents of an image file. This description will appear when a user cannot see the image in their browser, when the image is searched on search engines, and in screen readers. But it is very easy to forget to include this text in your images and that is bad news for accessibility and SEO . In Drupal 8, alt attributes are now set to required by default on images . The same goes...

Drupal 8’s Accessibility Advantage: Colour Contrast & Low Vision

mike — Thu, 22 Oct 2015 00:26:11 +0000

Drupal 8’s Accessibility Advantage: Colour Contrast & Low Vision

Many of the accessibility changes that have been made in Drupal 8 are pretty subtle. Most people probably won't realize that there is a deeper blue in the header and probably won't care. There have been a lot of little changes in Drupal 8 though to improve colour contrast. Many contributors to Drupal 8 Core check to see that Drupal adheres to accessibility standards. Colour Contrast is one of those standards. The Colour Contrast Guidelines are provided to assist those who are color blind or have low vision . For most users, this may only affect them when they step...

Updating Google Analytics In Drupal

epringi — Tue, 20 Oct 2015 21:16:30 +0000

Updating Google Analytics In Drupal

Foreword : Google Analytics is a great tool to see where people are browsing on your site, to monitor traffic, and possibly some other perks I'm unaware of. ;) So it's important to make sure it still works when you're upgrading the Google Analytics Tracking ID and updating the Google Analytics module, or just updating the module. Why would you want to do that? Well: The 1.x branch of the Google Analytics module is now no longer supported, so if you want security updates you'll have to update to the 2.x branch (pretty straight-forward). If you're reading this post, you're...

Drupal 8’s Accessibility Advantage: HTML5 & Improved Semantics

mike — Mon, 19 Oct 2015 18:14:57 +0000

Drupal 8’s Accessibility Advantage: HTML5 & Improved Semantics

Remember those pesky divs you typically saw on a lot of Drupal sites? Wouldn’t it be great if you could actually understand what each of those divs actually meant? Well worry no more, Drupal 8 Core comes packaged with HTML5 optimized markup! If used HTML5 before, you’ll already know how big of an accessibility advantage this is. For those who haven’t, this blog is for you. Essentially the big difference between HTML5 and previous versions of HTML is semantics - how understandable and readable the code is. And HTML5 excels at it. HTML5’s Semantic Markup The biggest different between HTML5...

Drupal 8’s Accessibility Advantage: WAI-ARIA

mike — Fri, 16 Oct 2015 13:48:45 +0000

Drupal 8’s Accessibility Advantage: WAI-ARIA

You probably wont notice it, but Drupal 8 comes packed with WAI-ARIA markup to ensure that your pages are as semantically correct as they can be out of the box. Who will notice it though is blind users who rely on additional meaning to be hard coded into the HTML of the site, rather than inferred from the visual cues on the page. Let’s say you’ve got an employee named Jim who needs to navigate your Intranet site like all of your other employees. Jim’s legally blind, and the open-source screen reader NVDA to help him with his work. Jim,...

The Challenge of Web Accessibility

mike — Thu, 15 Oct 2015 12:28:48 +0000

The Challenge of Web Accessibility

“The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice.” I’ve been thinking of the inspiring Martin Luther King Jr. quote and how much it has in common to web accessibility. I don’t make this comparison lightly, but web accessibility is a serious social justice issue which has many parallels with the Civil Rights Movement which he led. People with disabilities are routinely barred from participating in public spaces, are limited in their economic and political opportunities and routinely discriminated against. Legislation like the Accessibility for Ontarians with Disabilities Act (AODA) has played a huge role in...

Introduction To Drupal 8’s Web Accessibility Advantages

mike — Wed, 14 Oct 2015 21:50:23 +0000

Introduction To Drupal 8’s Web Accessibility Advantages

Web accessibility is an important but often neglected piece of today’s web environment. Drupal 7 Core made a step in making the websites more accessible by default. Since it's release there have been improvements to Core's accessibility and also to the contributed modules to make the platform much more accessible. Drupal 8 has added extensive support for accessibility in the Core. For anyone trying to make a barrier-free website, it is important to know what these features are and how each can be used. Throughout this series we will look into the variety of accessibility features that Drupal 8 will...

Documentation in a Collaborative Environment

mike — Mon, 12 Oct 2015 16:24:10 +0000

Documentation in a Collaborative Environment

Working in a team can be a lovely experience or a total disaster. Most workplaces have dealt with these situations before, many are still emailing Word Documents between contributors and hoping to get feedback with track changes or comments which then need to get manually compiled. Using approaches like this can easily find maintaining a document almost unmanagable. Writing documentation can be just as polarizing. It has been two years since OpenConcept released the Drupal Security Guide , a document which provides important security principles, best practices for basic security, and extra steps to be considered. Originally, the document was...

The Alternative to PDF: Using Sphinx to Build an EPUB

mike — Fri, 09 Oct 2015 12:24:15 +0000

The Alternative to PDF: Using Sphinx to Build an EPUB

In a previous blog post, we explained why PDFs have outlived their usefulness and that you should be using the EPUB format instead. It just makes sense to use a format that gives you a wide variety of accessible and mobile-friendly options by default. But what is EPUB exactly and how does one use it? An EPUB file is a ZIP archive that contains HTML5 files, images, CSS style sheets, and everything used to essentially make a website. It can handle most elements that are associated with modern browsers, which make’s is a great way to share documents in a...

PDF is Dead, Long live EPUB

mike — Fri, 09 Oct 2015 03:22:21 +0000

PDF is Dead, Long live EPUB

PDFs have served their purpose, but it is time to stop using them. Just as they have become convenient to use they have outlived their usefulness . PDFs need to be seen as the liability that they are. PDFs were intended to be a Portable Document Format. Something that anyone could open and read in a common format. It’s been a way more professional way to send a document like a resume or annual report than using Microsoft Word. There are far fewer concerns about virus’ or version numbers and it generally managed to lock in the look of the...

Drupal Jargon Translated for Non-Technical Users

claire — Tue, 18 Aug 2015 15:59:17 +0000

Drupal Jargon Translated for Non-Technical Users

Drupal’s terminology can be confusing when you are not already familiar with it. I have gathered in this post essential terms that will should make non-technical people (or simply people new to Drupal)'s life easier. I'm happy to add to this list if people identify additional useful terms they feel need further definition. Core Core refers to the code files that make up the default functionality of a Drupal site when you download it from drupal.org. The functionality includes menu management, user management, system administration, design and layout, etc. Additional functionality can be included by adding modules to the Core...

10 Reasons Why You Should Use Drupal

claire — Tue, 11 Aug 2015 21:27:55 +0000

10 Reasons Why You Should Use Drupal

This blog post represents the first part of a presentation I made at DrupalCamp Ottawa 2015 called "Why would you use Drupal?". Drupal has grown from a regular CMS to a large-scale application almost able to compete with Enterprise Systems in that it can support business processes, reporting and data analytics in complex organizations. We currently call it a Web Application Framework as it allows for delivering performant and efficient web applications and web services. Drupal works on a very simple equation where Core Code + Contributed Modules + APIs = everything you want. At least, in theory. It striked...

An overview of software testing

mparker — Mon, 03 Aug 2015 13:31:19 +0000

An overview of software testing

"Software testing" is a term used to refer to a variety of methods, tools, and practices for verifying that a software application works, at many different levels. All of us in the web development industry do some sort of software testing (even if the testing we do is manual and ad hoc, e.g.: refreshing a webpage after making a change to ensure the code you just wrote works). In this blog post, I will attempt to discuss why you might want to move away from ad hoc testing to more-formal testing, try to dispel some myths about formal testing, and...

Automatically running linters on commit

mparker — Thu, 16 Jul 2015 13:31:13 +0000

Automatically running linters on commit

This post is a follow-up to last week's post, Conforming to coding standards with linters . As we learned last week, linters are tools that you can use to check if a file contains any syntax errors, and/or whether it conforms to coding standards. This blog post discusses how to ensure that linters get run automatically when you make a commit. If you find a better process, please blog about it and post a link in the comments! This tutorial assumes: You write or modify code, You have linters to run on your code, and, You use Git to manage...

Conforming to coding standards with linters

mparker — Wed, 15 Jul 2015 16:27:07 +0000

Conforming to coding standards with linters

At the the DrupalNorth code sprint , I spent some time chatting about code linters, and how to use them to ensure your code conforms to coding standards. So, I thought I'd share the process that works for me. If you find a better process, please blog about it and post a link in the comments! This tutorial assumes: You write or modify code in a language like PHP, JavaScript, CSS, Bash, etc. What is a linter? Simply put, a linter is a static analysis tool that you can run to ensure that your code is free from syntax and/or...

How & Why People With Disabilities Should Engage with Open-source Software Communities

mike — Wed, 08 Jul 2015 12:44:37 +0000

How & Why People With Disabilities Should Engage with Open-source Software Communities

I have been developing open-source software now for over a decade and feel that community software is a really important concept for inclusive technology. With the rise of the Linux operating system and more importantly with the growth of the Internet, more people and companies have embraced a collaborative culture. The growth of do-it-yourself initiatives that allow creators to use, modify and distribute ideas is key to making technology fit a wider range of humanity. My company, OpenConcept, has been developing open-source solutions for the Web for the last 15 years. We develop with a popular Content Management System (CMS)...

The Drupal North Code Sprint

mparker — Tue, 07 Jul 2015 21:40:23 +0000

The Drupal North Code Sprint

The inaugral Drupal North Regional Summit was a blast! The official Drupal North sprint was held on Sunday, June 28th, starting around 10am and ending at 4pm, in Ryerson University's Rogers Communication Centre Transmedia Zone. 21 attendees showed up from all over Canada, the United States, and even Costa Rica: Adam White from Upper Rapids , Alberto Rojas from Manatí , Chris Luckhardt , Claire Desbois from Floe design + technologies , Eric Jenkins from Digital Bridge Solutions , Jean-François Bohémier , Jeremy Knab , Jose Eduardo García Torres from Anexus IT , Kevin Newman from Digital Echidna , Martin...

Best practices for generating patches and interdiffs

mparker — Wed, 27 May 2015 15:27:52 +0000

Best practices for generating patches and interdiffs

I've often been asked how I generate both patches and interdiffs at the same time, because the instructions on drupal.org currently detail the two processes separately, and different documentation pages give different instructions. So, I thought I'd share the process that works for me, providing real-world examples from an issue that I've worked on . If you find a better process, please blog about it and post a link in the comments! This tutorial assumes that: You know what patchfiles are, You know how to use the command-line (the instructions should work in both *NIX and Windows), and, You have...

Drush REPL, or Drupal, Drush, PsySH for easier development

xavier — Fri, 08 May 2015 18:52:05 +0000

Drush REPL, or Drupal, Drush, PsySH for easier development

Compared to languages such as Ruby or Python, PHP lacks a good REPL . REPL stands for read-eval-print loop, and no, php - a doesn't count. A good REPL will, for one, Print the result of each operation, which the standard CLI SAPI doesn't do (and it had trouble with the Eval part until recently). What the php -a client is, however, is an interactive scripting environement. You can type code, statements, as if you were within a php script, and they'll be evaluate the same way. Enter boris . It is a quick, simple, tiny, powerful REPL for php,...

Emails in development, or how Mailcatcher saves the day

xavier — Mon, 27 Apr 2015 18:55:28 +0000

Emails in development, or how Mailcatcher saves the day

Most developers that have worked on web applications or websites have had to implement email sending functionality. Emails are extremely useful, as it allows your application to reach its users, even when they haven't visited it in a while, or to let them know that something important has happened. Unfortunately, testing email delivery is, or was, a harder problem to solve. Now that professional Drupal shops are increasingly using multiple environments (dev, staging, live, etc.), it is important to have facilties to test email delivery. In the past, the recommended method was add to code that would either reroute emails...

Promoting BCorps in Canada

mike — Sat, 21 Mar 2015 16:54:32 +0000

Promoting BCorps in Canada

OpenConcept organized and hosted an event in our offices to promote Benefit Corps (BCorp) earlier in the year. It was great to see just how many people came out to this event on a very cold February evening. We did this because we want to see more businesses in Canada become interested in becoming certified. We reached out to MP's & MPP's because there are legislative changes that can be made which will provide more incentives for businesses to become BCorps. We also reached out to municipal counselors as municipalities in the USA are starting to take measures to incentivize...

Why Use CART Services for your Next Event?

mike — Fri, 20 Mar 2015 09:44:33 +0000

Why Use CART Services for your Next Event?

Most people have never heard of Communication Access Realtime Translation (CART), but it is a great way to make a live event more accessible. CART isn't as good for the deaf as ASL, but it is generally seen as sufficient accommodations. The Canadian Hearing Society has some very legitimate concerns about how CART is implemented and provides suggestions about how this should be regulated better. I've now seen CART used at Carleton's Accessibility Summit , Accessibility Camp TO and CSUN15 but have only seen them at accessibility focused events. In organizing A11yYOW last year, we made sure to include CART...

Setting up GitLab and Mandrill

xavier — Fri, 13 Feb 2015 18:59:21 +0000

Setting up GitLab and Mandrill

This is the first part in a series of system administration and management posts. It used to be that if you wanted to run your own SCM system or VCS , you needed years of experience and a grey beard. However much has changed in the past few years. We at OpenConcept switched from bare Git to GitLab about a year ago. The driving factor behind our change was to simplify the management of repositories and give our clients the option to gain direct access to them. We also picked up a bunch of useful functionality at the same time;...

Computers are Everywhere, Security Awareness Is Even More Critical

mike — Fri, 13 Feb 2015 14:47:07 +0000

Computers are Everywhere, Security Awareness Is Even More Critical

With the cost of computers dropping we are seeing them in places most people don't recognize. It is totally amazing the computing power that's been built into the $35 Raspberry Pi and they are also in our cars, TVs and many other products that could never afford to be "smart" before. One of the most common devices that people don't see as computers is their router. Most organizations now have several routers to make it more convenient to access the Internet. Although they don't look much like computers, they are. OpenConcept is a web development shop and doesn't offer security...

Improving Web Accessibility - Starting with our own website

sbacharach — Wed, 28 Jan 2015 19:19:16 +0000

Improving Web Accessibility - Starting with our own website

OpenConcept has been deeply involved in raising awareness about web accessibility for a long time. As we were developing our new website, we took this opportunity to make it as accessible as possible. Having proper alternate text for images is the low hanging fruit of web accessibility, however there were a few instances where we had to address some more unusual challenges. In order to provide the alt and title attributes to the user profile images by default, we actually had to develop a custom module. This is something we are working on getting resolved in Drupal 8 , however...

Single Exposed Filter Block for Multiple Views Displays

dylan — Mon, 12 Jan 2015 18:18:55 +0000

Single Exposed Filter Block for Multiple Views Displays

Chances are, any two visitors to your website will have different preferences when it comes to consuming the content you're offering. People browse websites for various purposes, with a wide variety of preferences and biaises. Providing visitors with options on how content is displayed is appreciated when presented via an intuitive user interface. In the past, clients have asked me to display lists of content in multiple formats (which is fairly straightforward with a basic understanding of the Views module) and to allow the user to decide what format is most approriate. In this example, I'll use geographical data as...

Gratitude & the Drupal Community

mike — Fri, 19 Dec 2014 14:37:06 +0000

Gratitude & the Drupal Community

At this time of year, a lot of people are thinking about gifts, both those that we give and receive. It is often a joyous time, although often stressful too. People come together and often reflect on what has happened in the last year, celebrate the victories and set new goals for the year ahead. We have a great deal to be thankful for and it is a time of year when we find ourselves expressing gratitute for those who have supported us and are part of our community. I don't think we are particularly good at doing this in...

Ladies Learning Code - Drupal Ottawa

mike — Mon, 01 Dec 2014 18:04:00 +0000

Ladies Learning Code - Drupal Ottawa

I was happy to have OpenConcept well represented at Ottawa's first Ladies Learning Code Drupal event. There was a great turnout of interested people, keen to get their feet wet learning Drupal. Mathew Winstone from Coldfront Labs led the full day event. It was clear how much work he had put into getting new people who weren't familiar with programming started with Drupal. It was great to be able to leverage Pantheon 's free hosting service to get people started. Fortunately, we didn't need to introduce the students to Git or installing a local environment before getting them involved in...

BADCamp 2014 - Accessibility & Drupal 8

mike — Mon, 01 Dec 2014 16:56:56 +0000

BADCamp 2014 - Accessibility & Drupal 8

San Francisco is beautiful in the fall, BADCamp has become a real institution in the Drupal community, and I had an opportunity to present about Drupal 8's accessibility. So I packed my bags and flew down to sunny California and was able to participate in several Drupal Core Code Sprints , the NGO Summit and several talks. It is useful to go to these community events and to have a chance to hang out with other people who are shaping this community. The Drupal community involves a lot of passionate people who believe strongly in collaboration. It is always exciting...

A11yYOW - Building Ottawa's Accessibility Community

mike — Thu, 23 Oct 2014 04:00:00 +0000

A11yYOW - Building Ottawa's Accessibility Community

Digital Accessibility is a really big and complicated issue. There are no simple fixes because the technology keeps changing and the web standards are regularly being adjusted in attempt to keep up. A site that is considered accessible today, may not be accessible viewed this way in 6 months. Ultimately it is about building technology such that the widest number of people can have the greatest access to the web. The web has become our town square and school as well as our our path to city hall and venue for purchasing for goods and services. Increasingly, to be an...

FairSay Training Tour - the Canadian Edition

mike — Wed, 22 Oct 2014 04:00:00 +0000

FairSay Training Tour - the Canadian Edition

It was great to work with Duane Raymond and George Irish to create a FairSay campaign/fundraising training in Ottawa on October 15th. I've corresponded with Duane for many years and have always wanted to make the trip to Oxford to go to the eCampaigning Forum. After organizing these events for over a decade, Duane has built quite a considerable base of knowledge and an extensive global network. In the afternoon session we had very interesting conversations on building a digital election strategy for 2015, retaining supporters online, effective eCampaigning models and converting online activists to donors. There were two streams...

Our First B Corporation Champions Retreat

mike — Fri, 17 Oct 2014 04:00:00 +0000

Our First B Corporation Champions Retreat

I had a great time in Burlington earlier this month with the B Corporation community . It was inspiring to be around people working for change and meeting people who are working to make business a force for good in this world. Over 350 people came from around the world to attend this event and it was exciting to see how global this movement has become. The event was held in Vermont and it was clear to see the pride of all of the local B Corps who have been fighting to make a difference in this community. I went...

POODLE SSL Vulnerability: Protect Yourself

mikem — Wed, 15 Oct 2014 17:20:14 +0000

POODLE SSL Vulnerability: Protect Yourself

On October 14, 2014 Google announced that SSLv3 (Secure Socket Layer, version 3) was vulnerable to an attack which has been given the cute name POODLE (Padding Oracle On Downgraded Legacy Encryption). OpenConcept has previously recommended the removal of support for SSLv3 in our Drupal Security Guide . Fallback to SSLv3 has been disabled on OpenConcept's servers. All HTTP servers providing encrypted service (HTTPS) should be forced to drop SSLv3 and support only TLS (Transport Layer Security). See the guide for instructions on how to do this. It is important to note that everyone who uses SSL should take action...

1.5 Decades - A History of OpenConcept

mike — Thu, 11 Sep 2014 03:52:00 +0000

1.5 Decades - A History of OpenConcept

This is a story of our origins that I hope will resonate with others seeking change in this world. There are many truths, some of them are here. Foundation The name OpenConcept came from a kitchen table conversation between three friends: Nancy Shaver , Russell McOrmond and myself. The initial idea was to use the Web as an interface for Popular Education (PopEd) and to help build Sustainable Communities. This idea never got off the ground at the time, but Russell continued to direct me in the essentials of HTML, PHP , MySQL and server administration. Russell also schooled me...

Canada's Cities Need a Digital Roadmap

mike — Tue, 09 Sep 2014 04:00:00 +0000

Canada's Cities Need a Digital Roadmap

Canada's Cities Need a Digital Roadmap, and it needs to engage with citizens. Most Canadians interact with the local level of government more than any other, and increasingly this is being done electronically Defining a Digital Roadmap A roadmap is a common planning tool to help both visualize and achieve a particular goal. It's useful to build consensus around any multi-stakeholder process. Projects often stall if they get caught up in the details, because there is no strategic approach to define priorities that everyone understands. Technology plays a critical role in most municipalities that goes well beyond infrastructure. Yes, many...

Moving Into the West End Well

mike — Sat, 06 Sep 2014 04:00:00 +0000

Moving Into the West End Well

I didn't start OpenConcept because I was interested in business, I started this company because I saw the Internet as being a vehicle of much needed change in our world. So when thinking about the future of my business, I had pretty non-traditional way of looking at growth. My initial inspirations about OpenConcept as a business started around a kitchen table over 15 years ago, and in much of this time has been spent around a kitchen table. What I knew was that progressive organizations needed to be better at collaborating with each other and that open source web tools...

Travelling to Twin Cities Drupal Camp

mike — Thu, 04 Sep 2014 04:00:00 +0000

Travelling to Twin Cities Drupal Camp

At DrupalCon Austin I was asked by Barry Madore of Triplo to talk about Drupal & Accessibility at TCDrupal 2014. In 2013, a team of people had done some great usability and accessibility work on Drupal 8 at the University of Minnesota . This seemed like an excellent opportunity to follow-up on that. This year Twin Cities Drupal Camp took place from August 7-10. I spent a bunch of my time there in the Awesome Room, which was where the sprints were taking place on Saturday. I couldn't get there in the week unfortunately, but was able to present my...

25 Years on the Internet

mike — Wed, 03 Sep 2014 04:00:00 +0000

25 Years on the Internet

I was a relatively early adopter of the Internet, having gotten a Bitnet account at the University of Calgary through the Shad Valley program. Of course I'd been involved in BBS 's & Fidonet before this, but that branch of computer networking died when the Internet started to take off. It was exciting to see the range of conversations on Usenet newsgroups , mailing lists and of course through email. I became very involved in exploring what could be done with this technology and in 1990 began approaching non-profits, encouraging them to invest in this technology to help them accompish...

Codefest 2014 - The Web Experience Toolkit

cwright — Tue, 02 Sep 2014 04:00:00 +0000

Codefest 2014 - The Web Experience Toolkit

I had the opportunity to attend CodeFest 2014 in Ottawa. This two-day conference was a great chance for anyone who “works in the web” to get together, share their expertise and learn from their peers. Background Codefest is a free, volunteer-run conference centered around the Web Experience Toolkit (WET) . WET is an open source project led by the Government of Canada that is developed openly on GitHub. The focus of WET is to develop an innovative, user-centered web experience that can be widely deployed through an open and collaborative process of development. Topical Chats and Technical Talks The morning...

Accessibility Summit - Fixing Accessibility At the Source

mike — Fri, 11 Jul 2014 02:10:00 +0000

Accessibility Summit - Fixing Accessibility At the Source

I am presenting at Ottawa's first Accessibility Summit . It's a 20 minute presentation on Fixing Accessibility Problems at the Source which I am using to talk about Drupal's experience trying to meet WCAG 2.0 AA. The slides from this event are available on slides.com , a neat service that works nicely using the open source library reveal.js . I totally loved that I could both edit the HTML directly in the interface and also import/export and host my files wherever I wanted to.For my Accessibility Summit Slides . I am including my notes here as part of this. Hopefully...

Web Accessibility is Complicated, ATAG is Necessary

mike — Thu, 05 Jun 2014 19:11:05 +0000

Web Accessibility is Complicated, ATAG is Necessary

Anyone who has been involved Web Accessibility knows that the basics are quite simple, but that it can get complicated really quickly. Training people to create content that can be perceived by people with varieties of sight, hearing, mobility & cognitive challenges is no small task, and ultimately we all make mistakes. Most web content now is being created through Content Management Systems, which are helping to simplify the process of producing content. The future seems to be bright for systems that can manage small chunks of data which are assembled on the fly to give users a personalized experience...

Welcome to the OC Team, Claire!

cindy — Thu, 05 Jun 2014 04:00:00 +0000

Welcome to the OC Team, Claire!

We're happy to announce that Claire-Isabelle Carlier is now a permanent member of our staff in the new position of Business Development and Marketing Manager. Over the past few months, on top of learning a lot about Drupal, about our company and our clients, and about working in Canada, Claire has already proven to be a valuable member of our team. She has updated our corporate look, logo and values statement; produced several proposals for new work; started enhancing our online presence (stay tuned, more to come!); prepared collateral and give-aways for two conferences; organized our luncheon talk for GAAD...

Supporting Community Services – Everyone Wins!

cindy — Fri, 30 May 2014 19:00:00 +0000

Supporting Community Services – Everyone Wins!

OpenConcept prides itself on supporting the community, and takes action to do so in several ways – one of which is encouraging staff to volunteer with community groups and services that they are passionate about, and getting behind that volunteer work by allowing for flexible hours and through corporate charitable donations. I've been volunteering for the Distress Centre of Ottawa and Region (DCOR) for about five years now, and I'm so grateful for the support Mike Gifford has shown for this service and my involvement in it since I began working at OpenConcept at the end of 2011. The Distress...

Building Community on Drupal.org

mike — Wed, 28 May 2014 14:53:00 +0000

Building Community on Drupal.org

Yesterday we saw profile images get into Drupal.org. This has gotten a bunch of positive feedback as it both modernizes the look of the community and addresses a style bug that goes back to 2010 when the last design (Bluecheese) was applied to the site. More importantly though it puts a face on the contributors of the d.o community -- we are no longer just anonymous blue nicknames ! The styling changes on Drupal.org are a nice improvement, mostly because it is a regular reminder about the individuals who are pushing to make Drupal better. Hopefully when we see the...

Translating user-entered strings in D7

mparker — Wed, 21 May 2014 19:30:00 +0000

Translating user-entered strings in D7

The Internationalization suite of modules do a pretty good job of making everything translatable in Drupal 7. But, if you're writing a module that stores its data outside variables or entities, you might notice a few gaps. On a recent project, I noticed that field display settings ( field formatter settings for those familiar with the Field API ) are not translatable by default. In many cases, this is fine because the field settings in core modules don't make sense to translate: for example, the number of characters to trim a summary at or the image style to use. Never...

Global Accessibility Awareness Day 2014

mike — Thu, 15 May 2014 04:00:00 +0000

Global Accessibility Awareness Day 2014

This was a more in-person presentation about web accessibility issues in general.  We showcased some general issues and facilitating a bit of a discussion to raise awareness. We welcomed people from different backgrounds, including government services, universities and design agencies. The topic was addressed to a non-technical audience to raise awareness on accessibility. Global Accessibility Awareness Day (GAAD) began pretty well this year for us. I started by participating in Inclusive Design 24 (#ID24) with a 7am presentation. For those who missed it the talk live, a recording should be available soon. In the interim, I quickly posted the presentation...

OC spring Vegetable Gardens

jesse — Wed, 07 May 2014 16:44:00 +0000

OC spring Vegetable Gardens

There are many great things about working for OpenConcept, but two that I appreciate in particular are the homemade lunches we take turns making for everyone and share each day, and the fact that we are encouraged to follow our own interests. OC always gets behind you on your pet projects. Personally, I love to grow my own food and have been encouraging urban farming initiatives locally here in Ottawa for some time now. In 2013, I was pleased to be able to start a garden here at OC headquarters to supplement the garden space I have at my own...

Want to be a Core Contributor? Drupal 7 Needs You!

mike — Wed, 30 Apr 2014 01:02:00 +0000

Want to be a Core Contributor? Drupal 7 Needs You!

Yes, all of the attention is on Drupal 8. D8, will be amazing! It totally makes sense that when folks talk about Core development that they think about the latest version. Sometimes though it seems that we forget that there are two stable releases with hundreds of thousands of sites using them for every development version of Core. If this proposal gets accepted, which I think it will, there will 3 supported releases of Core for a few months when the Drupal 9 branch is started. So we know when Drupal 8 is released that there will still be 3-4...

Shutting Down Make the Change

mike — Wed, 16 Apr 2014 22:43:00 +0000

Shutting Down Make the Change

Back in 2007, Russell McOrmond , Phillip Smith and myself decided to set up a service for the Canadian NGO community to make it easier to match individuals with their elected officials. It seems like a pretty basic component of any effective democracy, but it still isn't something that is available to Canadians. At the time, Statistics Canada offered a database of postal codes to riding associations. For $3000 you could buy a database on a CD and have the rights to buy updates every year. The license allowed us to resell access to the database through an API (Application...

OpenSSL Heartbleed Vulnerability CVE-2014-0160

mikem — Thu, 10 Apr 2014 18:12:00 +0000

OpenSSL Heartbleed Vulnerability CVE-2014-0160

What is "Heartbleed"? "Heartbleed" is the common name being used to refer to a critical security vulnerability found in the OpenSSL TLS Heartbeat system. OpenSSL is a very popular encryption library in widespread use across the Internet. It is considered to be a critical piece of software infrastructure to countless organizations worldwide. It is the library in use on most Open Source systems to enable encryption, such as with HTTPS . The nature of the vulnerability allowed anyone to retrieve chunks of system memory from a web server with an affected OpenSSL package. This did not require any special network...

Happy Birthday Drupal!

cindy — Wed, 15 Jan 2014 21:18:00 +0000

Happy Birthday Drupal!

Drupal is 13 today! The community continues to grow and we are proud to be a part of it! A good excuse to enjoy some cake with lunch.

Looking to "B" a Better Business

mike — Tue, 14 Jan 2014 16:22:00 +0000

Looking to "B" a Better Business

We are always looking for ways to become a better business. We have always strived to meet the needs of our clients and staff in a cost effective and environmentally friendly fashion. Last year we started the process of becoming a Certified B Corporation , as it seemed to fit well within the work we've done in the past decade. It was a very interesting process and raised many issues that we hadn't considered previously, which would expand the impact we can have as a business. It is really empowering to be part of a movement that is working to...

OpenConcept is Proud to Sponsor DrupalCamp Ottawa 2014

mike — Tue, 14 Jan 2014 03:37:00 +0000

OpenConcept is Proud to Sponsor DrupalCamp Ottawa 2014

Once again we're happy to sponsor Drupal Camp Ottawa . We'll have more posts on this soon. There are a number of sessions we're looking forward to presenting and as always look forward to meeting with others in the Drupal community to work together to strengthen the code that glues us together.

Happy Holidays to Everyone in 2013

mike — Fri, 20 Dec 2013 23:16:00 +0000

Happy Holidays to Everyone in 2013

Another year is coming to a close and we are again wishing you all the happiest of holidays at this special time of year. 2013 has been a very exciting year for us, including some amazing projects, new team members and fun DrupalCons and Camps. We are also proud that as of this week we are a Certified B Corporation . Looking forward to another interesting year to come! We wish you and yours all the best in 2014 - The OpenConcept Team

We've Joined the B Corps Community!

mike — Fri, 20 Dec 2013 22:10:00 +0000

We've Joined the B Corps Community!

We started the process of becoming a B Corporation early in 2013 after being exposed to it through HubOttawa in January. Initially it seemed like it would be an interesting way to more officially support the kind of work that we've been doing since we began in 1999. There are plenty of people who see starting a web business as a type of get-rich-quick scheme. I started OpenConcept for a very different reason; I saw that running a small business could be a way I could work to make the world better. I was surprised though when I first took...

Multiple language domains made easy

jesse — Fri, 13 Dec 2013 21:23:00 +0000

Multiple language domains made easy

With two back to back Drupal 7 multilingual projects involving unique domains for each language we kept running into the same frustration. Syncing the databases back and forth from local, testing, staging, and live environments in a way that does not require manually going into the database to chage the language domain settings seemed impossible, or at least as elusive as a fox. All I personally wanted was a simple way to override the language domains depending on the environment I was working on. The easiest way I could imagine would be to set variables in the $conf array within...

Making Drupal 7 form field elements more accessible with aria-describedby links

jesse — Tue, 03 Dec 2013 17:10:00 +0000

Making Drupal 7 form field elements more accessible with aria-describedby links

Working recently with an accessibility focus group has provided some very useful insight into areas where we can make some quick accessibility improvements to Drupal 7. Amongst several other similar improvements in terms of Aria related attributes, we have come to the conclusion that adding aria-describedby to form field elements will help with providing context between form elements and their descriptions. Without context, form field descriptions are confusing. The following is a short example of how we can easily add aria-describedby attributes to Drupal 7 core and webform module forms using theme and preprocess functions: Also, here is a link...

APC, Varnish, Memcache, and Caching Beyond Drupal Core

mikem — Thu, 28 Nov 2013 20:41:00 +0000

APC, Varnish, Memcache, and Caching Beyond Drupal Core

Drupal is a powerful web application framework and Content Management System. It is capable of serving high volume websites at incredible speeds. But a poorly configured cache setting can grind your web site to a halt, leaving impatient visitors waiting for pages. Excessive page load times will even drive some visitors away with the impression that your site has gone down. The most common recommendations for Drupal 7.x caching beyond the defaults provided in Core are APC, Varnish, and Memcache. Each plays its own specific role, and requires its own configuration settings to be reviewed by the site administrator. As...

When Even Our Kids Can Hack a Government Site...

mike — Fri, 01 Nov 2013 02:31:00 +0000

When Even Our Kids Can Hack a Government Site...

It is really, really embarrassing that a kid in elementary school could hack into any government computer system, however a 12 year old boy has pleaded guilty to doing just that in 2012 . I'm not sure how much is known about how he did this, and no doubt he is a very bright and curious child, but this really needs to be a glaring warning about a systemic problem with how governments in Canada manage security. In my dealings with government IT, I find far too often that departments go only so far as to apply a CYA approach...

Principles of Web Security

mike — Wed, 25 Sep 2013 15:18:00 +0000

Principles of Web Security

We've been doing a lot of work recently building a best practice guide on security and wanted to be able to send our clients a simple list of principles that are written in plain language. There is Safety in the Herd: Leverage large, well maintained open source libraries (packages) with a critical mass of users and developers. Use compiled packages and check data integrity of downloaded code. Start with OpenBSD, Debian/Ubuntu or RedHat/CentOS WITHOUT cPanel. Order Matters: Don’t open up services to the Internet before your server is properly secured. Limit Exposure: Only install and maintain what is necessary. Reduce...

Panels, Display Suite, and Panopoly - Oh My!

openconcept — Thu, 04 Jul 2013 14:56:00 +0000

Panels, Display Suite, and Panopoly - Oh My!

Drupal often gets compared to a set of lego blocks each with a different purpose, and to build a Drupal site you simply have to find the blocks you need and build the site. Easy! Well, for a seasoned developer it may be easy, but for someone starting out it may be a bit daunting. Especially since you don't usually get a pre-packaged kit of all the Drupal blocks you need for your desired site - instead you have to wade through tens of thousands of modules on Drupal.org to pick and choose the ones that best suit your needs...

The Flow of Content & Code

mike — Tue, 25 Jun 2013 21:40:00 +0000

The Flow of Content & Code

There are lots of ways to set up a enterprise server environment for Drupal, but in dealing with IT folks who are coming from other Content Management Systems (CMS) or worse static sites, there is an asumption that for an organization to have control, that they need to have a completely isolated server. Many organizations historically have not had a CMS which had the workflow structure and level of interactivity that Drupal comes with. Historically, the staging server has been used as the final Quality Assurance (QA) environment for new content. It was also used as a barrier between the...

How Procurement Can Shape Software

mike — Fri, 21 Jun 2013 12:31:00 +0000

How Procurement Can Shape Software

OpenConcept believes in the importance of community & the power of open source. Drupal is a great software product, but the community behind it is bigger and better than the software itself. Open source approaches are really disruptive when they are applied properly because they can disrupt the producer/consumer mindset which has been drilled into our heads over the last 50 years. When we realize that we can contribute something which helps others and by making the community stronger also helps ourselves. Sadly there are a few process in place which really hinder that participation. There are a lot of...

Micro Payments, Flattr & Supporting Open Source Development

openconcept — Thu, 20 Jun 2013 14:16:00 +0000

Micro Payments, Flattr & Supporting Open Source Development

We're going to begin a small experiment in using Flattr to help support our work with the Drupal community. We've got a huge problem in the Drupal community in that we are either relying on volunteers to "scratch an itch" or on Drupal shops (or freelancers) like ourselves to fit it into one or more contracts to see that we have some way to pay for our time. When the itch is no longer scratchy, or we're just too busy with other work to consider taking on maintaining projects that we, as contributors, have started, then projects become stale and...

Non-Profits and Drupal

Anonymous — Fri, 14 Jun 2013 19:10:19 +0000

Non-Profits and Drupal

When I told my dad I was working with Drupal he responded, “Hey, that’s what my company uses!” I shouldn’t have been too surprised considering he works for Amnesty International which has been using Drupal since 2007. In fact, a number of nonprofits have turned to open source platforms, specifically Drupal, to get information about themselves and their efforts available online. Here’s a look as to why so many organizations have made the switch: Drupal allows an easy translation functionality - ideal for international organizations which require their information to reach a wider audience. With one website and one installation,...

Bits are Abundant - So Lets Start Thinking That Way!

mike — Tue, 11 Jun 2013 18:53:00 +0000

Bits are Abundant - So Lets Start Thinking That Way!

Buckminster Fuller was a real visionary, but he died in 1983 and the backbone of the Internet TCP/IP was only standardized in 1982, so it would be hard to imagine how he would have been able foresee either the World Wide Web, let alone the re-thinking of intellectual property that has come about with the growth of Free Software (or Open Source Software). He definitely thought out of the box as he strove to "make the world work for 100% of humanity in the shortest possible time through spontaneous cooperation." One of his main critiques of our economic system was...

Why Aural UI should be a Priority (Accessibility @ DrupalCon Portland)

Anonymous — Tue, 11 Jun 2013 16:13:00 +0000

Why Aural UI should be a Priority (Accessibility @ DrupalCon Portland)

Accessibility is a very important topic here at Open Concept, as our own Mike Gifford is a champion for accessibility and an organizer for the Drupal Group on Accessibility. As someone with a background in both health and information studies, I understand the necessity of designing a website to cater to the diverse users who need to access essential information. With limited knowledge of where Drupal is at in regards to accessibility, I set out to learn about the issues and new developments coming out of DrupalCon Portland. Jesse Beach - a member of Drupal’s accessibility group - gave two...

DrupalCon with Vincenzo

mike — Mon, 10 Jun 2013 16:36:00 +0000

DrupalCon with Vincenzo

We did it! The Drupal community successfully fundraised to bring Vincenzo Rubano to DrupalCon Portland. Vincenzo is a blind Italian student that has been contributing to Core for the last year. This was one of the first successful crowdsourcing efforts in the Drupal community and we were really happy to show that it can work. This proved that Drupal developers and shops are willing to use alternative means to bring folks to DrupalCon. The week went fast, but I wanted to highlight a few key elements of our discussions from the conference. The first person we wanted to meet with...

Drupal Association Guest Blog: Drupal Crowd-Funding Success!

mike — Sat, 08 Jun 2013 20:15:00 +0000

Drupal Association Guest Blog: Drupal Crowd-Funding Success!

We did it! The Drupal community raised $5k to bring Vincenzo Rubano to DrupalCon Portland. This is an amazing accomplishment that demonstrates that crowdsourcing to support the Drupal community can work very well. Although it's been an idea that's been brewing for a while, we've been doing all that we could to bring Vincenzo to a DrupalCon . Vincenzo is a blind Italian student who is just finishing high-school. In the fall he started contributing enhancements to Drupal 8. As a screen reader user, he has been able to identify & test problems and effectively communicate them through the issue...

The True Costs of Hosting

mikem — Tue, 04 Jun 2013 21:20:00 +0000

The True Costs of Hosting

"$1 Hosting Sale - Reliable, Secure & 99.9% Uptime‎" "Only $3.95/month + $10 Off Today!" "$1/mo 30GB Space 100GB Traffic, PHP, 100 Databases, 40+ Site/Blog Apps‎" "Cheap Web Hosting Canada from $1/mo Web Site Hosting" ... These are just some of the offers being made for bottom-line hosting solutions on today's World Wide Web. Offers that seem almost too good to be true. Often times things that seem that way end up being exactly that. It's not that they should be avoided completely, but when deciding what you need from your personal, organization, or corporate web site it is important...

DevOps @ DrupalCon Portland: What I Learned

mikem — Mon, 03 Jun 2013 21:14:00 +0000

DevOps @ DrupalCon Portland: What I Learned

DrupalCon Portland was held at the Oregon Convention Centre from May 20 - 24, 2013. I found out I was going in place of a coworker who could not make it about 5 days ahead of time. What a ride! Without much time to prepare my schedule, equipment, or fun adventures while on the West coast, I packed a laptop, some socks, and shot off for whatever might await me... It was daunting at first - a busy week chock full of amazing talks, great opportunities to learn and discuss and socialize - all in front of me without a...

What is Open Government?

Anonymous — Fri, 31 May 2013 17:48:00 +0000

What is Open Government?

As the newest member of the Open Concept team, I wasted no time trying to learn as much as I could about various initiatives using Drupal as its main platform. This mainly entailed watching numerous videos from DrupalCon, starting with Ottawa’s own DrupalCamp in March (organized in part by Open Concept), and now I’m slowly getting through all the new material coming out of DrupalCon Portland. Although some of the code-heavy videos targeted towards developers tend to elude me, I do find myself interested in the ones discussing open government. This probably has to do with my background in knowledge...

What Managers Need to Know About Security

mike — Thu, 16 May 2013 20:50:00 +0000

What Managers Need to Know About Security

This is was originally titled What Communications Managers Should Know (and Do) About Web Security , but that was just way too long a title. Security is something that everyone needs to understand on a basic level in our modern society, but staff need to know more as their organizational mission can also be jeopardized. For people in management it is especially important as they set the tone for everyone else. IT security simply cannot be left to the techies to take care of. The risks are huge, it’s complicated, and unfortunately if management ignores it, it won’t just go...

Crowd Funding for Drupal Accessibility

mike — Wed, 10 Apr 2013 18:10:00 +0000

Crowd Funding for Drupal Accessibility

We were successfully able to raise the funds to bring Vincenzo to DrupalCon. Thanks everyone, was a great community effort! I first encountered @falcon03 in the Drupal 8 issue queue in September of 2012. At that point I didn't know why he was interested in accessibility issues or what, if anything, he had to contribute to the discussion. With the Drupal 7 Core issue queues, over 400 people have participated in the discussions, patches and tests. Most are active on just a couple issues out of the many that were tagged with accessibility. A few of the participants, like Jason...

Videos from DrupalCamp Ottawa

mike — Mon, 25 Mar 2013 14:25:00 +0000

Videos from DrupalCamp Ottawa

We really enjoyed the opportunity to be part of organizing Ottawa's first DrupalCamp. It was a great success, and as a platinum sponsor we were happy to see it take place. There were a lot of good presentations, but we'd like to highlight a few of them here on our site. The first is a great talk by Tom Erickson, CEO of Acquia talking about Drupal & government around the world. As an Acquia Partner, OpenConcept was really happy that so many of their team was able to come in to participate in this event. It was also a pleasure...

Is Your Website Using Drupal 6? Time to Start Planning Your Upgrade!

Anonymous — Fri, 15 Mar 2013 09:15:00 +0000

Is Your Website Using Drupal 6? Time to Start Planning Your Upgrade!

Laura Scott posted an excellent article at Pingv that makes the case which OpenConcept hopes every Drupal 6 user will immediately take to heart; it's time to be actively working on your website upgrade . We excerpt and link Laura's article as she spells it out as well as anyone could, but we will underscore a couple of the main points: With the impending release of Drupal 8 people still running Drupal 6 have only three options, one of which isn't actually an option at all, and another isn't really an option for most users either. The three options are:...

Ontario.ca Chooses Drupal - A Win for the AODA

mike — Wed, 13 Feb 2013 10:47:00 +0000

Ontario.ca Chooses Drupal - A Win for the AODA

We were happy to see that at the end of 2012, the main website for the Government of Ontario(GoO) moved to Drupal 7. Their new site demonstrates that it is possible to have a visually interesting site that meets the Accessibility for Ontarians with Disabilities Act(AODA). Many folks reading this blog post will know that the AODA requires a wide range of organizations within Ontario to meet the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG 2.0 AA). WCAG is an International standard organized by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), they are responsible for a number of standards for the Internet including...

BADCamp Blog 3

dylan — Tue, 22 Jan 2013 15:16:00 +0000

BADCamp Blog 3

Check out Part 1 of my adventures in California . Or, I you have already heard about Day 1, check out Part 2 of the series . Day 3 at BADCamp started out very much the same as my first two mornings in the Bay Area. I headed out early, made my way East through the waking streets of San Francisco, and hopped aboard the BART Train to Berkely, muffin in hand. I arrived at the now familiar campus of UC Berkeley and made my way to the Pauley Ballroom with a bit of time to spare before the start...

Drupal 7 WET/WxT Variant - The Government of Canada's Distribution

mike — Mon, 21 Jan 2013 15:48:00 +0000

Drupal 7 WET/WxT Variant - The Government of Canada's Distribution

We've been strategizing, evaluating & deploying the Government of Canada's (GoC) Drupal 7 Web eXperience Toolkit (WxT) since it was first released over a year ago. We've implemented this for government agencies inside & outside the GoC because it is clear that so many agencies need to meet the dual challenge of a site which is both bilingual & accessible. The Drupal Variant of the Web eXperience Toolkit is an open platform for web publishing which has a critical mass of public sector agencies collaborating with it publicly in GitHub. It is also exciting to see institutions like the University...

BADCamp Blog 2

dylan — Mon, 07 Jan 2013 10:22:00 +0000

BADCamp Blog 2

Check out Part 1 of my adventures in California. Apart from a simpler trip from San Francisco to Berkeley, day 2 of BADCamp started out much the same as day 1. The Mobile Summit was held in the same room as the UI/UX Summit. The morning's sessions were presented by John Albin Wilkins (of Zen fame) and Sam Richard , a front-end developer who currently works for NBC Universal. John's presentation was an update on the status of Drupal 8's Mobile Initiative and an overall perspective on the importance of developing for mobile. Sam's presentation (which he called a "Fireside...

Drupal Camp Toronto 2012

jesse — Mon, 19 Nov 2012 09:11:00 +0000

Drupal Camp Toronto 2012

My first Drupal Camp Toronto experience is sadly over. There was a whole lot to absorb and although I found that I did learn a few new things, the most beneficial part of the conference for me was the inspiration I gained from others. I met many kindred spirits and future partners in crime. It was really interesting to learn about some of the initiatives that others are pushing forward. Overall I would say that Drupal Camp Toronto 2012 was a great event and really well organized. I would recommend it to anyone that is remotely interested in Drupal to...

Sittin' on the Dock of the Bay

dylan — Mon, 12 Nov 2012 11:59:00 +0000

Sittin' on the Dock of the Bay

In mid-September 2012, we at OC heard about an upcoming Drupal event at the University of California at Berkeley called Bay Area Drupal Camp (or BADCamp). I'd been to the Bay Area the previous summer to attend the wedding of a long-time friend and my wife and I just fell in love with the area, so when the opportunity to travel back to that part of the world arose, I jumped at it. I quickly contacted my friends (who live right in the heart of San Francisco) and offered to buy them dinner. When they accepted, I quietly mentioned I'd...

Introduction to Rules in D7

jesse — Mon, 15 Oct 2012 12:32:00 +0000

Introduction to Rules in D7

What can I say? rules are a priceless asset when it comes to customizing the functionality of a Drupal site without having to actually code anything. If you embrace them, you will live happier and stress free. Okay, probably an impossible statement considering our field of work, but I have found that knowing how to take advantage of rules effectively inside and out gives me a huge advantage I didn't feel I had before. I have been able to save time, build complex systems faster, and most of all, assess and reduce many of those annoying small customizations requests that...

Drupal 8 Accessibility Sprint Roundup

mike — Mon, 18 Jun 2012 11:12:00 +0000

Drupal 8 Accessibility Sprint Roundup

Drupal's first Accessibility Sprint was a great success with around 30 people participating either on site or remotely. It was graciously hosted in the offices Evolving Web , where we were able to take advantage of their great location in the old port of Montreal. It was organized by the Montreal Drupal Association and we're really fortunate to have both accessibility maintainers present as Everett Zufelt & Brandon Bowersox-Johnson , were able to make their way up. The biggest impact of the sprints are the things that you can never quantify. The building face-to-face relationships within the Drupal community is...

Ontario Government Domain Survey

mike — Mon, 11 Jun 2012 10:51:00 +0000

Ontario Government Domain Survey

Following our work on analyzing federal sites with Ben Balter's Site Investor script , we surveyed over 111 Ontario Government domains using this tool and found some more interesting findings. The Government of Ontario isn't as large as the Federal government, but it is the most comparable level of government in Canada and also is the province where OpenConcept is based. Our collective tax dollars have paid for these sites and I believe that they need to be built to be accessible to its citizens. Because Ontario doesn't yet have an Open Data portal , where I could simply download...

Planning for Ongoing Maintenance

mike — Tue, 05 Jun 2012 10:14:00 +0000

Planning for Ongoing Maintenance

It is pretty much expected that most organizations will go through the process of re-launching their website every few years. The process of deciding to abandon the old site, negotiating with a vendor to build it and finally deploying the new site can easily take a year. This is often a consuming process that leaves organizations happy to resume their day to day operations, and happy that they don't have to worry about the website for a while. Most small organizations don't have the luxury of having full-time web staff working proactively on their web presence. Things on the Web...

Digital Best Practices for Museums & Other Institutions

mike — Fri, 01 Jun 2012 12:28:00 +0000

Digital Best Practices for Museums & Other Institutions

I just got back from a quick trip to New York and visited a number of impressive museums. Not surprisingly, one of the most amazing was the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), in which I was fortunate enough to spend a whole day. One of the exhibits used QR Codes and walking around the museum I really got to thinking about the Virtual/Physical opportunities that modern museums can now take advantage of. The MoMA did lots of stuff right, but it's clear that they are still trying to figure out how to integrate online content in their physical exhibits. With...

Analysis of GoC .gc.ca Domains

mike — Wed, 30 May 2012 17:43:00 +0000

Analysis of GoC .gc.ca Domains

I ran into Ben Balter's article Analysis of Federal Executive .Govs and really liked the simple but effective analysis that he did on the US government. Not that the technology behind it is simple, his Site Inspector and WordPress Domain Inventory plugin module are great. It does a pretty good job at tracking the site status, support for non-WWW and IPv6, use of Content Delivery Network (CDN), choice of Content Management System, Cloud Provider, Analytics, JavaScript Libraries, and HTTPs support. I do hope that I have some time to add some enhancements to this project, but first I was interested...

Migrating Data Using Drupal's Migrate Module

mikem — Tue, 22 May 2012 15:13:00 +0000

Migrating Data Using Drupal's Migrate Module

One very common task faced by web developers worldwide is the need to move data from an old site to a new site. Frequently I have been faced with data migrations where the old and the new system are not even compatible systems (i.e. another CMS -> Drupal, or better yet, custom ASP + HTML -> Drupal! Fun!). Drupal's Migrate module is an extremely powerful and robust tool for managing this often complicated task. The Drupal.org site has plenty of documentation on the basic functionality of Migrate . In this article I will discuss some pitfalls of the Migrate module...

GOSLINGS - 10 Years Promoting Free Software to Government

mike — Sun, 13 May 2012 20:04:00 +0000

GOSLINGS - 10 Years Promoting Free Software to Government

We were happy to have supported 10 Years from GOSLING to GOOSE event earlier this month. We've been coming on/off for a long while now and have always found the conversations encouraging. It's been a long, long struggle to get the right individuals in government thinking about how the public sector values of participation, cooperation & standards can be reflected in software. Government has evolved a risk averse culture and so it is much easier to adopt new ideas when others inside government have tried (and succeeded), than to feel like you are breaking new ground. Having a network of...

OpenLayers, Accessibility & Drupal

mike — Fri, 06 Apr 2012 15:09:00 +0000

OpenLayers, Accessibility & Drupal

I've been curious about maps and accessibility, but it hasn't been something I've had much time to explore. Because maps are so visual, it's hard to think about how to make them fully accessible. Sarah Bourne in Making maps accessible asks the serious questions that that are at the heart of this issue, and frankly ones that I haven't had the opportunity to explore. I have recently begun learning more about digital maps, thanks to some recent work involving OpenLayers . I had an opportunity to think about this a problem on a practical level of how can I help...

Creating multiple value field groups in Drupal 7

mducharme — Fri, 23 Mar 2012 12:41:00 +0000

Creating multiple value field groups in Drupal 7

Introduction Drupal 7's integrated Fields API (formerly CCK) is a great step forward in allowing us to quickly create robust content types that integrate much better core. With the included Fieldgroup module, we can group fields into logical sections: This is great for creating a single logical group containing multiple fields. We can set the number of values allowed for each field which exposes the 'Add another item' button, but what if we want to instead set the number of values allowed for this entire fieldset? Field Collections and the Entity API The Entity API (also part of Drupal core)...

Views integration with the relation module

jesse — Tue, 24 Jan 2012 12:53:00 +0000

Views integration with the relation module

introduction Relations is an awesome new module for Drupal 7. It essentially allows you to link any entities together and which are themselves fieldable. I can think of limitless ways in which this can be super useful. However, the topic of this blog posting is not to heap praise on relations and explain in detail what they can be used for; I'll let you discover that yourselves. The intention is rather to give a practical example of how to create views of separate entity types tied together with relations. Something that I've had to play around with for hours to...

MediaElement.js & My Guelph Accessibility Presentation

mike — Tue, 03 Jan 2012 14:31:00 +0000

MediaElement.js & My Guelph Accessibility Presentation

Really like this article: An In Depth Analysis of HTML5 Multimedia and Accessibility . Last May I gave a talk at Guelph's 2011 Accessibility Conference . I wanted to raise awareness about aspects of the Drupal 7 accessibility improvements could be used as an example. The video was recorded by the University & I was sent a copy of it so that I could upload it here. I do think that the university may also upload a copy at some point, but there were delays and I had ideas within the presentation that I wanted to share. I was sent...

What's More Canadian Than Cree?

mike — Mon, 28 Nov 2011 05:33:00 +0000

What's More Canadian Than Cree?

I was pointed to this great resource on Plains Cree (nêhiyawêwin) links but it still doesn't have much information about presenting this language on the web. Since hearing the story about the creation of Cree & Inuit syllabics , I've been interested in how colonization introduced written language to an oral culture. Since working on several Arabic/Hebrew/Farsi sites over the years, I've been curious as to how this applies to the web. Being a unilingual person, I can't do more than look at the characters in any of these languages and I certainly have no education in linguistics. However, I...

How Drupal Helps with the GoC's New Standards on Web Accessibility & Usability

mike — Mon, 14 Nov 2011 18:35:00 +0000

How Drupal Helps with the GoC's New Standards on Web Accessibility & Usability

OpenConcept has been participating working in the work of building a Drupal theme for the Treasury Board Secretariat's Common Look & Feel (CLF) for a number of years now. We started distributing one in 2008 based on the Zen theme & Drupal 6. It was pretty simple and relied on a great many modules to be downloaded & configured before it would work as expected. We didn't get many contributions to improve the theme after providing it to a number of departments we and releasing it on IRCan, so we didn't invest much more in it. At the very least...

Intelligent Open Source Collaboration for Better Accessibility

mike — Thu, 27 Oct 2011 00:34:00 +0000

Intelligent Open Source Collaboration for Better Accessibility

Recently as we've been working on enhancements to Drupal 8, we run into several situations where we are looking at the jQuery library . Drupal's been including the free software jQuery for the last two releases and are using it more and more as it evolves. We were hoping we'd be able to simply leverage a solid accessible jQuery UI element rather than have to continue to enhance our own javascript widgets. jQuery UI 1.8 has an autocomplete widget in it so why don't we just use this rather than re-invent the wheel for Drupal 8. Unfortunately based on some...

Why Organize an Accessibility Unconference?

mike — Tue, 18 Oct 2011 14:31:00 +0000

Why Organize an Accessibility Unconference?

Last year I was approached by Jennison Asuncion who has been instigating a number of innovative grassroots efforts to get people talking about accessibility issues. I was impressed by the successes in DC , London , Montreal and Boston and it seemed like a nice challenge to take on in Canada's capital. These cities all organized a second conference this year and now Toronto joined in as well. The plan was to initially have the unconference in the spring of 2011, but unfortunately there was a surprise election so we decided to postpone it till the fall. We're happy to...

OpenConcept's New Look

mike — Wed, 10 Aug 2011 12:37:00 +0000

OpenConcept's New Look

In case you haven't noticed, the OpenConcept website has had an overhaul as of late. In migrating to Drupal 7, we not only were looking to migrate from our outdated Drupal 5 website but were excited for the opportunity to design an entirely new theme. OpenConcept partnered with Rachela Brisindi, from RGB Creative ( http://www.rgb-creative.com/ ) in order to update our logo and website design. Although Rachela was more experienced in print design, she had a strong creative vision and was interested in learning more about designing for the web. Once the OC team had approved Rachela's logo, wireframe and...

Dyslexia, Fonts & Open Source

mike — Wed, 27 Jul 2011 15:45:00 +0000

Dyslexia, Fonts & Open Source

At CSUN15 , Anne Comfort of Mount Allison University presented an interesting study - Can a font improve reading? - of over 200 full time students with dyslexia. In this study they were not able to demonstrate that changing the font helps readability for this population. There's a great summary of this in Adrian Roselli blog post after CSUN . It's important to note that there is considerable controversy around whether or not fonts can provide any benefit for people with dyslexia. In 6 Surprising Bad Practices That Hurt Dyslexic Users there is a list of some basic things that...

Web Accessibility Evaluation Methodology

mike — Fri, 15 Jul 2011 16:45:00 +0000

Web Accessibility Evaluation Methodology

Wanted to point folks to Karl Groves' article Do Accessibility Testing First , I really like his idea of automated nightly testing for accessibility. I also wanted to acknowledge that this is more of an accessibility evaluation tactic than methodology. I just got word that the Web Accessibility Initiative 's is starting up a WCAG 2.0 Evaluation Methodology Task Force to provide more comprehensive guidance on evaluating web accessibility. This is great, not only because the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (published in December 2008) aren't written for the average developer, but also because it should make it easier to build...

Drupal Accessibility as an Example

mike — Mon, 27 Jun 2011 18:06:00 +0000

Drupal Accessibility as an Example

I took a great opportunity to go to Guelph to both participate in and present to the 2011 Accessibility Conference . I was able to meet with a number of great accessibility professionals from Southern Ontario who were gathered for this event at the University of Guelph. I missed the A11yCamp which Sean Yo organized and also to Derek Featherstone 's HTML5/CSS3 training, but sent two of my team to it. In thinking about what to present to this audience I had rethink a few things. In presenting to Drupal audiences I had to go into depth about accessibility and...

Implementing Accessibility Best Practices

mike — Thu, 16 Jun 2011 14:44:00 +0000

Implementing Accessibility Best Practices

I got talking with Sandi Wassmer from Copious about accessibility best practices after I posted Accessibility Tips for Management last month. We had a really good exchange over Skype & have continued talking over Twitter. It's really great to hear what is happening outside of North America. Since we've been talking she was published in .NET Magazine with a great article The 10 principles of inclusive web design which I think are good guidelines for thinking about designing a site. Best Practices I was looking for a way to better publicize the accessibility work we've done on our own site...

The AODA & WCAG 2.0 - When it Matters

mike — Fri, 03 Jun 2011 17:03:00 +0000

The AODA & WCAG 2.0 - When it Matters

I was happy to see the AODA Compliance Wizard produced to make it a bit easier to determine when/where Ontario organizations need to act about accessibility issues. The Accessibility Standard for Information and Communications for the Accessibility for Ontarians with Disabilities Act (AODA) was released earlier today and it's a great accomplishment that reflects the dedication of thousands of people who have worked for improved Human Rights for our fellow citizens. It is great to see this act, which was initially received Royal Assent on June 13, 2005, finally receive the clarity about what will be required for web sites...

Quick Accessibility Evaluation of GoC Sites

mike — Fri, 29 Apr 2011 08:33:00 +0000

Quick Accessibility Evaluation of GoC Sites

Like many government agencies, the Government of Canada has a mandate to address accessibility issues. The Common Look & Feel presently is based on the 1999 accessibility standard WCAG 1.0 and will shortly require WCAG 2.0 compliance. This falls within the Management Accountability Framework , which is an incentive based system for management. Internal audits are presently being used to evaluate accessibility improvements over time. As I noted in my last blog Accessibility Tips for Management even with this regulation, how is management supposed to know when their site is accessible or not. Despite the Donna Jodhan ruling of 2010...

Accessibility Tips for Management

mike — Fri, 29 Apr 2011 00:06:00 +0000

Accessibility Tips for Management

Most accessibility articles are written for either developers or designers who need guidance on how to implement accessibility fixes. There's a lot more to write on this subject, but I was looking for articles written for the communications professionals who are overseeing web project. In most large organizations the people directing the sites development are not the same people as those who are coding it. Without having specialized technical knowledge tied to accessibility, do managers have the skills required to assess if their sites are accessible? In my experience most managers lack the resources to do any accessibility reviews of...

Geolocation With Drupal 7 & HTML5

mike — Tue, 26 Apr 2011 15:33:00 +0000

Geolocation With Drupal 7 & HTML5

The quick summary is that it's not ready yet, but it's looking very exciting! To get an update on the status of geospacial modules the following wiki is key . Unfortunately, of the 20 or so geo modules, only 6 have a Drupal 7 release at this point (only two of which are alpha releases & the rest are development releases). GMap includes location, taxonomy & macro utilities and of the 27,000 sites using this module there are 1000 that are presently using the Drupal 7 development release ; GeoNames ties to the GeoNames web service ; Geofield stores points,...

Long Live the Web Experience Toolkit

mike — Thu, 07 Apr 2011 22:21:00 +0000

Long Live the Web Experience Toolkit

In December 2008, OpenConcept set up a Drupal site to demonstrate that we could meet the requirements of the Treasury Board Secretariat's Common Look & Feel (CLF) 2.0 . We went further than this by releasing the code first to people within the Government of Canada & second we made it available through Intellectual Resources Canada (IRCan)'s repository. We provided a demonstration site to dispel Fear, Uncertainty & Doubt about open source & government, but also to engage with the government community to extend & improve this theme. After two and a half years of voluntary effort, we've decided to...

The Challenge of Collaborative Editing in Government

mike — Wed, 30 Mar 2011 12:25:00 +0000

The Challenge of Collaborative Editing in Government

I've actively encouraged NGOs to use Google Docs for real-time collaborative editing. They have a really great suite of tools which really should make emailing Word Documents between editors a thing of the past. There have been a limited number of tools that allowed for this type of process, however we've been experimenting with a great open source tool called Etherpad which will make this process much more common, especially within government agencies. We've been using this interface at iEtherpad now and have been quite impressed by it's ease of use. It's simpler than Google Docs, but has a few...

Recent Videos From DrupalCon About Accessibility

mike — Sun, 27 Mar 2011 23:41:00 +0000

Recent Videos From DrupalCon About Accessibility

Here's a summary of accessibility presentations from DrupalCon San Francisco & Chicago. I've put them in an order that I hope will allow people who know nothing about web accessibility to progress through a rather complex subject. All DrupalCon videos are stored on Archive.org which now also has an option for using HTML5 video. This is my first time using this great new HTML5 tag to embed a video. It's also a great space to highlight that there are as yet no captions available for these videos & I've yet to figure out how to make the controls accessible to...

Drupal 7

mike — Fri, 04 Mar 2011 14:19:00 +0000

Drupal 7

There is just so much to say about Drupal 7 and advantages to upgrading. There is so much excitement around this new platform and I'm very happy that we've been able to play a small part in getting this application to where it is now. I've already talked at length about accessibility issues with this release, but it's time to focus a bit more on some of the other great aspects. Usability There's been so much work that has gone into usability. There are two new themes which have been added, Bartik and Seven. Bartik provides a fresh new public...

Together At Last: HTML5 & Drupal

mike — Fri, 04 Mar 2011 09:21:00 +0000

Together At Last: HTML5 & Drupal

OpenConcept Consulting takes a step into the future of the web with HTML5. Witness the power of lightning fast and super stable in-page video with the stunning effects of jQuery. Accessible, mobile friendly, sleek and flexible: HTML5 is where our heart is. We are early adopters of many new technologies so that we can test/evaluate them before implementing them for our clients. We pushed forward with an early Drupal 7 install so that we could dedicate some time to working out the remaining kinks that are holding back implementation of this great new version. We've been using social media to...

DrupalCon Chicago and Accessibility

mike — Mon, 28 Feb 2011 16:31:00 +0000

DrupalCon Chicago and Accessibility

I don't know where the time's gone, but next week at this time I'm going to be at DrupalCon with thousands of other users & developers. I've really enjoyed Boston, DC & San Francisco, and expect that Chicago will be just as exciting. It's interesting to reflect that it was in 2008 at the Boston Keynote that Dries set the course for Drupal 7 challenged the community to embrace RDFa. This was long before we became involved in making Drupal 7 more accessible, but making sites more machine readable will do a lot to making them more accessible to people...

Gitting Earth Hour & Drupal

mike — Sat, 26 Feb 2011 13:50:00 +0000

Gitting Earth Hour & Drupal

We've used CVS, SVN over the years and are now using Git . If you've not a programmer you probably wouldn't be familiar with tools like Concurrent Versions System or Subversion which allow for precise sharing & collaboration between thousands of people but with over 150,000 lines of code in Drupal Core , you really need to have a way to manage these details to ensure that you've got the highest quality control possible. Git is the latest in social coding and because if it's distributed framework it should allow many more people to evaluate, experiment & collaborate with the...

Why We Aren't Supporting IE6

mike — Wed, 16 Feb 2011 14:17:00 +0000

Why We Aren't Supporting IE6

We've made a team decision to proactively advocate for people to upgrade from IE6 to a more modern web browser. We're doing this primarily because it has given designers & developers such grief, but also because we want our users to have the best, most secure browsing experience they can. Given the huge problems in IE6 we wanted to give our visitors as many tools as we can provide to help you upgrade to a better browser. Now we know that most of the remaining IE6 users are within large bureaucracies that have IT staff who believe that the cost...

Accessibility Issues Are Inevitable, So Let's Get On With It!

mike — Sat, 12 Feb 2011 10:52:00 +0000

Accessibility Issues Are Inevitable, So Let's Get On With It!

Back in November of 2010 Federal Court Justice Michael Kelen gave the Treasury Board of the Government of Canada (GoC) 15 months to make all of it's websites accessible to the blind. This is still a landmark case even though the government decided to appeal the case on Jan 10th. I'm not sure how much longer the appeal will extend the case, but the writing is on the wall, the GoC is going to need to begin the long and difficult process of ensuring that it's millions of public web pages are accessible to all Canadians . It is unclear...

Launching Early with Drupal 7

mike — Fri, 28 Jan 2011 15:47:00 +0000

Launching Early with Drupal 7

We've been very busy working on Drupal 7 enhancements for the last two years. It's gotten really hectic around our office in the last few months so we're not able to devote the time we wanted to launch a flashy new design. We've got a new design in the works to replace the one we set up back in early 2007 when Drupal 5 came out, but we've been prioritizing our efforts on getting to our clients sites rather than finishing up ours. Given that we're not going to be able to launch the new design in January, I've decided...

Setting Up Drupal 7's Private File System

mike — Wed, 22 Dec 2010 20:48:00 +0000

Setting Up Drupal 7's Private File System

I just updated the docs on drupal.org and discovered that D7 will take care of the permissions. I was working on my first Drupal 5 to 7 migration earlier today and ran into an issue with the file system I hadn't needed to define previously. Drupal 7 has both a public and private file system path that you can define. This is great for security as you can easily divide what files you want available to the anonymous public and which they should be denied access. Drupal can be used to control delivery to users with appropriate permissions. This is...

SEO Fluff, Marketing & Other Nonsense

mike — Thu, 16 Dec 2010 22:19:00 +0000

SEO Fluff, Marketing & Other Nonsense

I'm the first to admit that search engine optimization is important. I know that there is a lot to be learned about how to drive people to your site and ensure that they keep coming back to it. Two years ago it was estimated that there were 63 billion pages indexed by search engines . How will your site show up in the first pages of Google results if you don't get an edge over everyone else? I know that there really are 'SEO Experts' out there, that know the web well and have seriously researched search engine behavior. But...

Accessibility Critique of the 2010 Open Source CMS Report!

mike — Tue, 14 Dec 2010 18:13:00 +0000

Accessibility Critique of the 2010 Open Source CMS Report!

Earlier this year we agreed to sponsor the IdealWare's 2010 report comparing popular open source content management systems , and we're glad to have done so! It is so important to have a review of different systems if only to encourage discussion & debate about software use in the non-profit sector. Why Drupal 7 is Great Earlier this week I boasted on the NOSI discussion list about Drupal 7's accessibility enhancements. I know how much more accessible it was than Drupal 6. I have also done some work to compare it with other popular CMS systems. We've developed a frank...

Running a 15 Month Marathon of Government Accessibility

mike — Tue, 14 Dec 2010 14:39:00 +0000

Running a 15 Month Marathon of Government Accessibility

Preparing a Drupal Presentation with HTML5 & CSS3

mike — Mon, 25 Oct 2010 11:33:00 +0000

Preparing a Drupal Presentation with HTML5 & CSS3

In preparing for my live streamed HD session at Drupal Camp Montreal 2010 , I was prompted by someone's tweet or blog post from DrupalCon Copenhagen to try a different approach with this presentation. I'd much rather be facilitating than presenting, but I do have a message I want to spread to the community, so I had to take this seriously. Now the quality of the notes from DrupalCon's are definitely getting getting better. Here's examples from San Francisco & Copenhagen (links removed). There's stuff here that should be borrowed by many other conferences. A few folks I respect have...

Why Bother with Web Accessibility?

mike — Mon, 25 Oct 2010 10:31:00 +0000

Why Bother with Web Accessibility?

I'm happy to announce that the video of my presentation is now online. Thanks DBNStudios for recording it. I'd also like to thank @cobalt123 , @Chris Devers , @Let Ideas Compete , @OlsenWeb , @crizzirc , @mcbeth , @liber , @leshoward , @willem velthoven , @nickhall , @Stefan , @cobalt123 , @Kalense Kid , @Kalense Kid , @PhillipC , @United Nations Photo , @ChrisGoldNY , @Norma Desmond , @Sara G... , @Dan Kunitz , @Gabor Hojtsy , @Christolakis , @Don Solo, @cobalt123 , @Rene Ehrhardt , @patrick h. lauke , @m.gifford , @ , @NJLA: New Jersey Library Association licensing...

Donations to the Ottawa Public Library

mike — Wed, 06 Oct 2010 09:27:00 +0000

Donations to the Ottawa Public Library

OpenConcept has once again made a donation of books to Ottawa's Public Library . In 2008 we made a similar, but smaller, donation but since then the selection of resources have grown considerably. There are now 16 titles in the library's catalog and our donation includes a number of Drupal 7 books which have yet to be distributed. The growth of interest in Drupal is continuing to grow and we believe that it benefits everyone to make resources widely available. Donating books in the past has brought us staff, but also helps our client base. The four Lullabot DVD's we...

Chase Paymentech Module for Ubercart

jesse — Thu, 30 Sep 2010 16:00:00 +0000

Chase Paymentech Module for Ubercart

Announcing the uc_chasepaymentech module for Ubercart! This is a module that adds Chase Paymentech hosted checkout as a payment method to Ubercart. There isn't currently a module that integrates Ubercart with Chase paymentech. Although Chase based their hosted checkout on Authorize.net's framework, their specific implementation and methods of response verification are slightly different in functionality. There is not a sensible way to go about modifying the Authorize.net module that ships with Ubercart to incorporate Chase Paymentech without rewriting the entire Authorize.net module to make it more generic and adaptable to other Payment Companies and their implementations of the authorize.net framework...

WCAG 2.0 AAA - A Journey Not a Destination

mike — Wed, 29 Sep 2010 12:02:00 +0000

WCAG 2.0 AAA - A Journey Not a Destination

I've taken the notes about the process we are going through for our own site & attached it to this Drupal Accessibility Group Wiki Page . Please feel free to edit it. We have gotten a number of RFP's in the past that have stated WCAG 2.0 AAA compliance as one of the requirements that they would like to have in their response. It is great when folks are aware enough about accessibility issues that they can state of of their goals is to achieve the highest level of accessibility for their site. Really, who wouldn't want to have their...

Progress in Accessibility Enhancements for Drupal 7

mike — Fri, 10 Sep 2010 14:28:00 +0000

Progress in Accessibility Enhancements for Drupal 7

The list of issues here I'll try to keep updated to reflect the changes in accessibility issues in Drupal 7 prior to release. It's really amazing to see the improvements for accessibility in Drupal 7 over the last two years. There have been some really impressive improvements that are making this an even more inclusive framework for any web development project. I just took a look at the number of issues that have already been fixed & are part of Drupal 7 already and there are 67 (as of Sept 16). That amounts to hundreds of hours of discussion &...

Congrats Web Axe for 5 Years of Podcasting

mike — Fri, 10 Sep 2010 09:22:00 +0000

Congrats Web Axe for 5 Years of Podcasting

I was invited by Dennis Lembree and Ross Johnson to contribute some audio for their 84th podcast celebrating the Web Axe 5-year anniversary . They have had a huge impact on the community over that time and really appreciate the work they put into raising awareness about accessibility. Please subscribe to the Web Axe podcast if this content is interesting to you. The following is the text prepared for the podcast. I want to thank Cliff Tyllick for his help on preparing this: My name is Mike Gifford and I am the president of OpenConcept Consulting, an Ottawa-based Drupal shop...

Webinar on Planning an Accessible Website

mike — Tue, 10 Aug 2010 01:06:00 +0000

Webinar on Planning an Accessible Website

Everett Zufelt & I have agreed to present a webinar entitled Introduction to Accessibility and Planning for an Accessible Website . We'll be posting links to the archive when it's up, but wanted to ensure that the presentations were available online (along with a PDF version) before it went live in case people wanted to follow along this way. This presentation is licensed under a Creative Commons Share-Alike license so please feel free to enhance/distribute it. For those that missed it there is now a video archive of the presentation available. Questions from the end of the presentation. I'm going...

Using Drupal as a Prototyping Tool

mike — Wed, 04 Aug 2010 15:04:00 +0000

Using Drupal as a Prototyping Tool

This article was republished in GovFresh . I was really happy to have Patrick Lajeunesse present about Agriculture Canada's experience using Drupal as a prototyping tool. As you can see from his presentation, with a small team of communications staff they were able to set up both a Drupal and WordPress prototype to explore their needed functionality. I wanted to focus a bit more on why this makes so much sense for so many organizations, but especially government agencies. The implementation of web tools has improved significantly over the last decade and it is no longer something that needs to...

Ubercart as a donation system + Moneris as a Payment Gateway

jesse — Fri, 16 Jul 2010 10:52:00 +0000

Ubercart as a donation system + Moneris as a Payment Gateway

Hopefully this blog entry will help a few people overcome some of the hurdles in setting up a donations system. We are a drupal shop so all the following is for drupal 6. In this case the client simply wanted to have a way to collect donations from supporters of their political campaign. The only real constraint was that it needed to integrate with the Moneris payment gateway system. I was looking at creating a custom donation system and integration to Moneris, but in the end opted to use Ubercart. Ubercart is an awesome beast of a Shopping cart system...

The "CLUMPS" module

jesse — Thu, 24 Jun 2010 08:24:00 +0000

The "CLUMPS" module

Clumps is a module that I have just written and will eventually be releasing. Its currently about 90% finished. The name was hastily chosen from a google search for a synonym to section. It is also still up for debate so feel free to comment if you can think of a good name. All relatively good ideas start with a relatively complex, or annoying, problem. Protagonist: A site was required that split off into two separate sides with different paths say /sideone and /sidetwo. Most content is to be different, but some should be shared including menus and menu items...

Just Vision

mike — Tue, 22 Jun 2010 11:13:00 +0000

Just Vision

Just Vision is an organization that, through award-winning media, community outreach and an array of educational tools, informs, connects and engages people in Palestinian-Israeli civilian efforts to resolve the conflict nonviolently. OpenConcept was lucky enough to work with this passionate organization to help them develop a truly unique Drupal-based website. Just Vision had previously implemented another CMS solution and as such, had an existent, complex database that linked interviews from a diverse selection of 'peacebuilders' on a variety of themes. Developing the appropriate taxonomies and linking interviews with themes, footnotes, glossary terms and profiles was challenging but something that Drupal...

Drupal in Government Ottawa Showcase - A Great Success

mike — Fri, 18 Jun 2010 10:59:00 +0000

Drupal in Government Ottawa Showcase - A Great Success

The Drupal Showcase that we organized on June 15th was a great success. This event was organized & sponsored by OpenConcept and we were able to bring together over 75 people to learn about how and why public servants are using Drupal effectively to communicate. We had representatives from 15 government departments including: Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada (AAFC), Citizenship and Immigration Canada (CIC), The Canada Border Services Agency (CBSA), Canadian Transportation Agency (CTA), Human Resources and Skills Development Canada (HRSDC), Immigration and Refugee Board of Canada (IRB), Foreign Affairs and International Trade Canada (FAIT), Canadian Food Inspection Agency (CFIA), Department...

Organizing for Drupal in Government in Ottawa

mike — Wed, 09 Jun 2010 13:50:00 +0000

Organizing for Drupal in Government in Ottawa

For the last month we've been actively organizing to set up a showcase of Drupal sites in Government here in Ottawa. There are a lot of departments that are using this great CMS and this is the first event of it's kind working to get the public sector together and talk about the work they've done. We've already got more than 50 people signed up for the event on Tuesday, June 15th. We are quite happy with our list of speakers and know this will be a great opportunity for people to hear about the variety of ways this tool...

Building Better Lists of Country Data

mike — Thu, 08 Apr 2010 17:41:00 +0000

Building Better Lists of Country Data

One of our most popular pages is the Text List of All Countries in the World . Strangely this little piece of data has gotten over 60k hits since we posted it and has received a wide range of very positive reactions from around the world. What started as just something that annoyed me personally (how to get an updated list of all of the World's countries in on easy to copy/paste location) proved to be something that a lot of other people were looking for too. Now, when I first did this I didn't expect that generating a list...

Changing government standards and ‘Common Look and Feel’

mike — Thu, 01 Apr 2010 11:17:00 +0000

Changing government standards and ‘Common Look and Feel’

This is a reprint of the post I wrote for GovFresh . It's mostly a re-write of the earlier blog post I wrote specifically for the Canadian government . Most western governments have in the last decade developed an accessibility strategy for their websites, often based on WCAG 1.0. At the end of 2008, the WC3 announced the final version of WCAG 2.0 and the public sector is now struggling to keep up. In Canada there was a recent announcement about a revised Common Look and Feel (CLF) . In the USA the Section 508 is in its first of...

tinyMCE: Adding css styles to menu style pull-down

jesse — Tue, 30 Mar 2010 10:45:00 +0000

tinyMCE: Adding css styles to menu style pull-down

As designers, something that we all wish at one point or another is for non-technical users to be able to style their contributed content according to the styles we have defined in style sheets. Users usually want to be able to easily do this as well. If a WYSIWYG is involved it often means a user will be selecting colours and fonts that will end up inline with the element; hard coded in the HTML like . It can also be time consuming to have to go and style everything a user inputs if it doesn't exactly fit your design...

Ada Lovelace Day Celebration of Angie Byron's Conributions to Open Source

mike — Tue, 23 Mar 2010 22:38:00 +0000

Ada Lovelace Day Celebration of Angie Byron's Conributions to Open Source

Earlier this year I found out about Ada Lovelace Day (March 24th), and decided that I would pledge along with 1600+ others to blog about women who have contributed to science and technology. Fortunately, I am a Drupal developer, so there are lots of great examples of women taking leadership roles. I'm called to blog about the contributions of Angie Byron , known in the community as webchick . Now Angie's been a Drupal user for 4 years 41 weeks (six weeks longer than I have), but according to Ohloh (a free public directory of open source software and people),...

Changing Standards in Government

mike — Mon, 22 Mar 2010 15:49:00 +0000

Changing Standards in Government

Very recently Canada's Treasury Board announced that the Common Look and Feel (CLF) for the Internet 2.0 Standard is being updated . Now, for those folks who don't spend a lot of time on Government of Canada websites it's not something that you are likely to notice. However for both people with disabilities & the Canadian tax payer at large it could be a very big deal. Improved Design I want to first point out some of the good work done rethinking the CLF. Thomas Bradley's Proposal for CLF3.0 predated the public announcement for the update and presents a neat...

OpenConcept White Paper on CMS Accessibility

mike — Mon, 22 Mar 2010 15:07:00 +0000

OpenConcept White Paper on CMS Accessibility

OpenConcept is pleased to announce the release of an Accessibility White Paper . We have been actively promoting accessibility in Content Management Systems for the last two years and are happy to be able to provide some insights. This document is especially relevant if you are involved in web communications for government agencies or for organizations within the province of Ontario. If you have any questions, please don't hesitate to contact us at accessibility@openconcept.ca .

Drupal 7 Accessibility Podcast Transcript

I was listening to a podcast by AbilityNet in the UK the other day and liked what they were doing so I sent them a note on Twitter suggesting that their community might find the developments in Drupal interesting. I got into a conversation with them and ended up producing an MP3 with the following introduction to Drupal 7. After Drupal 7 is released we'll have to do a piece highlighting all the pieces that got in, but for now this is a good introduction. Looking at the right end of the problem The Internet is an increasingly important tool...

The AODA Customer Service Standard & Ontario's Public Sector Websites

mike — Tue, 13 Oct 2009 12:33:00 +0000

The AODA Customer Service Standard & Ontario's Public Sector Websites

A lot has changed since our initial posting about the AODA in 2009. For folks looking for general information (particularly pertaining to the web), I would suggest reading our more recent articles . If you're particularly interested in enforcement of this law I would suggest looking towards posts by Blakes(March 2011), Weirfoulds (July 2011) and FirstReference (August 2011). Ontario implemented the Accessibility for Ontarians with Disabilities Act (AODA) in 2005 and in January 2010 it will begin to enhance the level of services that people in this province can expect from their governments. Organizations Needing to Comply The public sector...

Promoting Open Source Procurement in Government

mike — Mon, 28 Sep 2009 09:52:00 +0000

Promoting Open Source Procurement in Government

The following article was prepared by OpenConcept for Summit Magazine , Canada's magazine for public service procurement. The full article is available within the PDF copy of the magazine . After publication I was sent this PDF about open source procurement in the Netherlands that was worth sharing. How Can Government Responsibly Procure Free Software? Free software is “free” in two senses: it is distributed free of charge, and can be freely used and shared because it is unencumbered by onerous and restrictive licenses. This software model has been refined over the past twenty-five years, and its use has become...

Ottawa Showcase of Drupal in Government

mike — Thu, 20 Aug 2009 13:39:00 +0000

Ottawa Showcase of Drupal in Government

It was the first sunny day we've had in a week, a perfect day to spend on a patio after work drinking a pint. However 35 people made their way to The Code Factory to attend the Drupal in Government Showcase. This was the largest Drupal event ever held in Ottawa and it clearly demonstrated that there is interest in this Content Management System. Having organized the event we wanted to highlight the CLF 2.0 theme that are providing to the community as well as the extensive work that we have done on introducing accessibility enhancements to Drupal . NOTE:...

Open Data in Government

mike — Fri, 22 May 2009 15:51:00 +0000

Open Data in Government

I've been thinking a lot recently about the accessibility of information that the government collects sometimes even distributes. We've blogged about problems getting information about postal code to riding data in the past. We ended up purchasing the data, but each time we do it is so inefficient it seems like it must cost the government more to sell it to me than give it away. Fortunately, there's been a lot of movement in this area around the world and there are a lot of good things to be inspired by. In the USA today the Obama administration launched Data.gov...

Presentations on Drupal, Accessibility, Wiki's & Open Source in Government

mike — Tue, 19 May 2009 09:34:00 +0000

Presentations on Drupal, Accessibility, Wiki's & Open Source in Government

Last week was rather busy week for presentations involving Drupal. Most of them were associated with FOSSLC Summer Camp 2009 , which fortunately were being taped by the organizers. The only non-FOSSLC event was participating in a panel discussion organized by the Translation Bureau of Canada. Drupal Install Workshop The week's presentations began with Steve McCullough & I leading a Drupal installation workshop. This went quite well for most of the participants because we were starting with a MAMP or WAMP install of the environment and then adding Drupal on top of that. Ran into a couple odd problems by...

Open Source Adoption Inevitable for Canada's Government?

mike — Fri, 01 May 2009 16:09:00 +0000

Open Source Adoption Inevitable for Canada's Government?

This is a reprint of the article originally published in OSBR's May Issue under the title The Feds are Ready for a Change "OSS is indeed the start of a fundamental change in the software infrastructure marketplace, but it is not a hype bubble that will burst and [the] UK government must take cognizance of that fact." Douglas Alexander Canada is at the tipping point for acceptance of open source. Open source software (OSS) and culture has reached a critical mass in the business world and it is also being actively deployed within the Canadian government. While open source has...

GhostNet & Creating a Culture of User Security

mike — Thu, 09 Apr 2009 01:33:00 +0000

GhostNet & Creating a Culture of User Security

Quick update, OpenOffice now ships with macro security set for 'High' so that "Only signed macros from trusted sources are allowed to run. Unsigned macros are disabled". By going to Tools -> Options -> OpenOffice.org -> Security -> Macro Security You can also set the security level to 'Very High' so that "Only Macros from trusted file locations are allowed to run. All other macros, regardless whether signed or not, are disabled." So if you are concerned with these articles, use OpenOffice. Listening to CBC's Search Engine Podcast (which was removed by CBC sadly) I was reminded again of how...

Panel Discussion on the Value of Open Source in Government

mike — Sat, 04 Apr 2009 16:35:00 +0000

Panel Discussion on the Value of Open Source in Government

I was fortunate to be invited to participate in a panel discussion organized by Andrew Ross of Ingress. The panel from left to right Roger Burkhardt ( Ingres ), Jean Bernatchez ( Enterprise Stewardship and Internal Services Strategies, Chief Information Officer Branch, Treasury Board of Canada ), Dave McIlhagga ( DM Solutions ), me & Donald Smith ( Eclipse ): Business value of open source panel discussion from Andrew Ross on Vimeo . I had a hard time focusing on what I was going to say to some of the questions that were presented to the panel, because of the...

Spring Cleaning Your Drupal Site

mike — Sat, 04 Apr 2009 08:09:00 +0000

Spring Cleaning Your Drupal Site

Many people celebrate spring by doing an intensive cleaning of their house, getting rid of stuff that isn't needed any more, putting away the winter clothes/jackets and cleaning in those places that you don't get to on a daily basis. It occurred to me that most CMS admins should take on a practice like this at least every year when I started looking at broken links. Checking for Bad Links Now the dead links are inevitable in any website that's up for any length of time. I was looking for a way to provide a list of broken links when...

Migrating WordPress Plugins to Drupal Modules - Earth Hour

mike — Sun, 22 Mar 2009 21:30:00 +0000

Migrating WordPress Plugins to Drupal Modules - Earth Hour

It was Friday afternoon and went over to search for terms on Twitter that I like to keep an eye on when I ran into a post from @haggaret . It was a call to convert an Earth Hour WordPress Plugin over to Drupal. Now I'm very aware of environmental issues, but there are 8765 ( or so ) other hours in the year to worry about, so what's the big deal about this one. I'm still not sure, but in solidarity I decided to check it out and see when it was, unfortunately it was 8 days later on...

Accessible Interface Design

mike — Tue, 17 Mar 2009 19:21:00 +0000

Accessible Interface Design

It's been another big week for accessibility issues & Drupal (and we're just barely at Wednesday). Got another patch committed to Drupal 7 (thanks Angie), but found another couple of bugs to add to the Accessibility Improvement's list . I taped a video of a friend of mine with Cerebral Palsy (Al Shain) trying to create an account and log into Drupal. That was certainly educational, and I've tossed it all up on Youtube with annotations for usability issues . Presentation Summary I just came back from a great talk by Mark McKay , who is the Tech Lead of...

Accessibility Discussions at DrupalCon

mike — Thu, 12 Mar 2009 17:15:00 +0000

Accessibility Discussions at DrupalCon

I've been trying to lead the charge on accessibility issues with Drupal 7 leading up to DrupalCon DC. As Dries outlined in his keynote, we've got until Sept 1, 2009 before the feature freeze takes place, so time's precious. Also, as Angie Byron noted, there are some accessibility issues that have been identified but not resolved for years. So, now that WCAG 2.0 is out and there seems to be a renewed interest in accessibility I was quite happy to see the interest in participants at the conference. Between the two Bird of a Feather (geeky breakout group) workshops that...

Union & Government Birds of a Feather

mike — Fri, 06 Mar 2009 00:18:00 +0000

Union & Government Birds of a Feather

One of the things is common in technology conferences these days is side gatherings that are informally called to discuss certain issues. They are generally referred to as Birds of a Feather Gathering. Today I participated in two sessions (discussing nonprofits & CiviCRM) and initiated two (focusing on governments & unions). All were quite interesting and a good opportunity to talk with people passionate about a sector they are involved in. In both sessions there were nearly 15 people involved. Considering the multiple presentations and discussion sessions that were available at that time I was very happy to see this...

Building Community and Finding Consensus for Accessibility Enhancements

mike — Tue, 03 Mar 2009 07:58:00 +0000

Building Community and Finding Consensus for Accessibility Enhancements

I think there are a number of ways that Drupal 7 could be much more accessible out of the box than it is right now. I've spent a bit of time working on a few items to improve and document some accessibility enhancements . Spent some time going through WCAG 2.0 documentation & comparing it with Drupal Core . And have been making patches and proposing best practices enhancements for a number of projects. I'm definitely much more of a PHP/MySQL developer, but the complexity of finding a neat solution that works for SEO, across all major browsers, and also...

Response to PWGSC's No Charge Licensed Software RFI

mike — Thu, 19 Feb 2009 12:32:00 +0000

Response to PWGSC's No Charge Licensed Software RFI

Well, it's been interesting to see how the government is choosing to investigate alternative software licenses. In a very broad definition that includes (thanks Wikipedia for this summary) it isn't clear that this definition is going to provide them very useful responses: Abandonware Adware Beerware Careware Crippleware Demoware Donationware Freely redistributable software Free software Freeware Nagware Open source Postcardware Registerware Shareware I wanted to thank the many respondents who took the time to fill in our survey. Michael Richardson, Sandelman Software Works Corporation Benjamin Horst, SolidOffice Rolf Paloheimo, Creative Communities Research Inc Peter Vander Klippe Alfred Settle, Freelance IT Consultant...

Canadian Government Uses Plenty of Open Source Software

mike — Fri, 13 Feb 2009 13:12:00 +0000

Canadian Government Uses Plenty of Open Source Software

Getting a survey of what software is used across all of the departments within the Government of Canada would be an extremely exhaustive process. I'm quite sure that there are many employees of the federal government who already are spending considerable time counting their proprietary licenses. So, how is it possible to get a quick overview of how open source is being used, since there are no contractual responsibilities to report it? With websites a lot of basic information is generally offered up from the server, and with a well established site like Netcraft we can do a quick audit...

Canadian Government Web Security Problems

mike — Wed, 11 Feb 2009 16:34:00 +0000

Canadian Government Web Security Problems

One of the reasons given about why the government should worry about open source software is security. I'm rather tired of this argument, so after hearing it one too many times, I decided to take some action. The concern is that if a piece of software is open for everyone, including hackers, it will be more vulnerable . This has been shot down any number of times, with some of the best known arguments stemming from the idea that many eyeballs will give you better confidence in the security of your software. Others security experts that have argued that good...

We're Now Acquia Silver Partners - Commercially Supported Drupal

mike — Sat, 07 Feb 2009 13:22:00 +0000

We're Now Acquia Silver Partners - Commercially Supported Drupal

This past week we completed the final steps to become a Acquia Silver Partner . This is something we've had a number of discussions about within the shop and are happy with the opportunities that this partnership provides for us and our larger clients. OpenConcept is already the premier Drupal shop supporting the Canadian government, federal unions and national non-profit organizations. Our longstanding work with multi-lingual content management systems has placed us in a great space to work with bilingual organizations. The work we've done on accessibility leads us to help support more and more entities which will be required...

Gathering Input About Government Procurement of Open Source Software

mike — Tue, 03 Feb 2009 11:42:00 +0000

Gathering Input About Government Procurement of Open Source Software

I attended an excellent talk last night about GCPedia that was presented by Jeff Braybrook, Deputy Chief Technology Officer for Canada at a Third Tuesday Ottawa Gathering . It was excellent to hear more about the history of the adoption of the open source tool Mediawiki within the Government of Canada. Jeff described Canada's CTO office as being "Hawkish about open source", and wanting to use it as much as possible. At a time when procurement officers and IT departments are still questioning whether or not open source can be used within government, this was great news. His view that...

Bringing in Twitter Into Social Marketing Mix

mike — Mon, 26 Jan 2009 12:46:00 +0000

Bringing in Twitter Into Social Marketing Mix

Even earlier this year I was pretty convinced that I wouldn't be twittering because I thought it was going to be a waste of time. Who has the time to send out 'interesting links', quick dinner ideas or to follow what people are thinking about, even in issues I'm passionate about. Well, apparently in 2009, I've found the means to bring Twitter into my life . I did so because I saw the efforts I was already putting into Web 2.0 tools and realized that I could link these applications together. I was already using Del.icio.us to keep track of...

Quick Accessibility Patch Accepted Into Core for Drupal 7

mike — Tue, 20 Jan 2009 15:29:00 +0000

Quick Accessibility Patch Accepted Into Core for Drupal 7

For a list of Accessibility issues for Drupal 7 . Wanted to make a brief announcement about a small patch that OpenConcept contributed to Drupal 7 to enhance accessibility. Drupal's accessibility is quite good, but there are always ways to improve for any software. In this case someone reported a problem with radio buttons where the tag was not being associated properly with the appropriate form elements. I looked at this problem, and rolled a patch for it (which included checkboxes as well) and then attached it to the project. As was discussed at the March 2008 DrupalCon, unit testing...

Building a Strategic Web Communications Plan

mike — Tue, 20 Jan 2009 09:34:00 +0000

Building a Strategic Web Communications Plan

OpenConcept has been working with our clients since 1999 to ensure that their content is positioned well. There have been a lot of changes over the past decade and we have been involved in many organizational efforts to understand the web. We have only recently started offering strategic planning workshops for organizations who want to come to a greater understanding of how to make better use of the Internet. Involving both technical and senior communications staff we can walk through issues that all national organizations are struggling with. The web moves quickly and it is critical that those people who...

Reading More About WCAG 2.0 & SEO

mike — Sat, 10 Jan 2009 23:39:00 +0000

Reading More About WCAG 2.0 & SEO

I've been blogging a lot recently about accessibility. This was started recently by the work that we have been doing around the Common Look and Feel of Government of Canada websites, but I've been involved in disability issues for a long time and so really would like to see the Internet be friendlier to a whole bunch of people with different abilities. If WCAG 2.0 is the current path to make information more accessible, it is in my best interests not only to have a checklist of items that our sites need in order to be Level A, AA or...

Fangs, Unique Strings and Drupal Discussions

mike — Thu, 08 Jan 2009 00:50:00 +0000

Fangs, Unique Strings and Drupal Discussions

I started a discussion about the need for unique strings withing the Drupal Groups Accessibility forum. The new WCAG 2.0 standards discourage webmasters from linking to different places with the same text. This does totally make sense and has some reasonable SEO implications as well. "Read more" is useful only if you have the visual reference to know where it is situated. "More about Example Article Title" is a much more descriptive way to link to a new page, but it is harder to program. It's also difficult when you have other types of generic links at the bottom of...

Living Leadership, the Executive Leadership Program of the Canada School of Public Service

mike — Tue, 06 Jan 2009 10:44:00 +0000

Living Leadership, the Executive Leadership Program of the Canada School of Public Service

The goal of this project was the establishment of an online collaborative work and learning environment for a group of distributed learners in the Living Leadership, the Executive Leadership Program of the Canada School of Public Service. The participants are executives from the public sector using the website to access information, documents and participant information. Each participant has a blog as well as a customized learning plan page maintained by the staff. The website is bilingual and features a calendar of events for the program. These elements were required to fulfill the Living Leadership Program’s blended learning needs. This was...

Government Wiki Implementations

mike — Sat, 03 Jan 2009 15:36:00 +0000

Government Wiki Implementations

So I decided it would be interesting to do a bit of a search within the Government of Canada's public pages for use or mentions of wiki's. There's been quite a lot of discussion on this front in 2008, so wanted to see where things stood at the beginning of 2009. Unfortunately there were only 404 references to the term wiki within domains with a *.gc.ca domain . Most wiki's aren't public so that isn't too surprising, and the two big instances of wiki implementation within the Government of Canada (GCpedia & NRCan's wiki) certainly aren't visible outside of their...

Translation Tips and Modules for Multilingual Drupal sites

mike — Mon, 29 Dec 2008 18:28:00 +0000

Translation Tips and Modules for Multilingual Drupal sites

Drupal has some excellent translation functions but deciding which modules to use and how to configure the modules is challenging. There are many different possible configurations depending on your website needs, domain names and content. You'll find there are a lot of choices of modules for setting up a multilingual site.... then there are a lot of key configuration items to enable depending on your website. This post focused on Drupal 6 modules and issues. We will give some example of the difficult decision making involved in translating content. There is no out-of-the-box configuration that seems to work, it all...

Government Accessibility Initiatives

mike — Fri, 05 Dec 2008 00:15:00 +0000

Government Accessibility Initiatives

I spent two days earlier this week in presentations to largely government employees about accessibility issues. It was organized by GOL Communications and we were invited largely to do with our work on the working to establish a collaborative CLF themes. There were more presentations about WCAG 2.0 than I'd ever heard prior to this event, and it was interesting to have it broken down int for principals that were pretty understandable. We must all strive to make websites perceivable, operable, understandable & robust. Surely focusing on those priorities as content developers would make our sites more useful for everyone...

Ontario Needs to Embrace Government 2.0 Methodology

mike — Fri, 28 Nov 2008 11:07:00 +0000

Ontario Needs to Embrace Government 2.0 Methodology

I just had a meeting with my representative from the CFIB , I am certain that without receiving information from them I would never have known about the requirement that the Ontario Ministry of Labour places on employers. Apparently, the Ministry has an additional 200 staff to enforce the requirement that all work places display the latest Employment Standards Poster. Now, the fines that they are issuing for not posting the latest version of the poster are not insignificant, so this certainly feels like a cash grab by the government. I think that the assumption is that if you are...

When Will We See OpenID.gc.ca ?

mike — Fri, 21 Nov 2008 22:58:00 +0000

When Will We See OpenID.gc.ca ?

Just wanted to add that the Obama administration is reviewing OpenID for consideration within the .gov domain (readwrite.com also now using Drupal). David Eaves just wrote up a good appeal for OpenID in his post canadian governments: how to waste millions online ($30m and counting) . Looks like the USA government is now endorsing OpenID (note site now using Drupal) as a framework. I wanted to point folks to a GC OpenID (no longer available), a proof of concept project to bring OpenID to the Government of Canada. I first became aware of the movement behind the OpenID project back...

CLF 2.0 Branding, Training and Implementation

mike — Tue, 18 Nov 2008 11:56:00 +0000

CLF 2.0 Branding, Training and Implementation

Last week Steve Lecomte and I met with Marquis Coté & Tamey McIntosh with digitalOttawa to talk about CLF 2.0 implementation/training and the launch of their new site commonlookandfeel.ca . It was good to hear about their vision for the site and where they hope to take the community. The site just launched this morning, and it is clear that they will be starting to add a lot of content to the site to help support a move towards compliance. We're looking forward to seeing where this initiative goes and finding ways to collaborate with others in the community. Steve...

LabourTech 2008: A Great Beginning

mike — Sun, 09 Nov 2008 21:02:00 +0000

LabourTech 2008: A Great Beginning

Well, I just got back from a whirlwind tour of Toronto. I had agreed to present at the LabourTech 2008 conference back in March, when Chris Lawson, CUPE 's Webmaster, asked me to participate. I was very impressed to see the turnout this weekend. There was quite a large turnout from Canada's Trade Union community. It is the first event of it's kind I know about and it was great to see this many people get out and discuss. I was part of a 3hr panel, the Open Source CMS Smackdown, which was a very friendly review of open source...

Databases, Government and Security

mike — Fri, 03 Oct 2008 00:27:00 +0000

Databases, Government and Security

I had to write a short note about a concern that was passed along to me about having public facing websites having databases on them. The opinion passed along to me was that it was insecure to have a database driven dynamic website for a public government department because the database made the whole system less secure. I just needed to state clearly that it is the scripting languages that interact with the browser that are the main point of concern, and these are well used in most GoC sites. Yes, if the .asp or .php scripts that are driving...

Common Look and Feel Standards in a Drupal Theme

mike — Mon, 29 Sep 2008 12:03:00 +0000

Common Look and Feel Standards in a Drupal Theme

For those in the theming world, Common Look and Feel for the Internet 2.0 (aka CLF) is the source of many hours of CSS tinkering and artistic compromise but necessary if you want to make a Government of Canada compliant website The context of CLF is noble: Canadians have the right to obtain information and services from Government of Canada Web sites regardless of the technologies they use. The key to effective implementation of universal accessibility lies in designing sites to serve the widest possible audience and the broadest possible range of hardware and software platforms, from adaptive technologies to...

Validation Problems - Sorry! This document can not be checked

mike — Sun, 31 Aug 2008 17:00:00 +0000

Validation Problems - Sorry! This document can not be checked

We use validators for our themes in order to produce standards compliant websites ( HTML , CSS , speed and accessibility ). We ran into this problem earlier in the week though with a theme we inherited from someone else. The error was that not all of the characters included in the file were UTF-8 , the new standard for international character sets. I believe that someone had just cut/paste the header values in from an old site and included them directly in the page.tpl.php file. This isn't unusual when upgrading a site, but certainly demonstrates the importance of validation...

Introducing Your Community to Your New Site

mike — Sat, 30 Aug 2008 12:22:00 +0000

Introducing Your Community to Your New Site

Drupal tries to make it as easy as possible for users to start participating in an online community. A lot of effort has been put into making the user registration process as simple as possible, however, given the nature of online spammers/hackers it is important to put in some controls to see that only the people you want to give access to are given rights on your site. So usually users will either see a text box on the sidebar, or click on a link which takes them to a registration page (full sized version of the one to the...

Upgrade to Ubercart and removal of Categories module

mike — Wed, 27 Aug 2008 23:52:00 +0000

Upgrade to Ubercart and removal of Categories module

We decided to upgrade our websites from the ecommerce module to the new Ubercart 1.0 shopping cart. Ubercart ( http://www.ubercart.org ) simplified the order taking process and has a very customizable checkout, shipping and tax settings. We were even able to charge GST tax on shipping! The one page checkout is great and calculated the shipping on the fly as you enter your shipping address. It will even automatically create an account for you so you can view your order status or print an invoice (or download a file). As well, we decided to rid the site of the categories...

Small Business and Big Unions

mike — Wed, 27 Aug 2008 16:29:00 +0000

Small Business and Big Unions

Well, a year ago we decided to become a part of Canadian Federation of Independent Business (CFIB). I was convinced that there would be more financial benefits to belonging to a large body of small businesses, and I think those have been proven correct. I also have called to get some support from them in the past and find the staff I've talked to be helpful and knowledgable. The regulations and paperwork are difficult to keep up with and I am glad that the CFIB has sent me material that has helped my business stay within health government guidelines. However,...

Getting Drupal in Libaries

mike — Sat, 23 Aug 2008 12:08:00 +0000

Getting Drupal in Libaries

Less than two years after this post they now have 11 titles when searching their catalog for 'Drupal' in the Ottawa Public Library. It is great to see how big the demand is for this great CMS. I am quite excited to see Drupal adoption taking off in different verticals in our society. We're feeling a sudden surge of interest within government, but we have also noticed a big increase within libraries. There are communities of users sparking up and library specific modules being developed. The flexibility of Drupal, particularly with CCK/Views makes it a great resource for people who...

Donating to the Drupal Association

mike — Tue, 12 Aug 2008 18:21:00 +0000

Donating to the Drupal Association

So it was after contributing a patch to the Donation module developed for the Drupal Association that I finally decided it was time for OpenConcept to step up to the bar and become an organizational member of this group. It isn't much more than a token gesture, however we are working to be more involved in contributing more than our time and experience to the Drupal project. We've donated some funds to Drupal events that we've attended and have organized others. The manner in which open source projects can organize and collaborate to pay for the inevitable infrastructure work is...

Private Wikis, WYSIWYG'S and What Really Is a Wiki Anyways?

mike — Wed, 02 Jul 2008 22:35:00 +0000

Private Wikis, WYSIWYG'S and What Really Is a Wiki Anyways?

The great news is hat wiki's are becoming mainstream these days and increasingly we are being approached by people particularly in government who want to adopt some type of collaborative and spontaneous editing environment that made wiki's famous. Unfortunately some of the elements of wiki's that have made them successful also makes them more difficult to adopt by non-technical and more bureaucratic organizations. Resources like Wikipedia have proven how valuable information can be freely organized by a community of users quickly and efficiently. Wikipedia is a great model and fortunately they are built on open source software so it is...

Simple Content Creating Issues in Drupal

mike — Mon, 30 Jun 2008 11:47:00 +0000

Simple Content Creating Issues in Drupal

We've had a couple clients recently have some trouble with some of the items that are hidden at the bottom of a Drupal node edit form. Depending on what modules you've got enabled and what content type you are editing there can be a lot of fields that you have to generate in order to create a node. So to help with usability Drupal 5 hides many of the fields by logical groups. Unfortunately, if you don't know what logical group you're looking for you can no longer quickly scan down the page to find the reference you're searching for...

Our Plans for Drupal Upgrades

mike — Tue, 17 Jun 2008 17:33:00 +0000

Our Plans for Drupal Upgrades

We had some feedback from a client earlier this week who was worried about adopting Drupal now because she was told that there was going to be a new release out soon that would make the previous ones out of date. I figured that it was important to convey OpenConcept's approach to Drupal upgrades so that it is possible for organizations to budget for future expenses. Now Drupal is a great software project, but like all software projects it gets out of date rather quickly. Because there is an active developer community and the Internet is such a corrosive environment...

Political Trend Watching in Canada

mike — Sat, 14 Jun 2008 00:42:00 +0000

Political Trend Watching in Canada

There are some interesting tools out there to quantitatively measure what people are interested in. What people put into a search engine is a good indicator of how much relative interset there is in a particular term. In reading the Wall Street Journal article Can Google Trends Predict The Election? I thought it was worth looking again at the political scene up here in Canada. I had taken a look at this when it seemed like we would be heading into an election in the fall. We're still waiting for the Conservatives to fall, but thought that I'd toss up...

Panels2: Worth the Upgrade and Steep Learning Curve

mike — Thu, 05 Jun 2008 17:28:00 +0000

Panels2: Worth the Upgrade and Steep Learning Curve

If you've used the panels module than panels2 is a logical upgrade. It lets you create a content pages which are divided into multiple areas which can include many kinds of content (e.g., nodes, blocks, views...) Here's what's new in Panels2: It offers many new features, better interface and the ability to enter edit mode right from regular node view (the original Panels requires a half dozen clicks to access edit mode) You can create a flexible layout either to by percentage or pixels rather than being forced to work with a pre-determined layout template (i.e. 2 columns and 2...

A Summary of Drupal Camp Toronto 2008

mike — Wed, 28 May 2008 13:44:00 +0000

A Summary of Drupal Camp Toronto 2008

Mike, Charlotte, and I spent the weekend in Toronto, attending the 2008 Drupal camp . It was a very enjoyable time and I'd like to thank the organizers for putting together a great event. I only arrived in Toronto midday Friday, so I missed both the morning sessions, but I was able to attend John Resig 's talk about jQuery . I had only briefly looked at jQuery before this talk, so John's talk was very informative, as well as impressive. I can safely say jQuery is a great tool for dynamic doing dynamic UI manipulation and definitely a handy...

Citizenship in the Age of Google

mike — Mon, 12 May 2008 19:46:00 +0000

Citizenship in the Age of Google

I don't write about podcasts I listen to unless they are particularly interesting, and One Nation Under Google certainly fills this need. Taped by CKUT and available through Rabble Podcast Network , Darren Barney's done an excellent job to challenge how we think about the politics and technology in our modern world. He reframes the definition of citizenship to be based on the practice of judgment, rather than a right of membership. This is particularly useful when we start discussing about global or wired citizens. He does touch a bit on some of the new technologies which have been used...

Building Drupal the Community in Eastern Canada

mike — Fri, 02 May 2008 15:14:00 +0000

Building Drupal the Community in Eastern Canada

Earlier this week Ottawa had it's first ever Drupal meetup. I started talking up the idea after coming back from the Boston Drupalcon and found that there were a few folks I knew in my network who were interested. Turns out that there were more long standing Drupal users here in the community than I was aware of. There were over 25 people present at the discussion at the James St. Pub and people stayed for nearly 5 hours discussing different elements of Drupal. The biggest surprise for me came from the number of government agencies who were in attendance...

Quick MarsEdit Sample

mike — Tue, 29 Apr 2008 15:00:00 +0000

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

mike — Wed, 16 Apr 2008 11:16:00 +0000

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

mike — Mon, 07 Apr 2008 16:50:00 +0000

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

mike — Wed, 05 Mar 2008 08:14:00 +0000

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

mike — Fri, 29 Feb 2008 00:55:00 +0000

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

mike — Mon, 25 Feb 2008 20:02:00 +0000

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

mike — Sun, 24 Feb 2008 01:16:00 +0000

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

mike — Fri, 15 Feb 2008 13:31:00 +0000

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

mike — Thu, 14 Feb 2008 14:26:00 +0000

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

mike — Sun, 06 Jan 2008 20:56:00 +0000

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...

PNG Fix Miraculously Resolves Longstanding Design Issues

mike — Thu, 06 Dec 2007 15:18:00 +0000

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

mike — Thu, 06 Dec 2007 00:56:00 +0000

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

mike — Tue, 04 Dec 2007 19:26:00 +0000

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

mike — Fri, 23 Nov 2007 18:28:00 +0000

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

mike — Mon, 12 Nov 2007 10:06:00 +0000

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

mike — Fri, 09 Nov 2007 09:10:00 +0000

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?

mike — Fri, 12 Oct 2007 22:25:00 +0000

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

mike — Fri, 05 Oct 2007 10:20:00 +0000

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

mike — Sat, 29 Sep 2007 10:56:00 +0000

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?

mike — Tue, 18 Sep 2007 13:36:00 +0000

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...

Computer World Canada Article on SCO Group’s Copyright Case

mike — Mon, 20 Aug 2007 14:45:00 +0000

Computer World Canada Article on SCO Group’s Copyright Case

ComputerWorld Canada published an article on 13 Aug 2007 that featured a quick quote that I gave them. GNU/Linux experts look for lessons from SCO suit . GNU/Linux adoption has certainly taken off in the desktop world since the release of Vista. As is often the case, some of the most interesting notes are in the comments that people leave. Our very own Russell McOrmond left the following. As you read Mr. Sookman's comments about FLOSS licensing, remember that his ideas actually apply more to non-FLOSS licensing than FLOSS licensing. As a lobbiest for CRIA and other businesses promoting the...

Content Management System (CMS) Report on Alternatives to Back-End

mike — Fri, 10 Aug 2007 17:02:00 +0000

Content Management System (CMS) Report on Alternatives to Back-End

The Canadian Union of Public Employees (CUPE), a long-time client, recently approached OpenConcept about content management systems (CMS) and the potential transition from what they are using now. CUPE’s website is currently running on a highly customized version of the Back-End (BE) CMS. BE’s existing, extended functionality is based on several modifications made by CUPE staff and contracted developers over the past few years. However, BE as an open-source CMS is no longer being developed – meaning that no additional features or updates are being provided by the open-source community, and external technical support is limited. As a result, OpenConcept...

States & Provinces in North America

mike — Sun, 05 Aug 2007 09:55:00 +0000

States & Provinces in North America

So I needed a list of provinces/states for a CCK select list I was creating, so figured I might as well document it for others as well, considering how popular my list of countries seems to be. I've attached a text list that makes these easy to import with their abbreviations as the keys. I was surprised at how many little Islands the USA has now absorbed. Wanted to see if I could find a list of USA states in Spanish, but couldn't find such a list. I decided instead to include a list of the states of Mexico so...

Release Announcement - Drupal Connect Module

mike — Fri, 03 Aug 2007 23:09:00 +0000

Release Announcement - Drupal Connect Module

We're super excited to announce the release of Steve's new Drupal module - Connect . Connect glues together two CCK node-types so that they are related to each other. Big deal you you say, but it is! Not just because it's our brain-child, but because it marries two pressing needs of our clients - effective take action tools and flexible event registration systems. But we developed this initially for an advocacy tool we were developing or a client, The Council of Canadians , so let's start there. All of the exiting Take Action tools I know have either grown very...

Finally, An API to Help Bind Citizens to their Representatives

mike — Fri, 03 Aug 2007 19:51:00 +0000

Finally, An API to Help Bind Citizens to their Representatives

OpenConcept is looking for Beta testers to help them evaluate our new political web service, Make The Change . We need application developers to take a look at the API we've outlined here, and suggest ways that it could be implemented for your projects. We've provided an example for PHP, but there are lots of great folks out there who use Perl, Python and other neat development languages. We are rolling out tools for Drupal, but Joomla & Plone have big communities of users who could benefit from this technology too. Like the folks at datalibre.ca we believe that governments...

Dealing with Oodles of Comment Spam with MySQL

mike — Tue, 24 Jul 2007 12:38:00 +0000

Dealing with Oodles of Comment Spam with MySQL

I keep track of a lot of sites, and at one point I needed to disable the CAPTCHA on one of them and forgot to re-enable it. Needless to say the spam bots had a field day. I don't check the site very often as I don't have much time to add new content, but when I was there last I realized that there were over 1000 comments waiting for approval. Way too many to scan through 20 at a time to see if there might be some actual people responding. I wanted to review as much as I could,...

Alternatives to Mathematical & Image Captcha's Needed by the Open Source Community

mike — Sat, 21 Jul 2007 01:38:00 +0000

Alternatives to Mathematical & Image Captcha's Needed by the Open Source Community

Like everyone else out there I'm sick of spam but like the idea of bringing user feedback to blog notes like this. I thought I'd list some alternatives to those wiggly letters that are so often inconsistently applied and are often difficult to read. CAPTCHA stands for C ompletely A utomated P ublic T uring test to tell C omputers and H umans A part. Solving captchas should be fun, or at least less monotonous. I'd like to see these implemented in open source applications like Drupal and perhaps we'll get the time to do this ourselves at some time...

Better Approaches to Managing Translation with Technology

mike — Fri, 20 Jul 2007 01:52:00 +0000

Better Approaches to Managing Translation with Technology

I got a call from a translation company the other day because they were looking to contract someone for some PHP development work. We got started talking about some of the work that they were doing, but also some of the opportunities to use content management tools to automate the process, and reduce the costs for high quality professional translations.We began looking at something like this a few years ago when we were setting up a newsletter tool for a branch of Environment Canada. They were interested in streamlining the process so that they could produce their own publications more...

Screen scraping MPs info from government's websites

mike — Tue, 17 Jul 2007 13:27:00 +0000

Screen scraping MPs info from government's websites

Well, for any number of applications, one might find oneself in need of the contact information for our federal politicians. There are any number of ways you can do this, including going onto a government web page like this , and manually copying and pasting the information. "dude, manual data input is sooooo last decade!" Or of course, you could screen scrape this data into a basic csv. DISCLAIMER: while normally my scrapings are done in the likeness of ninjas robbing a museum, this time around I resorted to some pretty hacky antics. This means that there is no one...

Disadvantages to Using Two CMS Installs to Deliver a Bilingual Site

mike — Tue, 17 Jul 2007 13:06:00 +0000

Disadvantages to Using Two CMS Installs to Deliver a Bilingual Site

I've noticed a few sites now are trying to produce a bilingual site by taking a basic install of a blog like WordPress and setting up a unique instance for every language that they want to use. There may be times where this is a reasonable solution, but for most organizations I think the long term costs will be much higher than the short term savings. By using Drupal for managing your content the maintenance and work-flow of a multilingual site will be considerably easier for most users. Setting up two versions of a Content Management System (CMS) in different...

Google Supporting Non-Profits & Taking Environmental Initiatives

mike — Fri, 13 Jul 2007 10:40:00 +0000

Google Supporting Non-Profits & Taking Environmental Initiatives

I've modified this article as Google has removed a few of it's pages and so I've pointed the links to the Way Back Machine. Not sure where Google's Climate Change, Public Health and Economic Development programs are now. Hopefully Google is trying to be good rather than just trying to get good press, however there are some interesting initiatives that Google is starting to take. They have fairly recently: Google Grants - Free advertising for charitable organizations in several countries including Canada Google Earth Outreach - Put your organizations efforts on Google Earth Hosting events with non-profit hubs like the...

Open Source Security Fears

mike — Fri, 13 Jul 2007 09:49:00 +0000

Open Source Security Fears

NOTE: There is a new effort to do this in Ottawa with Tech4good . Earlier this week I went out to Green Drinks Ottawa and had a really good conversation with a table of committed and very experienced environmentalists. Open source came up in conversation, and one of the people brought up security concerns as the main reason that their organization had decision not to use open source software, but rather to develop custom applications. I brought up a couple examples of how pretty much every big corporation is using open source software these days and are investing in its...

Measuring Google Trends Across Canada

mike — Fri, 13 Jul 2007 02:08:00 +0000

Measuring Google Trends Across Canada

Decided to check out a few of Google's new mapping plugins and did a quick test of Geotrends. Must say that it is a neat twist to find where people are searching for search terms. This builds on Google's Trends , which is pretty useful, but isn't really geared to searching your geography. I did a search based on some CMS's that we will be testing for internationalization, basic usability & customization to see which of these terms Drupal, Joomla, Plone, Typo3, Wordpress people are searching for. However when looking for what's hot in eastern Canada this Google Maps plugin...

Want to Upgrade to a New CMS?

mike — Tue, 19 Jun 2007 13:11:00 +0000

Want to Upgrade to a New CMS?

There are a lot of issues to consider when upgrading your website. Most often it seems the organization looking for the change focuses mostly on the new design of the site. Design is just one element and it usually isn't the most critical one to your new site's success. It makes sense that when people want to launch a new site that they will also launch a new design. This is generally a good idea as often converting a design to a new content management system will be nearly as difficult as creating a new design in the first place...

Jumping to Drupal Will Help Your Search Engine Results

mike — Sat, 16 Jun 2007 11:50:00 +0000

Jumping to Drupal Will Help Your Search Engine Results

I was contacted by a company earlier this week that wanted to enhance their search engine results and wanted to incorporate some dynamic aspects to their website to help them do this. After looking at their site and thinking about our experience with SEO I thought that there would be some huge advantages to migrating their site over to this Content Management System.In this blog post I want to highlight some of the steps that I proposed to make the shift from a static HTML site to an optimized Drupal site. There are a number of details of exactly how...

Strategic Use of Flickr by Non-Profits

mike — Tue, 05 Jun 2007 16:43:00 +0000

Strategic Use of Flickr by Non-Profits

In the last month I've noticed a number of NGO/NPO's have started to use one of the early Web 2.0 poster children Flickr . Unlike many of the other social networking sites out there, Flickr's all about the photos. You can't upload movies, write notes, or stick something on someone's wall like you can in newer tools like Facebook . However, if what you want is an interface for propagating images, Flickr is still one of the nicer ones. I started using Flickr in 2005 largely as a means of keeping track of people who I had met at the...

Import HTML Module

mike — Mon, 04 Jun 2007 18:55:00 +0000

Import HTML Module

The Import HTML module is a Drupal module that facilitates migrating from your existing site to a Drupal content management system. This module has the potential to save a lot of time and energy when importing an existing site. In many cases, migrating to a new website can mean copying and pasting large amounts of content, even though the pages are all formatted in a similar fashion. The import_html module can help automate much of this tedious work. Testing of Two Websites At OpenConcept, we focused on testing the Import HTML module on two main websites. The first website was...

What Action You Need to Take When a Techie Leaves

mike — Fri, 01 Jun 2007 11:13:00 +0000

What Action You Need to Take When a Techie Leaves

The following list is good practice regardless of the conditions of the tech's departure. In the case of a firing, these are all the more important, and will require more planning. Basic Authorization change basic usernames & passwords for all services above. ensure that the emails for all services above are valid and pointing to your new techie or a generic tech account. contact service providers and ensure that they all have the new contact name, phone number and email. tell your clients that the departing techie is no longer working there. Company Resources back up and then delete the...

What You Need to Know Before a Techie Leaves

mike — Fri, 01 Jun 2007 11:01:00 +0000

What You Need to Know Before a Techie Leaves

Steve & I have prepared a short list of things to help prepare your organization when you loose your techie. Many organizations rely heavily on their techies, but don't have a plan in place to replace them when they leave. The following is a list of things that may help ensure that there is as little disruption as possible when a key technical staff person leaves. Basic server/network access (for local machines, but also also dedicated or virtual servers) how is user authentication managed? what are the root and other administrator usernames / passwords. are there routers, firewalls, or other...

Building a Conference Registration Site

mike — Thu, 31 May 2007 20:13:00 +0000

Building a Conference Registration Site

Worth noting that there is now an interesting install profile for conferences available for Drupal. I started writing this post shortly after DrupalCamp Toronto, but didn't have a good time to finish it off. James Walker provided a good example of how to reproduce a conference registration site in his workshop "Building an event site in an hour". This functionality is useful for all sorts of organizations including the Drupal community, this recipe has been used for the Open Source CMS Summit at the Yahoo Campus and also at Toronto's Drupal Camp and will be rolled up to be used...

Lost Gmail - Email Hosting Challenges

mike — Thu, 24 May 2007 21:21:00 +0000

Lost Gmail - Email Hosting Challenges

Email is becoming an increasingly complex and unreliable medium. We expect email to be instantaneous and all pervasive. We depend on it arriving moments after it is sent because it almost always does. Last fall we switched to using Google's Apps domain hosting service to see if we couldn't test out this product before recommending it to our clients. Email hosting is a difficult thankless task because it has become such a critical form of communications. In general we've been very happy with the services provided by Google - particularly with spam reduction. But even with all of the resources...

Web Hosting Dilemma

mike — Thu, 24 May 2007 14:17:00 +0000

Web Hosting Dilemma

As a small web development company that also does web hosting for some of our clients it is difficult to even consider competing against the thousands of companies out there that specialize in it. In the last two years we've started to move away from promoting our own services and instead focusing on providing technical support for folks who want to choose to work with another web host. Partly this is because many of our clients have very strong feelings about where their site is hosted (either because off past experience or the monthly cost). It is also because it...

Server-side Scripting on Magma

mike — Thu, 24 May 2007 12:24:00 +0000

Server-side Scripting on Magma

Earlier this week we had a lot of trouble restoring data on a client's site which was hosted with a web host that we have worked with for a number of years. People always assume that their web hosts do keep backups, however this totally depends on the host and the package that the client chose to purchase. Fortunately the client had selected a package that contained backups, however restoring data from a backup isn't trivial and it all had to be managed through trouble tickets as per any large web hosting company. To gain a bit more control of...

Government Software Innovation

mike — Thu, 17 May 2007 11:21:00 +0000

Government Software Innovation

Being based in Ottawa, it is hard to ignore the opportunities available in providing services to the government. With federal, provincial & municipal governments all with offices in the city there is a huge opportunity for innovation and cooperation between different departments. Most Canadians don't realize this, but our country's largest single software producer is our public service sector and yet the experience, tools and intellectual property developed by government workers is rarely shared with other divisions let alone with the citizens who paid for its development. I have received a number of phone calls from government employees who are...

Helping Habitat for Humanity

mike — Tue, 15 May 2007 16:03:00 +0000

Helping Habitat for Humanity

OpenConcept is doing more work in providing technical support to other web consulting companies. Most recently we were called in by HJC New Media to help launch Habitat for Humanity Australia's new website . We were essentially involed in creating some php scripts for managing and collecting contact information from their contact us page as well as their eNewsletter. We were also involved in communicating the client's needs to the web host and flicking the switch for the final launch. Like many NGOs, there often aren't inhouse technical people who can help support them in their choices of technolgoy. The...

Speed Demo on Drupal's Search Engine Optimization

mike — Sun, 13 May 2007 22:03:00 +0000

Speed Demo on Drupal's Search Engine Optimization

I signed up to do a speed geek at Drupal Camp, but mostly out of habit. I first was exposed to it at AdvocacyDev 1 and later at the NTEN conference. Both times I was exhausted after presenting 5 five minute presentations, but found that it was a worth while experience. I'd never given a speed geek about Drupal before though and thought that nobody had mentioned search engine optimization at the conference. Seemed like something that folks would be interested in and felt that OpenConcept had some recent experience to contribute to this. At the last minute the speed...

Toronto Drupal Camp

mike — Tue, 01 May 2007 16:42:00 +0000

Toronto Drupal Camp

OpenConcept is pleased to be participating in the 2nd annual Toronto Drupal Camp . Ravi, Ethan & myself will be heading down to participate in workshops from other Drupal developers. Meet with other users and developers here in Ontario and get a better sense of how people are using this software. The community around Drupal is quite engaged and there have now been a number of conferences organized internationally to get together developers. International conferences have been held in Amsterdam , Brussels Vancouver, Portland , the Yahoo! Campus and this fall Barcelona . It was nice to see that the...

Drupal's Pony Power

mike — Tue, 01 May 2007 00:27:00 +0000

Drupal's Pony Power

The whole Drupal Song as featured on the Lullabot podcast made me think a bit more about help play a bit more with the culture of Drupal. We all know that Drupal is a great CMS that provides individuals and organizations with a scalable, user-friendly interface. But does it have pony power? Now we can say that with absolute certainty it does. I purchased a Konrad Pony T-Shirt from Angry Sheep Designs when I was in Halifax a month ago. It was popular and I had some requests for more My Little Pony styled products. I thought that a Drupal...

Why Unions Should Provide Free Websites to Their Locals

mike — Wed, 25 Apr 2007 09:37:00 +0000

Why Unions Should Provide Free Websites to Their Locals

I want to start out by saying that this isn't just something that is an issue with unions and locals, but is also a challenge with any organization with member groups that end up needing to have a website. This could be riding associations for political parties like the NDP or local chapters of the Sierra Club . There are a number of reasons why national or regional organizations like these need to be investing in the net on behalf of their members. The easiest way to do this is to offer sub-domains to member organizations so that they can...

Critical Static Page Caching

mike — Tue, 24 Apr 2007 20:55:00 +0000

Critical Static Page Caching

Note: We've discontinued this process and are using Drupal's boost module as it now fairly effortlessly allows us to produce cached versions of all pages for anonymous users. Some day there will be a Drupal module that effortlessly allows users to build static caches of their entire site so that plain old HTML can be delivered to 95% of your visitors and you can choose the refresh rate that is appropriate for you. Most sites have old content on it that won't change but every few months and regardless of how many times it has been crawled it seems that...

Working the Wiki

mike — Tue, 17 Apr 2007 13:46:00 +0000

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

mike — Wed, 04 Apr 2007 00:16:00 +0000

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

mike — Mon, 02 Apr 2007 20:20:00 +0000

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

mike — Wed, 28 Mar 2007 14:35:00 +0000

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

mike — Wed, 21 Mar 2007 01:25:00 +0000

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.

mike — Tue, 20 Mar 2007 15:56:00 +0000

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

mike — Mon, 19 Mar 2007 23:27:00 +0000

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?

mike — Fri, 16 Mar 2007 11:53:00 +0000

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

mike — Sat, 10 Mar 2007 18:45:00 +0000

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

mike — Sat, 10 Mar 2007 18:06:00 +0000

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...

Web 2.0 ... The Machine is Us-ing Us

mike — Sat, 10 Feb 2007 18:17:00 +0000

Web 2.0 ... The Machine is Us-ing Us

I stumbled upon this short movie while looking at the CivicActions site. The film: Web 2.0 ... The Machine is Us-ing Us is an interesting look at where the web is at now. It does a good job at explaining the hype about Web 2.0 in a ver visual and entertaining way.

Physical & Virtual Activism

mike — Thu, 25 Jan 2007 10:19:00 +0000

Physical & Virtual Activism

I was struck today by two different campaigns that are coming out of the USA, but striving for a global audience. The first one was from IdeaList.org - Action Without Borders - and the next from AVAAZ.org - The World In Action. Idealist's present campaign is to get folks together during the week of February 5-11 "to help launch a global network of people who want to change their communities and the world by connecting people, ideas, and resources in every possible way." This does seem like a very interesting challenge to use the virtual world to challenge people to...

Online Phone Campaigns Targeting Apple

mike — Sat, 13 Jan 2007 21:45:00 +0000

Online Phone Campaigns Targeting Apple

With online campaigns timing makes or breaks it. I was quite impressed with Greenpeace's Green Apple Campaign and their most recent Online Action . Their most recent action calls on mac users to call up their Public Relations Director and leave him a message, right before their big MacWorld Keynote (where the iPhone was announced). This is a neat next step for that allows activists interested in this campaign to do something which invests them more in the campaign and gets them moving up the ladder of engagement. Was neat to call up the other day and find that the...

Looking for Some Empowerment?

mike — Thu, 30 Nov 2006 16:01:00 +0000

Looking for Some Empowerment?

I've subscribed to a lot of rabble.ca 's podcasts and have enjoyed most of them. I have to say though that I was totally blown away by Reverend Van Jones' speech in FierceLight . Episodes 1-3 are filled with hope, conviction and challenge as Van Jones from the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights preaches to activists and spiritual people alike. It is easy to get discouraged as an activist. I think I would benefit from listening to these speeches every few months. It is important to look for inspiration in this world and to share what we have found...

Union Organizing

mike — Mon, 27 Nov 2006 14:48:00 +0000

Union Organizing

OpenConcept has experience serving national labour unions and regional locals across Canada. We have supported union in providing user/content support, technical support, customized bilingual content management systems as well as server admin support over the years. Our staff also has personal experience as union members and within a local's executive. We have a good understanding of the needs of unions in Canada and look forward to opportunities to support this important social movement. Are you looking to organize communication with your membership? Is your local preparing to go on strike? Do you need a way to organize communication away from...

rabble podcast network review

mike — Sun, 29 Oct 2006 18:51:00 +0000

rabble podcast network review

I'm not always the first to jump onto a bandwagon and although I've been looking at and subscribing to podcasts and video casts for over a year I haven't owned an iPod or mp3 player. I was downloading interesting documentaries and news sources, but more often than not didn't have time to listen to them. I finally bought an iPod earlier this week and had to say how much more I am enjoying the rabble podcast network (rpn) shows I've listened to. I've been reading rabble.ca's articles since the beginning as we were hired to help set up/customize an open...

Firefox 2.0

mike — Fri, 27 Oct 2006 15:04:00 +0000

Firefox 2.0

Just wanted to pass on a positive review of Firefox 2.0 I installed it this morning on my Mac and the upgrade went great. I didn't have any problems with extensions giving me problems (although not all of them were available for the latest code). So far it seems faster, with a few fresh theme elements. Like the new tab management which allows you to keep a smaller window open when you are using a whole bunch of tabs. The built in spell checker is also great for all of those web forms that we are constantly having to fill...

Exceptional Yum Upgrades

mike — Thu, 19 Oct 2006 15:38:00 +0000

Exceptional Yum Upgrades

We've got this new Xen server and needed to make sure that we weren't making the kernels out of sync with the physical box's kernel version. For this reason we needed to remove the kernel upgrades from yum so that this didn't get installed/upgraded by default. Modifying the /etc/yum.conf file and adding in this exception in the [main] section did the trick: exclude=kernel* Makes it a lot easier to keep track of those files you want to leave as they are.

Setting up a Tidy Environment for Drupal

mike — Fri, 13 Oct 2006 14:29:00 +0000

Setting up a Tidy Environment for Drupal

Had some fun earlier today setting up an environment to use the drupal htmltidy module in in a Fedora Core environment. The README.txt file in the module was rather brief, but I needed to run the following to set it up on FC5: yum install php-devel tidy libtidy-devel pecl install tidy php-devel is needed to run the phpize and tidy/libtidy-devel are needed to provide pecl with the libraries to incorporate these into php.

Opera Lyra - The Barber Of Seville

mike — Tue, 12 Sep 2006 23:46:00 +0000

Opera Lyra - The Barber Of Seville

I was looking for something to celebrate for my 35th Birthday (on Sept 11th), and decided back in July that it would be a bit of an adventure to buy two tickets to the Opera as I had never been before. I really wasn't sure what to expect as I had never seen one before, but since OpenConcept helped launch their site it seemed like a good thing to learn more about. I was quite surprised at how much fun this production was. I don't go to the theatre all that often, but I found the acting to be good...

Ottawa Roundtable on Social Movements & Open Source

mike — Sat, 17 Jun 2006 04:53:00 +0000

Ottawa Roundtable on Social Movements & Open Source

Russell McOrmond & I attended the Social Change and Community Technology Roundtable yesterday, June 16th. This was organized by Martin Itzkow and supported by the JW McConnell Family Foundation and the PLAN Institute for Caring Citizenship. It is always nice to meet with people like this and share our excitment about Open Source as a tool to build more collaboration between progressive organizations. Mike

Google Links

mike — Sat, 25 Feb 2006 16:37:00 +0000

Google Links

Google is great for a lot of things, but it s a pretty big place and often it doesn't seem like there is much of a road map to services that you actually want to use. Thought I'd just put together a few links that I'm using. GMail / Gtalk (why this can't also keep the .ca I'm not sure): http://mail.google.com/mail/ Google Maps (would be good if map.google.ca would redirect to maps.google.ca): http://maps.google.ca/ Google News - a nice customizable way to view the world: http://news.google.ca/ Google's Webmaster Tools - the Google sitemap interface: https://www.google.ca/webmasters/sitemaps/siteoverview Google Analytics - to monitor site...

Makepovertyhistory.org's cornerwhitebandsmallright css/javascript

mike — Sat, 25 Feb 2006 16:15:00 +0000

Makepovertyhistory.org's cornerwhitebandsmallright css/javascript

I saw this a few times, but wanted to make sure I'd be able to find it again. Haven't seen other campaign sites with banners like this, but totally see how it could be a useful form of promotion. The javascript just provides referrer information for make poverty history.. Probably better ways to do this, but interesting.. The banner fits in very nicely with the white wristband that this campaign uses. Could also be used quite effectively with breast cancer campaigns or any of the ribbon campaigns out there. // Current Page Reference// copyright Stephen Chapman, 1st Jan 2005// you...

CVS Patching Tutorial 1

mike — Thu, 23 Feb 2006 00:59:00 +0000

CVS Patching Tutorial 1

by Peter Bojanic Scenario: You customize a file that is under CVS control with some local changes (e.g. hostname, owner) and some common changes (e.g. application logic, host-independent variables). You need to commit some of your changes but not others. I'm working with a file called BE_config.php. There are some local customizations to make Back-End work on my machine and there are some common changes that need to be check into cvs. 1. First, move the working file out of the way: $ mv BE_config.php BE_config.php-peter 2. Now, let's get the latest version from cvs: $ cvs update BE_config.php U...

How to roll back the version of a file in CVS

mike — Thu, 23 Feb 2006 00:58:00 +0000

How to roll back the version of a file in CVS

Peter Bojanics put this together for OpenConcept. Familiar scenario: someone has checked a new version of a file into the CVS tree that resulted in a regression of the application. You want to roll that version back to a known state. This brief tutorial shows how to do it. 1. First, I update my working copy to the latest version... $ cvs update BE_Article.class P BE_Article.class 2. Now, let's find the latest stable version... $ cvs log BE_Article.class RCS file: /cvsroot/back-end/back-end0.5.x/class/BE_Article.class,v revision 1.45 date: 2003/04/08 16:40:51; author: iclysdal; state: Exp; lines: +109 revision 1.44 date: 2003/04/05 23:20:51; author: mgifford; state:...

phpMyAdmin Help

mike — Thu, 23 Feb 2006 00:53:00 +0000

phpMyAdmin Help

phpMyAdmin is an powerful tool to help folks manage their MySQL databases. Generally this tool is well documented and there is an active forum if folks want to ask questions to the community. Setting up Sub-Account Permissions MySQL (which is the database which is controlled by phpMyAdmin) has a great many levels of permissions which allows a lot of flexibility for securing your data. If you have a number of databases which you would like to administer, you can do this under a single MySQL user account. However, you can also give access to specific databases and tables to different...

Grep/Find Tools for locating text in Linux.

mike — Wed, 22 Feb 2006 23:59:00 +0000

Grep/Find Tools for locating text in Linux.

1) Problem with stripping front & back slashes Looking for an easy way to find php array definitions without quotes $foo[bar] = 'bad'; with definitions with quotes: $foo['bar'] = 'good'; Peter Bojanic suggested the following: grep \"[[^'\"$].*[^'\"]]\" *.php Which is the set of all things in square brackets that do not start with either quote character or a $. This set includes some valid extras, like $bits[count($bits)-1], but you just have to careful. Extra spaces below a ?> in a php script can cause problems with cookies, caching, sessions, etc.. It's often a problem finding which file has the extra...

Using wget to Mirror Whole Web Sites

mike — Wed, 22 Feb 2006 23:57:00 +0000

Using wget to Mirror Whole Web Sites

The following should all allow you to mirror an existing site from the Internet to your hard drive (if you are using a Mac or Linux): wget --convert-links --mirror http://www.slashdot.org wget -r -k -R .pdf -Dslashdot.org http://www.slashdot.org wget -r -l5 -k -Dslashdot.org http://www.slashdot.org It can be a useful way to migrate a script from an old server (which you may no longer have access to) to a new one.

Why NGOs and Unions Should Use OpenSource

mike — Wed, 22 Feb 2006 23:47:00 +0000

Why NGOs and Unions Should Use OpenSource

The following was adapted from a workshop lead by Mike Gifford on why NGOs should be interested in Open Source: Practical reasons why NGOs and the organizations that work with them should use Free/Libre Open Source Software Viruses - Any other OS than Windows will have fewer problems with viruses. Stability - GNU/Linux is a very stable Operating System, and Mac's stability has increased considerably with OS X which is based on Free Software. Cost - No license fees (up front or annual), no mandatory upgrades (you can choose to upgrade or not), and no external costs to try out...

WTOAction & WTOCaravan

mike — Sat, 28 May 2005 09:33:00 +0000

WTOAction & WTOCaravan

OpenConcept's origins were based in the anti-globalization movement framed by the Battle of Seattle. In the fall of 1999 we were contracted to provide a web site for the Cross Canada Caravan Against the WTO. This was a loose coalition of unions, NGOs, student groups and political organizations that was organizing to raise awareness about the World Trade Organization. OpenConcept's origins were based in the anti-globalization movement framed by the Battle of Seattle. In the fall of 1999 we were contracted to provide a web site for the Cross Canada Caravan Against the WTO. This was a loose coalition of...

Top 10 Open Source Tools for eActivism

mike — Sun, 23 Jan 2005 00:00:00 +0000

Top 10 Open Source Tools for eActivism

Note: This article was written a few years back now and the web software options have changed considerably. Many people are now searching for information about evaluations of wiki's. Dan Bashaw wrote an interesting follow-up to this article recently. I generally suggest either using MediaWiki if that's all a client wants since Wikipedia has made the norm, or doing something more customized that we would set up with Drupal. If you need help choosing what type of application you need or support in setting it up, please feel to contact us . by Dan Bashaw & Mike Gifford People have...