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....
Recent Blog Posts
By Jesse Payne on 15/10/2012
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...
By Mike Gifford on 18/06/2012
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...
By Mike Gifford on 11/06/2012
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...
By Mike Gifford on 05/06/2012
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...
By Mike Gifford on 01/06/2012
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...
By Mike Gifford on 30/05/2012
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...
By Mike Mallett on 22/05/2012
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...
By Mike Gifford on 13/05/2012
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...
By Mike Gifford on 06/04/2012
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...
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