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Every New Year brings potential for realizing fresh experiences and attaining goals for success above every year before.

Towards the end of 2011 we took some time away from finding new project partners to work on developing and launching a platform for Creatives to make their own websites called introduction.io as part of our incubated initiatives but as 2012 begins we're now actively seeking clients to work with on new projects.

Have you got an idea for a new project you'd like feedback on?  Need help rethinking your current online identity and web presence(s)?  Interested in bringing an offline community to the Web, or encouraging a current online community to be more participatory?  We can help out!

Lets discuss how we can work together to make this new year exciting and successful!  You can get in touch via our contact/RFP-submittal form, via telephone at 1.416.642-5469 or email: info@designguru.org

Transitioning over to using Drupal 7 has been very frustrating these past few months - after the lengthy process of encouraging the Drupal Community to help updating core to reflect some user interface improvements over Drupal 6, that energy for making processes simpler hasn't seemed to carry through to contributed modules. 

Particularly, all the CCK advancement for media handling through fields that had happened with Drupal 5 and then 6 seems to have been thrown out the window with the horridly infantile state of the Media Module, which is reason enough to hold off on upgrading and stick with Drupal 6 for a few more months... yes, while the core team races to plan for Drupal 9's life-changing improvements, I would still recommend making things work well using Drupal 6, a proven platform.

Still, you may be inclined to use Drupal 7 and then start pulling your hair out when you realize that the Media Gallery module doesn't really work well (lock in to 1 type of lightbox etc...) and yearn for old CCK methods for using imagefields which can handle multiple files being uploaded at once via flash or AJAX using contrib modules, of which there are many options these days...

Fear not - there is an experimental approach that works and is currently being developed further using Plupload which is being lead by vingborg called Mupload - I recommend checking it out and using that cash stored in the toupe fund for something else.

http://drupal.org/sandbox/vingborg/1138512

Drupal out-of-the-box leaves a lot to be desired in terms of self-explanatory user interface.  This has been one of the project's major stumbling blocks in terms of being easily adopted by DiYers as well as commercial firms familiar with CMS' offering more candy-like administrative dashboards etc...

However, with a few simple modules you can positively affect the user experience of logged-in site members and clean up some of the clutter Drupal normally displays with ease.  Here are three modules we routinely use on client projects and suggest checking out:

1. Administration Menu - this replaces Drupal's administrative functions from the main de facto navigation menu and horizontally lays out a clean top-positioned drop-down menu with groupings of tasks by configuration, building and content management.
2. Better Messages - this takes Drupal's system and error messages out of the main content area of your theme and uses jqueryto generate Growl-like messages which float on top of content - fading in and out for a smooth, non-startling experience.
3. Form Tips - normally Drupal forms (like node/add/page etc...) are quite visually cluttered - even though putting help text in next to each field aides administrators its unnecessarily displayed as always-on by default.  This module hides the help tips to only display when your mouse hovers over an icon next to relevant fields, again using jquery to display and then hide the help message.

If you weren't able to attend last Friday's Drupal Business Summit in Toronto and missed my talk on Drupal in the Cloud, you can check out some notes I whipped into a microsite at: http://drupalinthecloud.designguru.org

The talk was brief and basically introduced trepidation developers have to working in the cloud, going on to relate our experience trying to get Drupal 7 to run on Microsoft's Azure platform - an experience which helped Microsoft develop a new method for getting Drupal into the cloud.

Mark Surman is in the business of connecting things: people, ideas, everything. A community technology activist for almost 20 years, Mark is currently the executive director of the Mozilla Foundation, with a focus on inventing new ways to promote openness and opportunity on the Internet.

The Mozilla Foundation is a non-profit organization that promotes openness, innovation and participation on the Internet.

Mozilla is best known for their Firefox browser, but they also incubate other software projects, grants and engagement efforts such as Mozilla Drumbeat.

In this episode Design Guru Principal sits down with Mark to hear how he got involved with the Web and has worked to promote openness and inclusiveness before and during the past 2+ years he's been the Executive Director of the Mozilla Foundation.

LINKS:
designguru.tv
mozilla.org/​foundation
commonspace.wordpress.com

on Twitter:
twitter.com/​designguru_org
twitter.com/​msurman
twitter.com/​qasim

I will be speaking at 2pm with Mark Kuznicki from the Moment about how we worked with Microsoft's Azure platform for a digital solution to share 2011's GovCamp event with people around the world who couldn't attend the event in person.

* You can find out info about the event and register here:

http://drupalsummittoronto.drupalgardens.com

I caught a story last week which was overshadowed in the majority of tech news coverage by Steve Jobs' passing - a UK based company (Datawind) has achieved the lowest retail pricing to date (2999 INR = 62 CAD) on their Aakash tablet computer running Android 2.2 and is making the devices in Hydrabad India.  Like how the announcement of the One Laptop Per Child computer triggering demand for Netbooks a few years back, the release of this ultra-affordable tablet will have massive global repercussions across the digital hardware industry. Promoted in hand with IIT Rajasthan, Aakash has a social mission of enabling students and educators in India and the government is using the product to promote their 'Made in India' campaign to encourage the production and consumption of locally manufactured goods.

Asides from manufacturing and retail prices falling tremendously on tablets and handheld computers, I'm sure that as more portable online computers come to the hands of exponentially more people in Lesser Developed Countries, their productive use of the Internet is going to change international knowledge-sector/services industries.

This may sound like a grand statement but overall, the rate of economic shift away from MDCs will increase in-sync with means for self-education through devices like this and more accessible internet connectivity in countries where people have a craving for knowledge and true need to generate income. Additionally, entrepreneurship and trade have long been culturally understood as facets of life in many parts of the world outside of 'Western' MDCs - which will fuel technology based businesses seeking to operate on an international level. 

Amazing developments are occurring in LDCs these days - access to the Internet is at an all-time international high and its fascinating to watch the rate of adoption increase exponentially as more devices use the Net better and are available cheaply.  This past year alone the Arab Spring movements in the Middle East and Northern Africa have demonstrated that the barriers to entry for using web services like Twitter and Facebook are lowering and that there is massive potential for multi-lateral communication today in areas of the world considered 'remote' (from the Western World?) just a few years ago.

The video in this post is for a project at kbo.co.ke launched last week in Kenya at the GKenya2.0 event which looked at the the future of the country's digital marketing arena.  The 'Getting Kenyan Business Online' project is basically a tool akin to our own introduction.io service (albeit feature-bloated and more for creating a conventional full-fleshed website) and Google's plan is to leverage partnerships with people like Safaricom - the largest East African mobile provider, to kick start the web economy of Kenya - which is very interesting.

My own experience in Kenya with the Web goes back to 1995 when I was one of the first 1000 people in the country logging-on, and though hurdles such as power outages set-back the Net's overall adoption in the region through the 1990s and early 2000's, things are changing in Kenya very quickly - recently back-bone connectivity became possible through sub-marine connections to Asia and Europe and mobile operators have introduced affordable data rates whilst ensuring reliable network connectivity.

Back in 2007 we were fed up with looking for client work through conventional job boards and bloated employment platforms like monster.com and, in thinking that a lot of people working with Drupal would feel the same, created a site called the Drupal Developers Network.

The site was running just as we built it back in 2007 up until today - we've just flipped the switch on an entirely new version of the site (http://www.drupaldevelopers.net) running up-to-date code that will let us roll out some cool community features over the coming weeks.

Unfortunately in the upgrade we had to delete a ton of user profiles because there was so many spammy accounts in the system so we invite you to visit us at the new site and create a fresh profile.

The site has a member listing for both job/gig seekers and employers - as profiles get added we hope that this site will once again become a useful tool for the Drupal community and:

• Easily put employers in touch with Drupal experts,
• Foster professionalism,
• Introduce Drupal professionals to each other,
• Raise awareness about Drupal.

Last year I wrote a post about a competition Shopify was running to see how many people could start a new business selling through their service online, and who would do the best at it. 

This time round, there's more prizes totaling $500,000 in value and I can't wait to see what great innovation the competition spurns - last year it encouraged dodoCase to launch!

Check out all the info at shopify.com...

I just came across a fun mock-tube-map displaying some modules for Drupal which enable its 'social media' potential - its download-able from Acquia.

After years of pondering, months of planning and endless hours behind computers trying to make this happen, I'm glad to announce that our latest product, introduction.io is live!

What is it?

introduction.io makes is simple for anyone to have a website showcasing their creativity.

Our service lets you focus on presenting your creative work best – you don't have to worry about hosting, code, or anything complicated and we offer a suite of features which give you tons of flexibility.

The Back-Story

Being a creative individual usually involves an interest in different types of creative expression - for me personally this has meant starting a record label, whipping up interview videos with people I find interesting, constantly photographing and more.  For years I had been tiring of having all the media I create in various projects being stored all over the web and wanted a single place to showcase the best examples of it.

Towards 2010 I began working on this problem and in a couple of months I began seeing it as a platform for anyone to use - knowing that a ton of colleagues and friends would find having a site like mine useful.  Applying experience from client work involving bespoke media handling, intranets and project portfolio functionality, this Design Guru project has been in development full-swing for the past few months and we literally *just* went public!

What it Does

An Introduction is your own online portfolio website, comprising of Projects which contain images and video, located at your own custom URL!

There are many ways to create your portfolio online – from building your own website to signing up for any number of website creation tools. However, it can become time consuming and cumbersome to have to edit code and create an aesthetic reflective of the entire identity of your creative work. introduction.io reduces the stress involved in getting your portfolio online by taking all the hosting, code and design planning/implementation weight off your shoulders.

Try it out!

You can visit the site, choose a plan from http://www.introduction.io/pricing and sign up for free - all accounts come with a free trial month, so you won't be charged during your first month of use and can cancel whenever you'd like.

See an Example

Check out http://qasim.introduction.io to see a glimpse of what's possible - I'm still moving some media around and plan to make my Introduction a constant work-in-progress :)

Read through the main site at http://www.introduction.io and its support section for more information and please drop us an email to email@introduction.io if you have any questions or would like to say hello!

I'm sure you're going to have a ton of fun using the service and can't wait to see your Introduction! :)

Cheers,

Qasim - Principal at Design Guru

For some reason I just found myself on the main website for Internet Explorer and was shocked with how terrible its typography/spacing and overall product marketing was, then thought it might be interesting to take a glance at how Apple does things.

Funnily, even the URLS of the two websites is telling:

http://windows.microsoft.com/en-CA/internet-explorer/products/ie/home

http://www.apple.com/safari

This video is an info-graphic I just came across which was originally created by Patrick Clair for Austrailia's ABC1 - dissecting the nature and ramifications of Stuxnet, the first weapon made entirely out of code.

Its been nearly 1 year since the first discovery of the worm - next month I'll be posting more about it and how it has affected computing world-wide.

Microsoft recently launched a new cloud hosting platform called Azure and have been pretty active in promoting its inter-operability, reaching out to Open Source software projects to explore its suitability for hosting all sorts of software.  We got in touch with them and the founders of a Canadian event called GovCamp to build the event a website using Drupal 7 on Azure and see what we could learn along the way.  This post will introduce the project and relate our methods - for any of you reading this who may want to try your hand at deploying Drupal on Azure.

About GovCamp

Founded in 2010, GovCamp takes a page from the 'unconference' movement in bringing together various groups of people to promote non-partisan dialog - specifically relating to the changing role of Government.  For its second-ever event this summer, organizers were aiming to bring 100s of people together in Toronto representing the grassroots, Government and Industry to spark dialog which could be communicated outside the physical event using the Internet and then into the future - with at at least annual sessions of GovCamp being held in Toronto.

In its first year, the event had used a simple Wordpress website (hosted on a standard Linux-based virtual hosting environment) and hadn't gone through any identity-defining exercise - its site didn't necessarily relate what the event was about but primarily allowed organizers to easily publish blog posts.

For 2011, the organizers were certain that they would welcome more attendees than the previous year and anticipated hundreds of people around the country (and internationally) wanting to clue into the day's happenings, despite physical separation.  They needed a website that featured a blog of event-related news, could be used to relate scheduling information as well as detail on who was presenting sessions in the schedule, and stream live video from the event.  After assessing the needs and wants of the project it was clear that Drupal would be an excellent platform for it - which we could use to build a robust dynamic website that would be easy to use whilst scalable and thus relevant after the event and again when next sessions of the event were held.

So, we decided to build a website using the latest available version of Drupal 7.x, with the newest versions of contributed modules that would offer the feature-set we needed.  Alone this would be an arduous task as this meant dealing with not-yet-stable code, but we further stressed the case by attempting (for the first time ever) to get it all working on Windows Azure.

* The site's design was bespoke and kept simple - developed in 1 week from a visual identity for the event which we created.

About Windows Azure

Already used by Volvo, General Mills, 3M, Bing, The Associated Press and hundreds of other world-class brands, Azure is a cloud platform for building web applications using Microsoft's international network of data-centers which leverages that network to ideally remove the concerns of hosting infrastructure from app developers' responsibilities.

Getting Started

Because Azure is essentially a distributed hosting platform for Windows software, we needed to setup a virtual host using Windows IIS Server that would then have PHP and MySQL installed, with a small suite of tools to let us work with the Drupal file system and database we finally had to install.  So, though working in the cloud is supposed to remove headaches of working with hosting infrastructure, we were faced with essentially kitting out a new server. 

After some poking around through discussion forms and Microsoft's own helpful blog posts discussing PHP on Azure it became apparent that there was a pretty straight-forward method to setting up all of this software with just a few clicks > we used a package installer called Azure Companion, which we loaded into our hosting instance with instructions on what software we wanted installed.  The instructions were sourced online via a handy XML script and once the hosting instance was configured with our software set, we could focus on building the site!

Here are the steps we followed to get Azure up and running with the Azure Companion:

1. Sign up for a free account at http://www.microsoft.com/windowsazure
2. Login to Azure's Management Portal (with a Windows Live account)
3. Create a new Storage Account
4. Create a new Hosted Service
   1. Choosing a URL to access the host via the Web,
   2. Choosing to deploy the Hosted Service to a 'Production Environment' (and ticking to start the deployment after setup),
   3. Selecting the installation package file we found online,
   4. Editing the configuration file for that installation package to reflect the Storage Account information we just setup and then choosing it for the new Hosted Service
5. After waiting for a little while the Hosted Service was up and running and we popped over to the URL we had chosen (at port :8080 in our browser) to take a peek at the Azure Companion.
6. Basically, there are three things we wanted the Azure Companion to install for us (+ anything it needed in order for them to run):
   1. Drupal (We chose to install it in the '/drupal' sub-directory)
   2. PHPmyAdmin (We chose to install it in the '/phpmyadmin' sub-directory)
   3. Extplorer (We chose to install it in the '/explorer' sub-directory)
7. After selecting the Applications to install and clicking Next, Azure Companion set about installing the software +MySQL etc... and our fresh Drupal 7 install was available at the URL/drupal we set the Hosted Service up at.

Here are some resources came accross in our prelimenary research:

• What is Windows Azure?
• Getting Started with Azure Companion
• Deploying Drupal 7 with Azure
• MSDN's Azure Resources
• Azure Companion Package Download
• Azure Companion XML Feed

Now, along the way we made a couple of errors because we hadn't learned the following - but bearing these things in mind, it should be somewhat straight-forward to get a Drupal install up and running on Windows Azure:

• This whole processes uses a Windows IIS server - so apache .htaccess (and age-old Drupal-standard URL re-write rules don't work on Azure), and instead - such rules are written into web.config files which work in a similar way to .htaccess - Drupal 7 now comes with a Windows-friendly web.config file in root but it needs to be edited in order for direct-access to subdirectories off-root.
• The main way to access the site's file system (and that of PHPmyAdmin and extplorer) was using the 'extplorer' tool we installed via the Azure Companion - there is no SSH or FTP when using Azure (as your files are literally spread out between all sorts of machines and geographic regions).  This is important to remember because if you mess up the URL rewrite rules in the root web.config file it can be difficult to fix the problem!
• Through the Azure Companion you can edit files one at a time - so even if you mess up your web.config in the root and can't access 'extplorer,' you can still go to the Companion at xxx.cloudapp.net:8080, look to the 'edit file' field and type in '../web.config' (or whatever file you know you need to fix which you can't otherwise access) and the Companion will load up an editing screen where you can make changes and save the new file with edits.
• You can edit the php.ini file for your Hosting Service through the Azure Companion - click Admin and then Configure Runtime
• The database server location is simply 'localhost.'

Through these steps we had setup our Drupal install and could continue onto actually building our website.

* Of course, if you're reading this and have already built a Drupal website and just want to move it onto Azure, you don't need to install Drupal through the Companion - just extplorer and phpmyadmin;

• Create a new database via PHPmyAdmin and upload/import the database for your already-developed Drupal site/application,
• Then use extplorer to upload and unpack your site's file system tarball - editing the web.config (and sites/default/settings.php file) as needed to reflect the rewrite rules and database location.

Drupal as Application Toolkit - Building govcamp.ca

Many of you reading this will be well familiar with Drupal, and likely have already explored what makes Drupal 7 tick.   To give you a sense of how the actual event website came together, here's some information on the 3rd party/contrib modules we used to build the site; asides from Azure, this is a great model for any event website.  Also - for any of you attempting to use Azure, you can be sure the modules we used work using the methods using Azure described in this post.

As CCK is in core for Drupal 7, we just needed to install a couple of field modules, a wysiwyg editor, Panels and Views plus some tools for improving overall user interface.  Our site theme was a derivative of Zen which we installed as normal; placing it into the sites/all/themes/ sub-directory.

Here is a list of all the modules we used on the site:

User Interface Tools:

• Admin_menu - We used this classic tool to replace the new-in-d7 Overlay and Shortcut modules, saving wait time during development. 
• Ckeditor - Our favorite standard WYSIWYG editor
• IMCE - With its CKEditor file-browser integration, this makes for a good solution to allow users to upload and embed media in their posts (until d7's media module becomes more usable.)
• Menu_position - This lets us define what content types are automatically child to specific menu items in the main menu - so that when someone clicks into a session detail post, for example, it will show within the highlighted 'schedule' page linked to in the menu, though the schedule is actually of 'Page' type.
• Flag - Admins can flag session details and speaker bios for instant archival; archives are displayed listed in a View accessible from the main menu.  This allows for data to be temporal but still saved for future reference, with non-changing URLs (re: SEO)
• References - Used to provide an auto-populating pull-down to admins when editing Session Leader posts - allowing them to dynamically relate the bios to Session detail posts (which we then created a themed embedded-in-content View for, to cross-reference both content types where defined).
• Panels - For dynamic landing pages.
• Views - For dynamic lists (such as the schedule-per-room on the Video Stream Panel).

Social/SEO Tools:

• Opengraph_meta - Extending Drupal's native meta tagging to be Facebook-friendly and auto-generate per-post.
• Pathauto - To write automatic semantic URL rules (so that all schedules are at '/sessions/sesstiontitle' for example)
• Tweetmeme - To automatically include a widget on posts allowing site visitors to share a link to that post on Twitter.
• Search404 - To automatically trigger a search for whatever term a site visitor attempted to use as a URL on the site.  This helps to direct visitors to content they are interested in, if its location has changed... (especially useful since we moved from last year's basic Wordpress install)

Administrative Tools:

• Backup_migrate (In addition to Azure Companion's ability to backup the whole server snapshot, this can automatically backup the site database)
• Ctools
• Date
• Token
• Entity

As anyone familiar with Drupal will know, out-of-the-box, it affords very simple functionality for publishing just two kinds of content setup by-default for more static kinds of posts - we had to install the above modules in order to acquire the functionality needed for this specific project.  As well, we replaced the default theme with a derivative of the Zen theme framework which we created specifically for GovCamp.  (Using Zen significantly speeds-up development time and ensures some base x-browser operability.)

We chose to create a site whereby organizers can create bio posts per-speaker and then link them to session-detail posts they also submitted to the site.  Initially this meant defining custom content types (a native feature to Drupal 7), then creating the dynamic Views and Panels to display content and overall site config + user role/permission definition. 

Through themeing, we made the site print references (using a View-block leveraging the Reference module) between speakers and their sessions onto each post so visitors can click through content and be lead through the schedule of events - which was entered into the site as a 'page' with a hand-coded HTML table representing what was happening when.  (Originally we created a View for the schedule but it couldn't be displayed in a way that Event Organizers expected so we opted to just code the table.) 

During the day of the event, a Panel was published which had some plain-page content describing each Auditorium's topical theme with links to pop-up a video-stream player for that Auditorium.  The panel used three columns in each there was a View-block per-Auditorium to display the sessions upcoming through the day (they were linked node titles with the date-field from each node, displaying just the time and not date using Custom Date Display).  This was the main launch-area for live-video stream content, which was served from the Streaming Network, a sponsor handling the video feeds directly.

Of course, one of the aims for this site was to make it live past the 2011 event - so we introduced an Archive on-site, which basically lists all Speakers and Sessions as soon as event organizers log in and toggle a javascript link on each post (provided for using the Flag module).  As soon as content is moved into the Archive, we can simply turn off the main-menu links for the Schedule and Speaker Listing until the next GovCamp event.

Final Notes & Source Downloads

Using the Azure Companion, getting Drupal up and running on Windows Azure is pretty straight-forward.  Its not the quickest environment (due to lack of SSH/FTP) to develop a site in - so we recommend porting a pre-developed Drupal website to Azure if you need to use it for hosting.

As Windows Azure will let you setup your site at a sub-domain (something like http://xyz.cloudapp.net) you'll probably want to mask it with your own domain name.  Unfortunately their hosting setup doesn't do custom DNS - so edit your existing domain and add a CNAME entry for the cloudapp subdomain > once thats working, you'll be able to access the site at your domain as well as the Microsoft-given one.

Attached to this post are some files we thought you might find useful - the root web.config file we created to get Drupal's URL re-writing working whilst enabling access to sub-directories (e.g. '/phpmyadmin') and a compressed archive of the site's database and file-structure. 

If you use the attached, remember:

• You'll want to edit the web.config file to change the drive letter from 'f:/' to whatever is displayed in the path to your php.ini file via the Azure Companion's default phpinfo.php file, which gets installed into the root when Companion installs
• Edit the sites/default/settings.php file to include the password to the database once its setup in your (Azure) Hosting System.

Jon is a Principal at Teehan+Lax, a User Experience design firm he co-founded with Geoff Teehan in 2002, based in Toronto Canada.

He has worked in digital media since 1994 - starting at Shift Magazine where he won a National Magazine Award nomination for his writing before joining Grey Interactive a couple of years later as a copywriter.

In this conversation with Design Guru Principal Qasim Virjee, Jon recounts his observations on the early state of the digital advertising industry in the 1990s - introducing the service offering and approach of his firm framed by the need for focused User Experience design in the early 2000s. In recent years, the growth of Teehan+Lax's team brought the need for a broader mandate - leading to differentiation of Projects from Platforms whilst defining a commitment to transcending the hourly rate through better articulation of the company's value proposition.

URLS TO VISIT:
designguru.tv
teehanlax.com

on TWITTER:
Jon Lax: twitter.com/​jlax
Design Guru: twitter.com/​designguru_org
Qasim Virjee: twitter.com/​qasim

This new TED Talk from thinker/activist (/co-founder of avaaz.org) Eli Pariser is interesting to me for his point that 'auto-personalized content and space' online is a fallacy.

A trend exemplified by Amazon's recommended-product feature a couple years ago has now become status quo; I routinely hear client wants for their web spaces to contextualize themselves to their users based on actions.  A major critique Pariser makes, which I agree with, is that this automation can become inhibitive to a sense of common experience - algorithms are increasingly determining per-user experiences on the Web and this challenges beneficial feelings of social interaction online.

Getting online at the end of the 1990s was thrilling for its Wild West sense of adventure and anonymity (remember filling out forms with usernames and addresses you made up on-the-fly?)  In an increasingly branded and commercial Web today, Web experiences are becoming less adventurous due to an a priori assumption that we are being watched.  I think that, though there are more tools on the web for rapid social interaction than ever before, our online social activity is less free because we are less anonymous and subconsciously (for the most part) feel that we cannot choose to control the atmosphere of online spaces we inhabit/interact-in.

After my brother's wedding was over last week I was faced with in interesting dilemma; should I take the easy route and ask attendees to upload their photos to say, flickr, and then collate those to a common photo pool to then embed into the Wordpress website I had created for the couple... or, should I integrate a gallery to their website.

Though I think there are huge merits to using 3rd party hosted-media solutions like flickr (I frequently use my flickr account for hosting photos I blog from my iPhone, for example), I find that they aren't very community-friendly - especially flickr.  What I mean by this is that people can get together and pool their photos but that pool suffers from not being able to display images by any other sort than the date when they were added to the pool.  Furthermore, flickr doesn't really offer many ways to embed photos into external sites other than their slideshow widget - something a lot of 3rd party media hosts have demonstrated recently is an over-reliance on leveraging their APIs to satisfy integration applications, rather then servicing the end-user with a variety of tools (flickr could offer a skinnable embed widget like Vimeo does for example.)

So, after pondering this I realized that I should take a gander at the simplest approach to creating an integrated gallery - thinking that the Wordpress site already has user permission levels and I could create accounts on the site for friends and family to log into and create their own gallery, which would auto-display on a common page.

It didn't take long for me to decide on using a plugin called NextGen Gallery.  Despite having a cheesy name, this plugin offers some really simple but powerful features, including:

• Images can be displayed using a variety of standard javascript options (like thickbox and lightbox),
• Custom templates can theme galleries child-to your main Wordpress template,
• Images within-galleries can be sorted multiple ways (e.g. Ad-hoc, Date/time taken, Filename etc...),
• Per-user ownership of galleries (so wedding attendees can manage their own galleries),
• Sidebar widgets,
• EXIF data display (optional)

Now, at first glance I was excited for this to come together but daunted by having to set it all up.  Well, once I rolled up my sleeves the integration came together in just 1 afternoon - and that was mainly in CSS customization! 

Like with most Wordpress plugins, to create a gallery display, I had to embed a tag into a regular page - so I created a 'Wedding Photos' page, linked it to the main menu and had it auto-display all the galleries wedding guests with logins would be contributing to.  From there, I then created a small PHP customization to display the names of the contributors (taken from the 'display name' of their user login/account on the website).

It took me a while to figure the name display out, so I thought to include it in this post incase you want to use it: you'll need to edit the wp-content/plugins/nextgen-gallery/view/album-extend.php file (or whichever one applies to the display you are using), to include the following, wherever you want a name to display:

<?php $user_info = get_userdata($gallery->author); echo $user_info->display_name; ?>

A final thing to note is that NextGen Gallery has a strong community following - which translates to other contributed plugins which extend its functionality.  I recommend checking out NextGen Public Uploader (lets public users upload images through a simple front-end form item > no back-end login needed!) and NextGen Gallery SEO Titles (creates semantic URLs for galleries).

To celebrate the weather changing over here in Toronto I've just changed our site backgrounds to hand-drawn bicycle art :)

You can see all the images in the gallery above - one loads as the site background randomly per page load.

(Cheers to the following flickr folks for their groovy images: nyoin, doubledareyaa & tps12 !)

As soon as I heard the good news about my brother's wedding date being set for this Easter, I began thinking about how I was going to build him a simple website that would allow the couple to edit their own content easily and solicit information from their friends and family - such as RSVPs and comments via a guest-book.

After some poking around online I came across a few terrible hosted solutions specifically marketed at non-techsavvy couples, which were either built in Adobe flash (which meant that they didn't play nice with google, were cumbersome to navigate, took time to load etc..) or feature-limited.  From there I questioned whether tumblr or Posterous could be a good platform - after seeing Posterous co-founder Sachin Agarwal's wedding website built as a simple blog I knew it would work well (especially for letting attendees post photos, videos and so on to the site), but kept coming back to the idea that I'd like the site to sit on my own hosting setup so I could make sure it stays online for a very long time.

The platform I chose to use was Wordpress and the site I created is http://www.kameelandkashfi.com

Here are some of the aspects of Wordpress as a wedding website platform I like, which helped make the choice:

• Wordpress has an excellent iPhone app
  • Posting/editing posts on-the-fly is very easy,
  • I can monitor comment submission in real-time.
• Multiple user accounts/login - the bride and groom can use the site as a collaborative blog in years to come; with posts being attributed to their author; this gives the site itself longevity,
• Optional post commenting meant that I could create a Guest-book out of a simple single post with public commenting turned-on,
• Plugins - installing new site functionality is fairly straight-forward, such as a forms plugin to handle an email RSVP form with captcha/spam protection,
• WYSIWYG editing with full-HTML view; embedding iframe content, like Google Maps into posts was very easy whilst editing content for the bride and groom using Wordpress' editor buttons was simple as they didn't need to understand HTML to add/edit posts.

Here are some plugins I found essential along the development path:

• Akismet - the popular spam blocking plugin from Wordpress parent company Automattik
• Fast Secure Contact Form - to create the custom RSVP form; this simple plugin provides a Graphical User Interface that let me make a form in minutes > determining what fields I want to offer guests RSVPing (dietary restrictions, number in the guest party etc...), where the form should be emailed upon submission and what message to be displayed to people once they had RSVP'd.
• Google Analyticator - an easy way to add google analytics/statistic tracking to the site, without editing the site template,
• WP-Cufon - a down-scalable solution to display non-web-fonts; this javascript font-replacement system is a cinch to work with and let me covert custom forms I used in designing print materials, on the website for page headings etc...

I'm quite happy with how the site has turned out - it took just two days to design and build and has proven to be highly useable.  Of course, there isn't much content that goes into a wedding website but to have a simple publishing interface that allows the bride and groom to edit information easily and moderate their RSVPs & Guestbook posts right on their cell-phone has been amazing.

* Sidenote: I created a bespoke design inspired by research I did into pan-Islamic mosaic-tiled architecture.  Once I created the design in Photoshop, I simply edited the stock Twenty-Ten template that comes with Wordpress to my needs.

Recently, as an incubated Design Guru project, I created a website which collates posts from various publications across the web - all thematically related to innovation/technology and society.  The site auto-populates and updates posts every 5 minutes.

It seems increasingly difficult to keep abreast of the full mass of technological advancement these days and this new site has been a very useful tool over the past few weeks to sort through interesting posts at-a-glance using a few factors which are built-in:

• Posts by incoming publication/feed (RSS/Atom),
• Category/Tag - the site automatically pulls keywords from the posts, based on frequency of use, or otherwise applies pre-defined tags (which I've entered to sort the individual feeds),
• Region - the site traces incoming IP addresses and combines that information with geo-referenced wording in post content to plot posts on a global map,
• Channel - Feeds have been grouped into arbitrary clumps - to start with; Agency News, Objects, Physical Spaces, User Experience and Interface

The site has been named Design Guru Insight (http://insight.designguru.org) and has been entirely built using Open Source Software and then aesthetically themed to match our main website. 

Perusing Insight, you'll notice some neat functionality asides from the neat geo-locational tagging and mapping - particularly:

• The site remembers your preferred display mode (detail/list/map),
• Dynamic embed codes are available as widgets you can add to your own website - they auto-update with news as posted to feeds/channels and so on,
• RSS feeds are available to throw into your own aggregator,
• You can search through posts using keywords.

There will be some additional changes being made to Insight over the next few months - because the site is based on the Drupal framework, which we typically do web development work using, its very flexible and should be fun to add additional functionality to!

I'd love to hear what you think of the project; drop comments below!

the Media Social (http://www.themediasocial.com/)

1st edition - SXSW 2011 recap

Within-industry collaboration an ever-increasingly important aspect of working in Communications today. The Media Social is a monthly event focused on encouraging dialogue between professionals in the media industry.

For this, our inaugural event in Toronto, we're partnering with People Downtown to throw a fun party this Friday which will bring together a bunch of folks who have just returned from Austin, Texas from attending the South By Southwest Interactive Festival (SXSWi).  A few SXSWi attendees will be relating stories from their festival experiences at the beginning of the night (+ Julia from Port 25 will be speaking about a competition being run by WebNotWar) and after a couple hours of schmoozing the beats will get a little louder :) (Kind of like a post- http://canl.it/ experience).

* To help us get organised, please RSVP on Facebook

* This event is sponsored by the folks at port25.ca !

LINKS:
http://www.peopledowntown.com/
http://www.designguru.org/
http://www.themediasocial.com/
http://www.port25.ca/

I had to do some digging to get a solution for this today and thought to clue you all in; for a while now we've been writing custom time-stamps on nodes yet always kind of left comments alone - so I didn't have a PHP snippet handy to bung into a project I was just working on... the trick was in replacing '$node->posted' with '$comment->timestamp' ... example below:

<?php print $author; ?>- Posted: <?php print format_date($comment->timestamp, 'custom', "M j 'y"); ?>

The ever-increasingly rapid release cycle of Apple’s product generations is getting a little annoying – I feel like I just bought my iPad a few months ago, oh wait – I did (!), and there’s no way for me to get front and rear facing cameras on it etc… Given that the prices aren’t really changing on this second-gen iPad, my first-gen iPad feels relatively redundant. It would be nice to start seeing either hardware-upgrade paths being designed into Apple consumer electronics or a trade-in program for people who want to stay up-to-date with new versions of their hardware devices.

McKinsey Publishing’s Lars Föyen recently sat down with engineer/inventor/technology-theorist Ray Kurzweil to hear about the basis for his predictions, how industries will change when they come to pass, and the double-edged nature of his vision.

The video clip is brief but interesting in the reveal of his projections from the simple thesis that technology evolves exponentially rather than linearly.

* You can watch the interview at the McKinsey Quarterly's website and download a full transcript attached to this post.

I just came across a powerful example of how the social web is enabling people of common interest to gather around that interest and rapidly be able to collaborate online.  Alive in Egypt is a project inspired by a moment and facilitated by micro-blogging, collaborative document editing and co-publishing platforms.

Google recently launched a telephone service through SayNow (a company it just acquired) which allows people to ring a number, leave a voicemail and have that message archived in a web post whilst simultaneously being tweeted with a thematic hashtag.  Given the recent events unfolding in Egypt, this has proved a very powerful, albeit simple, technology - people on the ground in Cairo and elsewhere witnessing events and unable to express them directly through new media (due to state-inflicted Internet access shutdowns etc...) are now able to simply make a telephone call and have that message be transmitted across media and available online.

Taking the voicemail-to-web concept further, was Habib Haddad, who sent a single tweet asking for help translating the published voicemails from Egypt and received hundreds of responses offering assistance.  The result is a website called 'Alive in Egypt,' which posts translated voicemails from the country with an impressively quick turn-around time from when they were first recorded.  Organized via twitter and then using shared Google Docs, the hundreds of  contributors to the site collectively are creating a resource which makes these voicemails accessible to a global audience in English, Arabic and other languages.

Now, the technology used in this example is nothing revolutionary or new in itself (telephony-web hookups have existed for years are are something we have worked with here at Design Guru).  Amazing to note in this story however, is that grassroots spontaneous collaboration can prove successful - the quality of translation on the site cannot be held as accurate as say, the encyclopedic accuracy of Wikipedia posts, yet the two sites share an expression of the passionate commitment to vocalizing truth that people can relate online - and that in itself leads a reader of Alive in Egypt to assume that what they are reading are true representations of stories unfolding in that country.

*Article Photo: Protesters at Al Tahrir Million Man March - Feb 1, 2011

*Taken this morning before chalking up the wall with plans for our new monthly social event launching this March (stay tuned; full details will be posted here next week.)
 

Design Guru Principal Qasim Virjee sits down with two members of staff in the Community Team at this Toronto-based firm which services mid-to-large size companies, helping them communicate better with communities.

In the video, Peter Flaschner and Ujwal Arkalgud discuss the work they do, describing their personal backgrounds and motivation for engaging in this kind of work, plus ruminate on their perceptions of human relations through digital media online - finishing with a few expectations of phenomena to come.

Ref: http://www.sequentiaenvironics.com

I had done some research recently to track movements in the Advertising world using video online in ways that are markedly different to segments produced for television broadcast. 

Over the past few years, as online video has become a larger part of the web experience for wired North Americans and Europeans, agencies are creatively producing and distributing moving pictures to relate subject matter cross-media (including both the physical and digital realm); and motivate action around their (commercial) messaging.  Video proves an exciting platform for engaging not-just-future customers in multi-lateral communication with companies/brands and has a virtually unlimited potential to enable viewers as spokespeople for the content they are viewing.

Of course, the context of online video is increasingly becoming social - phenomena such as 'going viral' not only results from viewers commenting on and promoting clips but results in a stronger relationship between viewer and what they view (because of the personal nature of sharing a video with 'friends' and adding commentary to it) as promotional success relates to the viewers opinion of the video. 

A few years ago JWT Spain created an intriguing example of online video advertising with their Friexnet segment called 'The Keys to Reserva' - a short film by Martin Scorcese positioned the sparkling wine product in a fictional narrative about long-lost Hitchcock screenplay copy.  The segment went viral thanks to its high-quality aesthetic, association with both Alfred Hitchcock and Scorcese plus creative use of cross-media promotion - including a micro-site to further engage the public with the video's narrative.  Since then numerous campaigns by other agencies which merge Big Screen celebrities with commercial brands have made great use of online video's social capacity (e.g. Nike/WK; "Get your basketball on!").

For the most part, online video advertising has been produced to promote physical products and today I came across an amazing example of, what I think, we will be seeing a lot more of in the next few years - video to promote online products.  Released at the end of September 2010, this clip was directed by Roman Coppola and features Jason Schwartzman walking the viewer through the New Yorker magazine's new iPad app.  The clip is highly watchable (youtube comments reveal some viewers watched the clip repeatedly and others even see it routinely!), for its combination of ridiculous mise-en-scene and comic performance by Schwartzman - who is generally regarded as iconic of New York (through his role as Jonathan Ames in HBOs Bored to Death, set in NYC) and so is a great choice for the spot, despite the end scene where he jumps out of a pool (who has a pool in New York?)

In this video, Design Guru Principal Qasim Virjee chats with Jaime Woo - Design Guru Associate & one of the co-founders of Gamercamp, to hear about the annual video-game conference's history plus this year's events and future developments.

LINKS:
designguru.tv
gamercamp.ca
gamercampjunior.ca

Drupal by nature doesn't allow for markup to be included in node titles - which had me scratching my head when a large multi-national client of ours requested the ability to use superscripted characters in page titles on some of their content.

After much research, it seemed to me that there were a couple of sketchy approaches people use with 3rd party modules such as Page Title and Automatic Node Title; the idea being that those modules might let markup be entered in alternative fields to the standard Drupal title field, and then display that markup whilst hiding the title field.  Well, I tried these methods and they just seemed too convoluted - plus I don't think they really get by the display of HTML issue.

In the end, it turns out that some simple CCK'n'theming goodness can make a powerful solution very very easily.  All you have to do is:

1. Create a cck field for an alternative title,
2. Hide the display of that field from nodes of the type(s) which feature it,
3. Version a page.tpl.php for the node type you are replacing the titles on and include some custom php statements to optionally display the alternative title when one has been filled in for that node being displayed.

A great thing about using CCK of course is that you can display the HTML title in Views and Panels and so on as needed.

I called my new field 'alttitle' - here's the code I used.  Note: you can get creative with the php such that you have a conditional statement in just the main page.tpl.php of your theme which only uses the alternative title per node type using it and so on...

Because most people come to working with Drupal professionally through teaching themselves, everyone seems to have their own methodologies for building sites using the framework.  I've advocated working live off of remote development servers for a long time which the belief that it prepares you early on for any hiccups that may arise relating to the nuances of your hosting environment, but then today rethought that approach.  The problem was that Media Temple, who is generally pretty reliable, got very very slow with mysql access speeds and I began to get frustrated building out a client's site at tricycle speeds.

So, I rolled up my sleeves and prepped my trusty Macbook Pro to help me finish up development on this site.  For this, I needed a Linux-Apache-Mysql-PHP stack installed (LAMP) and decided to use a software package called MAMP - which is very easy to install.  After futzing with the php.ini file to get things up to my preference (upping the upload max file size restrictions etc...) I moved the site I'm working on off of our dev server by tarballing it and then using the WGET command in shell.  Note: WGET apparently doesn't ship with macs so you'll need to install it - I found a package and instructions from statusq.org very helpful.

In just a few minutes (our internet connection is quite fast), I had untar-ed the package containing my site's files and database and repointed the settings.php file to the new localhost database location and was off to the races - I can't believe how fast work has gone this afternoon on this project... Up until you need to show a remote client or project partner your work, this approach is lightning quick and extremely fun :)

For more insight into setting up your own development environment I highly recommend peeping the article on drupal.org.

We've decided that we need some help in the studio with a bunch of fun projects - this is a position that would give someone special an amazing wealth of knowledge and first-hand experience working in the realms 'social media' and online publishing/promotion.

Though perhaps ideal for students at one of downtown Toronto's Universities or Colleges, this part-time, unpaid position would be engaging and enjoyable for anyone with a flexible work schedule who has a capacity for learning and confidence in expressing themselves through a variety of media. Read more »

We're looking for a full-time Drupal Expert to be responsible for website and software development for anywhere from 1-5 projects at a time and also play a role in working with and managing Junior Design and Development interns. We are specifically interested in someone who is comfortable with the entire cycle of web development, from configuring server setups, writing SQL/PHP, and developing Drupal modules to coding CSS/HTML and debugging cross-browser issues.

If you find that you're one of those special folk who have a love of good design and confidence in using custom code + Drupal to bring interactive designs to life then working at Design Guru in this role will be rewarding and exciting! :) Read more »

Just over 3 years ago I launched a blog called 'Why Drupal?' which resided at http://whydrupal.com and served as a repository for tips and tricks picked up along the path of learning and working with the Drupal Content Management System/Framework. Since then, Design Guru has focused 90% of our efforts in building groovy web places to working with Drupal and we thought to finally migrate the blog over here to our main site.

In addition to posting more frequently, you can look out for some video content we've been working on to help explain what Drupal is, and why we love working with it - so please check this space over the next few weeks!

Since we moved in this past Spring, our conference area of the Studio has felt off-balance - our table is quite large and four black wire-frame armchairs just have not been able to carry the space around the table's ends, so yesterday I went out shopping to find two new pieces to solve this dilemma.

As the table is white and our (old) chairs are black, I wanted a combination of this polarity in two chairs which wouldn't be so striking as to draw focus to themselves when not being used - and I think I found the perfect chairs for the job at Morba, just around the corner on Queen st West.

These repro's aren't Herman Miller but feature the original design as conceived by Charles and Ray Eames in the 1950s. I chose to put together black metal bases with white fiberglass seats and the effect is very nice - don't you agree? :)

Souktel designs and delivers mobile phone software services that link young people with jobs and connect aid agencies with people who need help. They're almost ready to launch a new website and we're proud to be working on streamlining the user interface of that site to make it more accessible and engaging to potential Souktel customers and anyone interested in this innovative organization.

We really believe that Souktel is an excellent example of how SMS can provide very powerful means of communication through its simplicity. You can learn more about what they do in the video attached to this post.

I just came across a very interesting handset manufacturer by the name of Native Union - the firm is Hong Kong based and makes handsets with a combined audio jack, which can interface with USB, for mobile phone use. You can also use their handsets with a laptop and whats specifically of note is that they've worked with credible product designers (such as UK-born Michael Young and France's David Turpin) to improve the usability and styling of their handsets.

Currently marketing under the 'Moshi Moshi' brand ("Hello" in Japanese) they've obviously get sales targets on the Asian Market and are leveraging japano-kitsch to help sell their products. In addition to 3 current models of plug-in handsets, there is also a Moshi Moshi speakerphone which looks very interesting.

I freaked out a little this morning when I noticed that a key resource I had bookmarked was missing from the web well almost!  Thanks to Google's cache I dug up the instructions originally posted on urbanmainframe.com on how to install APC (for displaying realtime upload progress details next to the field uploading a file in Drupal for example) on a Mediatemple account. Et voila: Installing APC on Media Temple Grid Server

1. Telnet or SSH onto your GS server

2. mkdir /home/#####/data/lib (where “#####” is your Media Temple account number)

3. mkdir /home/#####/data/lib/php

4. wget http://pecl.php.net/... (at the time of writing this is the latest stable version - adjust as necessary)

5. tar zxvf APC-3.0.19.tgz (again adjust as necessary)

6. cd APC-3.0.19

7. phpize5

8. ./configure --enable-apc --enable-apc-mmap --with-apxs2=/usr/sbin/apxs --with-php-config=/usr/local/php-5.2.6-1/bin/php-config

9. make clean

10. make && cp modules/*.so /home/#####/data/lib/php

11. Finally add the following code to your php.ini file: extension_dir = /home/#####/data/lib/php/ extension = apc.so

That’s it. APC should now be installed and you should be able to measure a significant improvement in your PHP script performance.  

I've been a fan of Shopify for a while now - not just because they're fellow Canadians (based in Ottawa), but mainly due to their excellent hosted-ecommerce service. We're proponents of building context-sensitive web spaces however, often budgets can't afford us building clients a full-blown custom shopping system - that's when I'm proud to recommend using Shopify - they make setting up shop easy and offer extensibility through APIs and the ability to custom-theme a hosted store (using their easy in-house template language called Liquid).

Teaming up with published entrepreneur Tim Ferriss (he wrote a popular book called the 4 Hour Workweek), Shopify just announced winners to an amazing contest they cooked up - the idea was simple; a $100,000 top prize would be awarded to whomever did the two highest consecutive months of sales through a new Shopify store, with their help, in a 3 - 6 month period. Now, its tough to tell how effective the goal of winning prizes was to the thousands of Shopify customers who entered the contest but its interesting to look at the winner of the Grand Prize; a San Francisco-based iPad accessory maker called Dodocase.

As the New York Times reported yesterday, Dodocase was founded by two chaps (one of which is a Y-combinator alumnus) who saw a need for related products to sell alongside Apple's iPad. Patrick Buckley began designing a classic case for the iPad which, in my opinion, has been styled to mimic the internationally renowned Moleskin notebook. Taking his prototype to local book-binders, the firm was launched and began taking orders through their Shopify-powered e-store, receiving 10,000 orders for their cases in just a few months after their launch.

Now, $100,000 of gifted investment can help any start-up but its interesting to see that at $60ish per unit, Dodocase has been highly profitable straight out of the gate. Patrick Buckley and Craig Dalton may have created their product without the incentive of winning this competition but I think its safe to assume that once they saw their product sales coming in, their goal may not have just been to win the Grand Prize. Sometimes such a carrot can take an entrepreneur's mind off of profit goals beyond a short term period; which has apparently aided the success of 500 such Shopify stores launched during the competition - who all realized some financial sustainability by its end.

I've above-attached an info-graphic with some interesting numbers Shopify derived from the competition and will keep an eye out for comparisons between regular Shopify store sales stats.

The new set of backgrounds on our site comes thanks to Tanakawho - an excellent photographer in Tokyo who has gained some fame on Flickr thanks to her keen eye for capturing innate sentiment in objects whilst maintaining a natural sense of balance. She works mainly with point-and-shoot cameras and produces some of our most favorite photos on the web.

The images load in random rotation throughout the site and are also available as a pop-up gallery by clicking on the above thumbnails.

This video got cut and released a little while back to announce our friends at JUMA's Spring-Summer 2010 collection's launch. Inspired by our May 2010 Studio Series podcast episode, JUMA chose to soundtrack the video with Neon Indian's excellent 'Summer Heat.'

I really enjoy how rough the video is - right from the over-exposed footage to the use of pause-motion overlays and quick scene-cuts.

Often cases it can be useful to display a larger version of an image to the site user when they hover their mouse over a thumbnail on your site (a simpler interface than the magnification idea I've blogged about). 

There is a ton of javascript floating around out there on the Web which you can use to do this but I've just come across a cool drupal module (Hover Preview for Imagecache) that integrates cleanly with imagecache; allowing you to choose a hover relationship between any two imagecache presets on node field displays as well as in Views!

For a long time it seems newspapers have been crying out for the blood of pseudo-journalists who use the web to publish rapidly, and often case, without adequate research, grammatical acumen and so on. This is why it was so bloody refreshing to have just came across something which exemplifies the need for Newspapers to maintain their relevance in the 21st century through innovation and the welcoming embrace of technology.

The Guardian newspaper has initiated an 'Open Platform.' The embedded slideshow in this post will lead you through it but basically, they've created Application Programming Interfaces (or APIs) to their wealth of content online! This means that the public can create web tools and spaces that feature content from the Guardian online - using that content as their main crowd-draw, more easily than ever before. A fantastic example of the platform in use is a site called 'What could I cook?' - it pulls in recipes from the Guardian, displaying them alongside other/local content with the cited author being the Guardian.

The ramifications of this embrace of technology are huge; should enough sites use the platform, the Guardian, by way of its leveraged content base, will become an essential source for other people's business models and communities online. Whether a direct business model is forthcoming through this approach remains to be seen but for now, I think its a clever gambit for an age-old business to maintain relevance in today's technocratic society.

Though apps released through Google's Marketplace for Android mobile devices may not be as numerous or jazzy as Apple's bevvy of micro software developed for iPods/Pads/Phones, something's just happened to make it incredibly accessible to anyone with a creative idea for an app.

Announced recently, the Google App Inventor for Android is a very simple interface to allow virtually anyone (it was created with school children as initial testers) to create an Android App. Using a simple graphical lego-like drag'n'drop program, you can now create your own apps in seconds - just like this video shows.

*On a related note, I've been doing a lot of research lately into new hardware devices sporting the Android Operating System which will challenge the iPad's market-share and attractiveness. My findings will be posted here later this week and I'll try to explain then why the App Inventor may play a large role in self-promoting adoption of Android to consumer electronics users.

This discussion features: - Rahaf Harfoush (@rahafharfoush) - Qasim Virjee (@qasim) - Jaime Woo (@jaimewoo) - Lee Dale (@smack416) - Behrouz Hariri (@behrouz_hariri) - Matthew Burpee (@matthewburpee)

There's something so exciting about returning from the printer's with a fresh stack of new business cards!

With being in the new studio (2 months ago Design Guru moved across the road from our old space at the Centre for Social Innovation - more on that soon), and recently choosing 'the right' typeface for our word-mark (Florencesans), its really fulfilling to see this physical representation of our updated identity.

The motif of 'loose leaf paper' imbues freshness and innovation in this new card design and is printed on fairly lightweight 14pt white stock.

Last month saw me travel to three cities which had Apple stores; I was with my brother who was visiting from Kenya at the time and we found ourselves visiting the stores in NYC's Soho Area, a shopping arcade in Las Vegas and finally at West Edmonton Mall in well, Edmontown Alberta, whilst he considered buying (and then bought) an iPod Touch and Macbook Pro.

When I’ve watched people in each Apple store pick up an iPad for the first time, its obvious that they aren’t sure what to do with it. I found this really curious (it was my first reaction when I played with one a couple months ago) because they don’t even jump straight into Safari and check their gmail, like on the conventional computer setups in Apple stores. Instead, they immediately seem satisfied to play around with hand gestures to seemingly first feel confident in being able to use the iPad – which is noteworthy because I think its become such a desired object that most folks who’ve considered buying one felt obligated to make the purchase rather than urged by some sense of necessity.

The iPad is certainly cool and has a ton of uses, though they all seem ancillary to other devices which do more, albeit in perhaps a less easily-tactile way. I've felt compelled on whimsy to purchase one yet confused by a feeling of guilt driven by the non-necessity of having the device for a specific function in my life (which isn't currently fulfilled by my touchscreen phone, laptop(s) and so on). Of course, there must be a correlation here between my needing to justify buying one and their price - a $600+ read-blogs-on-the-toilet-device certainly seems extravagant!

I asked some friends and colleagues what they've been using their iPads for - here are some responses:

Reading! Kobo, Kindle, Instapaper and Safari are by far my most used apps.
- @flashlight

It's my weekend device - laptop pretty much stays at office
- @mkuplens

Google Reader, comics, ebooks, video, IM. Experience is better than doing any of these on a laptop or phone.
- @joncrowley

Reading the news on the couch.
- @matt416

Breakfast/lunch/dinner table computer.
- @adamschwabe

Here's an interesting short interview Leisa Reichelt a user-experience specialist who worked with Mark Boulton design on the Drupal 7 User Experience Project uploaded just about a year ago - when the Economist Magazine had begun a shift over to using Drupal for their websites.

May was an interesting and busy month here in the studio - we:

• Built an interactive site for the Liberal Party of Ontario which tied together micro-blogging feeds and live-then-archived video from a conference they held for their caucus (which had speakers including the Premier of the province and Malcolm Gladwell)
• Went into BETA with an intranet we've been building for the Stephen Lewis Foundation which will see over 200 organizations across the African continent be able to exchange resources and knowledge about Aids education.
• Designed a brand new interface for the Ontario College of Art and Design's Mobile Experience Innovation Centre (MEIC) - which we're currently developing using Drupal and will launch later this month.

Of course, the weather also sprung forward into full-on summer time here in Toronto and this mix reflects this transition; it starts off mellow with some minimal tech sounds, features the brilliant singer-songwriter M Ward and then explores various manifestations of dub before picking up the tempo with some danceable 4/4 beats.

Tracklisting:

1. Elevator Up - Solvent
2. Suffer - Esse
3. Epistemology - M Ward
4. Revolutionary Step - Pablo Moses
5. Soundboy Killa - Liquid Stranger
6. Pon De Dancefloor (Dubsteppa Mix) - Dubstar
7. Day'n'Nite (Lonely Stoner Vocal Dub) - DJ R
8. Copy The Floppy - Deceptikon
9. Absinthe - General MIDI
10. Full Moon - Armand van Helden
11. Nightfall - Mirash
12. Unsweetable Soul (feat. Maffia Soundsystem) - Arlo Bigazzi, Claudio Chianura & Lance Hanson

A glimpse of our new studio shot at the end of a long week :)

Lightboxes have become a de facto standard for displaying larger-than-thumbnail images to site viewers over the past couple of years.  They work pretty well for this function but there are instances when you may want to display details in an image that would require it to be large yet contained within a small area.

We just added a magnification/zoom function to a client site which I thought I'd share - the idea was to let clothing shoppers of the indie label JUMA be able to see the fine detail on garments whilst shopping online.  We had already implemented the Views Slideshow module to provide an interface where people could hover over thumbnailed images to instantly view a larger version (see the left side of the image above) but wanted to add a third level of enlargement.

After doing some best-approach research this morning I found two solid ways to do this using modules powered by javascript which are easily available. 

One option was commercial and the other free, but the real decision for us came down to the commercial one because it played nicely with Views Slideshow - that module is Magictoolbox.com's Magic Zoom.  Both this and Cloud Zoom offer essentially the same functionality - they create an image display option (for cck image fields per content type and in Views) and Magic Zoom can automagically override the display site-wide of a specified imagecache preset.

Both solutions are easy to implement and offer some cool customization options to help you aesthetically integrate the magnification window into your themed site but we found that Cloud Zoom would only load the first item in a View Slideshow list of nodes.  For anyone not using Views Slideshow I'd highly recommend checking out Cloud Zoom.

After searching around in vain this morning for a module to include the nifty Facebook Like widget on some client sites I came to the realization that it should work just like the Tweetmeme solution I cooked up back in December last year.

The idea is that Facebook gives you an iframe tag to use per domain - so instead of hard-coding a URL into the code to let people 'like' a specific page just make that URL call dynamic using the PHP so that the tag works on any node you want it on.  From there all you have to do is embed the code in a node-type.tpl.php template file and boom you're off! 

Here's the code with a wrapper div you can use via CSS for extra positioning etc: What you'll notice is that you don't have to do much - just get the code from facebook then include your own root URL and add the php to call specific nodes right after it :

<?php print $node_url ?>

You can see this in action here on the Why Drupal blog at the end of each post.

For the past year we've been working with the Toronto-based Stephen Lewis Foundation to create a unique website that will change the way they interact with their hundreds of member organisations scattered accross the African continent.

Our work has entailed using Drupal to create a platform for exchanging general information, experiences, lessons learned, and effective practices between member organisations of the Foundation.  The site works as a private-access intranet that is web-accessible.

Its been an excellent experience thus far and it will be very exciting and fulfilling to see people starting to use the site over the next few weeks.  Expect a more in-depth post soon detailing how we built the site and what its users are doing with it.

This friday we'll be launching a new monthly series of talks with colleagues in the (new) media industry.  For the inaugural session, the event will be a round-table discussion about Online Identity. 

We will be tossing ideas around the table on how individuals and organizations can maintain a harmonious identity across varied platforms on the Net and it should be quite a fun time.

Here are the participants:

• Qasim Virjee - Design Guru's Principal
• Behrouz Hariri - Graphic Designer
• Jaime Woo - Social Media Strategist/Consultant
• Lee Dale - Founder/Director, Say Yeah!

* The event will be held in the Alterna Boardroom at the Centre for Social Innovation and run just 2 hours from 2 - 4 PM.

Afterwards, attendees are welcome to join the participants for drinks at the People Downtown party being hosted at Tequila Bookworm on Queen St W.

NOTE: If you can't make it, don't fret - we'll be filming the talk to upload next week as an episode of designguru.tv

We are accepting donations from attendees and you can RSVP using the widget below:

Check out our inaugural episode of Design Guru's monthly Studiomix series!

Running just under 1hr, I recorded this set with a diverse array of tracks which have been playing in high rotation whilst doing project-work lately - a couple of em (by Das Racist and Neon Indian) were pretty popular at this year's SXSW festival as well.

You can listen to the mix using the link/player above and/or download an MP3 - please drop a comment below to let us know what you think of the idea of this series ('music selections by designers for designers'?) and the mix! :)

Tracklisting:

1. A Tale of 2 Cities (Tal M. Klein Remix) - Jayl Funk
2. Brooklyn 2 Brixton - Freq Nasty
3. Happy - Daru feat. Renu
4. Deadbeat Summer - Neon Indian
5. Aminti Billah Turbo - Turbo Tabla
6. Combination Pizza Hut & Taco Bell - Das Racist
7. Togens Hule - Casiokids
8. The Infinites feat. Paul Conboy - Bomb the Bass
9. Taste of Snow - Zagar
10. Searchlight - Aloha
11. Broken Dreams (D'n'B Album Edit) - Black Canvas
12. Alright (Benny Page Digital Soundboy Remix) - MCD
13. Humanize - Big Boss Man
14. A51 - Junkie XL
15. Sex Dot Com - Ohm Square

I just came accross an interesting little read where the Academic Technology Specialist for Stanford University's division of Literatures, Cultures and Languages expresses 3 reasons why he is invested in using Drupal for 9 projects at Standford. 

I totally agree with Zach's reasons of Flexibility, Leverage and Longevity - we love using Drupal at Design Guru because its a powerful framework for almost all web projects we undertake, scales fairly easily and quickly plus features a highly extensible architecture.

The Opening Reception for an exhibit by Design Guru associate Abigail Godfrey is being held on Thursday April 8th from 7 - 9 PM here in Toronto at the IX Gallery.

Here's some more description of the exhibit by Abi:

"Familiar landscapes have been transmuted. Each scene moves with its own rhythm. The movements of passersby, commuters on their way home from work, a glimpse of an ambulance. Each one has become essential, its energy revealed. Diffuse, as if looking into a memory, you begin to remember that day. It is re-born with painterly texture and elemental echoes: the angle of the rays, the bags you carried home, the sounds on the street, the scent of winter’s wane and spring’s advance. Travelers glide in and out of sight. Trees are made of clay. Cars and buildings bubble and burst in a hurrah of sunlight. The mundane is transformed into a dreamscape. These altered visions, simultaneously telescopic and microscopic, emerge from the liminal anew."

You can RSVP on Facebook...

IX Gallery
11 Davies Avenue
Toronto, ON
www.ixgallery.ca
info@ixgallery.ca
416 469 4848

Episode 4 is a conversation between Design Guru director Qasim Virjee and Social Media thinker/consultant Jaime Woo. In it, they recap lessons learned at 2010's South By Southwest Interactive festival in Austin, Texas - mainly, how attendees used new technologies such as Twitter and Foursquare/Gowalla to communicate and navigate through the multitude of events happening.

LINKS:
designguru.tv
jaimewoo.com
qasim.ca

TWITTER HANDLES:
@designguru_org
@jaimewoo
@qasim

Filmed at an event we organized in Toronto - held at the Centre for Social Innovation on February 25, 2010, this panel was put together to discuss Open Video/Media and followed a live-streamed talk by Lawrence Lessig.

The panel was moderated by designguru.org's Principal, Qasim Virjee, and featured:

• Maclean Greaves (VP, Interactive - Zoomer)
• Ruby Ashtar (Copyright Lawyer)
• Brett Gaylor (Film-maker/Director, RiP a Remix Manifesto, EyeSteelFilm)
• Mark Surman (Executive Director, Mozilla Foundation)

You can see photos from the event on flickr here.

LINKS:
designguru.org
by.mcleangreaves.com
films.nfb.ca/rip-a-remix-manifesto
mozilla.org

Our friend Jaime Woo just clued me into an interesting workshop he's organized next week in Toronto (April 1, from 6pm - 10pm @MaRs) which aims to help entrepreneurs equip themselves with conversational skills to help engage in modern online dialogues.

Media veteran Ian Capstick will share his knowledge of approaching media and successfully 'getting your story told.' This workshop will prepare people with major media jargon and background info. In addition, Ian will go through media training tips to help people in interviews to clearly get their message accross - irrespective of the media through which the interview is published.

Jaime Woo will then share his insights on how to approach online and social media with your story. Jaime will explain 'social media outlets' and weight the pros and cons between each major avenue for engaging people online. He will also offer takes on how to measure efficacy of efforts in social media for PR and other campaigns.

Tickets for the session are $129 and can be purchased through this link: http://guestlistapp.com/events/16500

Tumblr is a great idea - the hosted service lets you sign up for free and then create a blog that is essentially comprised of different types of content - text, photo, quote, link, chat, audio and video.   Your tumblog can be posted to quickly and re-themed using their provided ones or custom html; all editable within their web interface so there's no need for ftp'ing files etc...

Okay, so its yet another blogging tool.  What's so great about that?  Well, asides from the fact that it has different content types to segment views by them (something not in the de facto wordpress standard approach), tumblr's unique in letting you import rss feeds automatically into your tumblr site!  Cool eh?

Drupal heads reading this will no doubt instantly say "Whatever man, Drupal can do that in a second!" and they're right; it can.  We recently took a stab at building out a site to do everything that tumblr does for Flavorpill in NYC using Drupal 6 and some contrib modules.  Ultimately, we wanted a site that lets anonymous/public users contribute as well as logged-in ones, all submitting the same types of content.  The main benefit of registering on-site was keeping track of your posts with a profile page that features a User Tracker.

Development time was short and we were really aiming at making a site which people could use easily - so we skipped making some crazy implementation of Flashvideo or Kaltura and just allowed 3rd party video embeds through a single field (for URL or embed code) via the Embedded Media Field module.

Here's the quick module over-view for anyone who has been pondering what they need to make Tumblr using Drupal.

First up, install Drupal 6 and the following modules:

• CCK - lets you define the seperate content types etc...
• Pathauto - gives you flexibility etc through semantic URLs
• Embedded Media Field - works with CCK to create fields which accept video or audio media from 3rd parties; automagically embeds and provides interface for display options
• Gravatar - displays avatars based on users' email addresses
• Imagefield - create field in content types which can accept image(s) and store locally
• Imagecache - automatic ad-hoc image resize rules with multiple displays
• Date
• TinyMCE - a pretty solid option as WYSIWYG editor for general public/basic user options
• Views + Panels - create the dynamic displays of content per content type etc...
• Captcha + ReCaptcha - safeguard the site from spam-bots... Recaptcha provides enough security for accepting public content submissiosns withou moderation
• Fivestar - simple/instant jquery content rating.

Of course, the beauty of using Drupal to build a site like this is that you're afforded scalability; meaning that you can always add features to the site and go far beyong the basic set of tools tumblr offers people.

Now, on this implementation we didn't build in the automatic rss-to-node functionality, but that could easily be afforded by the FeedAPI module.

To view the site we built a la Tumblr, please head over to:
http://www.whatisinnovation.com

I've just flipped the switch on an exciting new project for Toronto-based arts organisation Indian Electronica - its a campaign to help channel international momentum in reaction to the BBC's announcement of plans to close their Asian Network station.

You can visit the campaign at http://savetheasiannetwork.com and read more about its justification and technical make-up in our client projects section here.

The event we hosted here in Toronto last week was a great success - thanks to our panelists, the OVA, Kaltura and of course, to all who came out to watch Lawrence Lessig talk via video-conference + engage with our panel! The video footage of the panel discussion is being encoded and I'll post it here later this week.

I've been a fan of Vimeo for a while now - its a video hosting service similar to YouTube but with a keener appreciation of interface design and community base largely focused on cool techniques for creating motion graphics which push the envelop. 

Vimeos users are generally professionals or serious hobbyists when it comes to video - which early-on saw them creating a commercial offering called their 'Plus' service to offer hi-def video hosting/on-demand streaming with configurable embedded players which can be limited by domain and feature custom colors, logos and post-roll options.

The latest innovation in their offering for Plus account-holders is a new approach to viewing video statistics.  'PlusStats' has some nifty stats I haven't seen anywhere else - like displaying where your videos are embedded (URLs + georgraphic locations) and the number of loads vs. plays.

You can check out a demo of PlusStats here: http://www.vimeo.com/stats/demo

Directed by alternate reality-gaming thinker Jane McGonigal and produced/funded by the World Bank Institute, this looks like the most exciting call for social innovation using online tools yet!

Its an online game directed at affecting social change which can earn top players mentorships and a role in a World Bank sponsored summit in Washington DC.

To sign up, visit http://www.urgentevoke.com and create an account - after admin approval you'll be given access to more information about how to play... 

[Cheers to Christy Dena for the heads-up on this one]

Despite my distaste for '2.0' suffixing, the term Fashion 2.0 is being used across the web in reference to new trends within the fashion industry reforming advertising, procurement, production and other aspects of business using the latest web technologies.

Without getting into the nitty gritty of how the fashion industry is specifically evolving using particular online spaces and platforms, I wanted to quickly make note of two projects we've undertaken and launched this year - Atelier Rosemarie Umetsu (http://atelierrosemarieumetsu.com) and JUMA (http://juma.ca).  Both are very different in terms of aesthetic and information architecture, so as to accurately affect the difference in how each firm does business within the industry.

Atelier Rosemarie Umetsu focuses on creating haute couture and limited, non-seasonal, lines for established female performers in the Arts.  Though not every piece they create is made to be presented on a grand stage, the Atelier's namesake owner and designer has a background in classical music - an extension of this is her tendancy to work with people socially or professionally related to the performing arts.

JUMA was founded in 2003 by brother-sister team Jamil and Alia Juma, who have since focused on creating collections seasonally which retail world-wide and target a young, hip but slightly conservative customer.  They make clothes for both men and women which can be worn in a variety of contexts, though not as formally as Atelier Rosemarie Umetsu's.

I have known both firms' owner-operators for a number of years but only been engaged commercially through Design Guru with JUMA since 2006/2007 when we worked together to create and launch their first dynamic site - which allowed functions like blogging and e-commerce and saw them develop an online identity for the label.  The time since has been a very interesting learning period for myself and the JUMA team which involved us regularly discussing the potential for independent designers to use online tools and leapfrog the barriers to market established by advertising dollars of conventionally large international fashion houses.

Only in the last few years has communication technology allowed start-ups like JUMA to build a world-wide audience and develop a relationship with fans/friends of their label that is engaging and produced with high aesthetic value.  The new site we produced and launched for them this month exemplifies this and provides platform for a truer expression of their brand than ever realized (read the case study).

Now, given that Atelier Rosemarie Umetsu is a smaller outfit which does not deal with retailers, their online needs are very different than those of JUMA.  Quite simply, the Atelier relies on word-of-mouth and mainly needed the best calling card ever - their website is essentially a modern, interactive brochure.  The site supports word-of-mouth and doesn't drive it - through mainly providing two types of content; photos and press clippings.  The photos are organized into galleries depicting events at the Atelier, custom-curated shoots held at the Atelier, clothing being worn for press shots and live at performances and so on - they collectively tell the tale of the Atelier's clothing being desirable amongst an artistic vanguard and place it within a cultural/social context.

Despite the differences between the two fashion design firms we have been working with, Drupal has proven to be an excellent platform for developing the right solution for each of their needs.  Its innate scalability means that as their business models develop, their site's can grow to feature new functionality as needed.  Being more than a simple content management system (a la Joomla/Wordpress), Drupal has allowed us to create custom dynamic data types and displays, such as the Atelier's bespoke gallery and JUMA's innovative online shopping interfaces.  As well, with OpenID and Facebook Connect logins integrated, Drupal allows labels like JUMA to use their own website as the social glue that binds audiences they develop through spaces/platforms like Facebook to hopefully drive sales whilst keep their fans/friends engaged.

In addition to technological whizzbang, both sites are very simple to update; Drupal allows us to build very simple interfaces that only present features relevant to the person looking at the site - so JUMA's interns can post to the blog, say, but not have access to e-commerce settings crucial to the firm's commercial success.  We understand that no matter what purpose websites serve to whomever we make them for, they should make life online more enjoyable, fulfilling and easy.

Now that its live, I will be posting regular updates on Fashion 2.0 lessons learned through the JUMA case-study and try to explain how Drupal can play a larger role in the fashion industry.

If you work in fashion and would like to discuss your project with us, please get in touch!

Now that the barrage of final touches to our 2009 projects is pretty much tackled (new client project details will be uploaded in the next few days), I've decided to place some ads on a few designguru web properties (like JoomlaFeed and WhyJoomla?) to [hopefully] usher in new work. 

Typically, I'm cautious with using our own adspace so I thought I might as well have fun with this campaign!  Kicking it off is a lovely animated 300x250 spot inspired by a favourite board-game of mine.:)

Check back for more spots as they go live!

You might have read a post I did recently about how Aegir makes managing Drupal installs really easy.  Well wondered how to get it all installed?  Here's a video with instructions. Also - be sure to read Development Seed's post about the new release for all the goods on new changes etc...

Thursday February 25th, 5:30-10:00pm
@ the Centre for Social Innovation in Toronto
215 Spadina Ave, Suite 160

RSVP: http://lessigtalktoronto.eventbrite.com

A Wireside Chat with Lawrence Lessig

6:00pm - 7:30pm
Professor Lessig will deliver a talk on fair use and politics in online video from Harvard Law School in Cambridge, MA/USA - we are projection-screening a live hi-def stream of the talk.

This is a talk about copyright in a digital age, and the role (and importance) of a doctrine like “fair use.” Fair use allows limited use of copyrighted material without requiring permission from the rights holders, and is essential for commentary, criticism, news reporting, remix, research, teaching and scholarship with video.

As a medium, online video will be most powerful when it is fluid, like a conversation. Like the rest of the internet, online video must be designed to encourage participation, not just passive consumption.

Discussion Panel

7:30pm - 8:15pm
Picking up on Lessig's talk our panel will share takes on participatory media culture and the changing nature of content ownership and usage in the Digital Age.

We will also be joined by videoconference for an address by Kaltura co-founder Dr Shay David.

w/ McLean Greaves / Zoomer Media,
Mark Surman / Mozilla Foundation,
Brett Gaylor / RiP A Remix Manifesto + EyeSteelFilm

Moderated by: Qasim Virjee - Principal, Design Guru

& Social

8:15pm - 10:00pm
Attendees will have a chance to mingle with panelists and each other over refreshments.

PRESENTED BY:
Design Guru & the Open Video Alliance

EVENT SPONSOR:

 

 

In this second episode Andrea Carson relates her definition of art, describes art scenes in Canada and tells us about her blog, View on Canadian Art (VoCA).

This short film introduces 'open video' as a movement away from corporate structures in the motion picture industry, towards creative and collaborative freedom.

Running just 1 minute long, the film was created by Qasim Virjee at designguru.org in January 2010 to be considered in competition by the Open Video Alliance.  Please leave comments on the competition page here: http://contest.openvideoalliance.org/video/17869/what-is-open-video

* You may share or remix this video in accordance with the Creative Commons BY License (creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/)

FEATURING:
- Matt Black from Coldcut and Ninjatune
- Audio by Abdul Smooth
- Video footage of D-Fuse's 2009 'Particle' performance in São Paulo - shot by toby*spark

LINKS:
- ninjatune.com
- abdulsmooth.com
- dfuse.com
- sparkav.co.uk

The HTC Dream was the first hardware sold with Google's Android platform, a free/open-source operating system for mobile devices.

At the end of last year, when the Canadian telecommunications giant Rogers started selling these phones, I was extremely excited to get my hands on one.  Leading up to that I had gone through 2 versions of top-end Nokia phones running on Symbian (an N80 then N95 8gb) and was keen to get a touch-screen device yet not keen on the iPhone's proprietary software and inability to legally be 'unlocked' (being someone who travels and doesn't like paying large roaming charges to monopolistic carriers like Rogers.) So, when I found an HTC Dream on craigslist around Halloween I dropped the chap a line immediately and have thoroughly enjoyed using Android since.

I must say, though I like the HTC hardware, and Android itself, I've been very unhappy with how Rogers, the carrier I use, has approached their marketing and customer service for these phones - to aide sales for HTC Magic, for example, they disabled the software keyboard on Dream models so that customers would more simply see the two phones as competiting products based on falisy - the Magic doesn't have a hardware keyboard.

In addition to cheeky advertising gimmicks, Rogers has been tardy to announce a software update for their HTC Android phones - this has sparked huge community backlash (check out this forum thread) given that version 1.5, which my phone runs, was released in April 2009 and has since been updated by Google thrice (to 1.6 in September , 2.0 in December and then 2.1 this January!)  Adding insult to injury, the version of 1.5 they have been selling phones with apparently had a flaw which disabled 911 emergency dialling access!!!

Last week I got a couple of text messages from Rogers telling me that I had to disable my GPS location service on the phone to help them troubleshoot a 911 access problem.  When I got another message from them a few days back I ignored it thinking it was the same reminder, until yesterday - when I noticed that I had no data service on my phone?!  Looking back at that txt from Rogers last night I realised that they now needed me to run a software update on my device to enable 911 and that it was 'mandatory' - without making the update within 24hrs of this notice, my data would be cut off?!!?  After booting up an old PC of mine to run the update software today (they don't support Mac), losing all my data from the phone's main memory in the process (luckily Google is the store-house for my contacts and email though I still have to reinstall all my apps), I noticed that my data service is still not working!?

I looked all over Rogers' website today, then rang them and only after being on hold for some time waiting to speak to a human tech support agent did I discover, by way of a pre-recorded on-hold message, that it could take up to 24hrs to restore data *after* installing the OS update! This wasn't in their warning txt and they never sent me an email or phonecall (an automated one would've sufficed), let alone posted this message in an accessible place on their website.  Also noteworthy is that nowhere in this fiasco did they address why this update still kept us using Android 1.5 or when a 'real' (ie. not emergency) update would be rolled out.

And so now I wait, checking to see if those little bars for service get annotated with an 'Edge' or '3g' icon...

Here's what people are tweeting about this:

When you're building sites which use many contributed modules (+ views and panels) you can end up with a ton of CSS files being called at the same time.  Generally the main down-side to this is load-time, so most Drupal site developers choose to use the css-aggregation function (found under Site Config > Performance) that comes stock with Drupal.

The problem with using Drupal's aggregated CSS is that you end up with a crazy mashed-up chunk of CSS which can be a pain when you're still editing it live on a site in development (for example, using firefox's web development toolbar or firebug).

Asides from the load-time issue, I noticed something else whilst doing x-browser testing on a new site we're developing @ design guru; Internet Explorer 7 won't load more than 30 (or 31?) CSS files at once!  Supposedly a security feature, this annoying phenomenon makes CSS/styling dev work a pain in ie7 but fear not, there's a work-around and its as easy as installing a module!

The 'IE Unlimited CSS Loader' module will save much head-scratching - it fixes the ie7 problem and lets you still work on your site's css without using the Drupal aggregator. Nice. :)

Personally, I love the concept of rubbing an on-screen item to 'heat it up' and then share it across social networking websites/platforms etc...

More information can be found @ Bonnier's website.

15 years ago, the majority of websites were collections of static pages curated by people who didn't have commercial goals for whatever they published.  'Content' back then was pretty simple - usually copy with imagery comprised of posts - the Web's infrastructure was limited such that the rich media applications we take for granted today (eg. on-demand video streaming) couldn't exist due to phenomena such as bandwidth limitations and even the youthful innocence of html itself.

Through the boom-days of the mid-late 1990s however, 'content' became something salable (either itself holding perceived monetary value or otherwise by driving 'traffic' that could be sold through advertising) and the whole Web took on a more impersonal aesthetic.  The birth of 'portals' and establishment of ubiquitous banner advertising space imbibed the Web with uninspired/unrealistic commercial purpose and through the early 00s it was difficult for people to regain pre-boom enthusiasm for using web-space as room for un-justified self-expression.

Something changed in the middle of this decade however; the Web had grown-up infra-structurally; for most parts of the world, access speeds to the Internet sufficed delivery of rich media and access points were more numerous than ever before - these coupled with people en masse feeling familiar with the Web through using it to acquire common and specialized knowledge [from reading news sites to wikipedia to finding anything query-able through Google] plus do common tasks (such as banking), allowed the Web to take on a new social significance.  Since the beginning of the Web, there had always been potential for social interaction on it, but until this simple concept became popularized by mainstream [news] media outlets, middling academics, the marketing establishment grasping at new media straws, and others as the 'new Web' or 'Web 2.0,' there wasn't much gusto for new platforms and services to be developed which could stitch social interactions on the web together.

As spaces and platforms emerged through the 00s - all flying the flag of Web 2.0, it seems that people had become used to socializing online and this familiarity begged a feeling of corpus to relate conversations to.  Whether that corpus means a central space on the web to express oneself better-than-elsewhere or simply tie together one's multitude of identities/accounts, easy-to-update websites typically featuring a list of reverse-chronologically-ordered posts, known as 'blogs' seem to have become de facto - in being cheap, accessible and visible [re: Google and being part of a host network etc...].

By the end of the 00s the Web was more universal than ever before and had gone through its second major commercial experience; not in providing platform for commercial activity as in the 90s but this time by being rebranded.  'Web 2.0' is somewhat of a misnomer in propagating the myth of online social interaction being a *new* phenomena.  Right now Facebook, say, has over 350,000,000 users from around the planet all sharing media and confabulation with each other often, but because it is a closed space (registration is required to play children!), with an internal culture developing [framed by its functional tool-set and native user interface], its members are hindered in believing that the interaction they experience can exist simply by virtue of them being on the Web.

The nature of the web though is Open - its developed spaces may be vast and exclusive, as with Facebook, but in attempts to reach the largest audience [and convert them somehow into customers?], the companies and individuals acting as developers must address the issue of common space; in so far as interfacing with each other. The truth in this has been witnessed recently with networks trying to become platforms by opening up Application Programming Interfaces [APIs] which allow information interchange across their virtual borders.  Blogs should not require duplicate manual posting in order to maintain one's identity between semi-closed networks but instead act more organically as repositories of one's actions online - with media detailing one's online interests and activities.  The development of these repositories should be somewhat effortless [ideally even doing away with cut'n'paste?] in order for their truth in being reflections of one's identity to be more accurate.

Moving into the teens of this new millennium, 'content' will become more fluid through multi-media socializing and online spaces will become more accessible allowing for dialogues to exist cross-platform.  Posterous is the best example available for demonstrating how a blog can become a more social corpus which is automated to yield the effect of organic development.  After signing up for a [free] Posterous account, you can setup a blog in seconds; choosing a theme for it or even jumping into custom creating your own aesthetic [with a single-file html/css template editable through their web-based administration area].  Then the fun begins - Posterous is uniquely innovative in allowing you to 'autopost' your Posterous content to many other 'Web 2.0' spaces/networks/platforms - among other things, your blog posts can now automagically:

• Tweet links to themselves,
• Post (per-tag etc...) to another website - such as your company's Wordpress or Drupal-powered website,
• Upload photos to your flickr photostream,
• Update your status on Facebook,
• Upload videos to Youtube,
• Podcast audio recordings.

This new decade promises continued adoption of 'smart-phones' worldwide as well as increased bandwidth; allowing more people to easily create/capture multi-media and get it online with little noticeable delay - we've already seen this with the rise of citizen journalism [re: Iran's political turmoil through 2009...].  Of course, no matter how much trend-spotters may say that mobile devices will be using fewer Operating Systems [due to larger adoption or Android my handset manufacturers and Apple's continued sales of the iPhone], the vast majority of mobile devices on data connections to Edge/3g/HSPDA/4g networks all offer email.

Posterous has taken a brilliant stance in upholding email as the primary means for its users to get their content online.  Once you have an account, simply email posterous.com your content and it will automatically appear on your blog in seconds, and be autoposted to the applicable external accounts you hold (with platforms like Twitter or sites like Flickr).  They have a bevy of options for flagging content to just be autoposted to specific accounts, and offer you multiple Posterous blogs to which you can as well flag email posts to be directed very easily.

Of course, you aren't limited to posting via email; as with most conventional CMS/blogging systems you can login via the web to type up posts or use their amazingly simple Bookmarklet - which loads through your browser and can retrieve multimedia content from nearly any [non-flash] website for you to comment on and instantly publish to your Posterous blog.

The implications of using email to feed a Posterous blog and, by-extension, one's other online accounts, are tremendous.  Think beyond urban locations in North American or European countries - think beyond the policing that limits the Web's visibility in places like Iran or China; the world uses email and if a computer or mobile (or any other) device can connect to the Internet, irrespective of the Web, individuals and organizations can now post to their blog(s) easier than ever before, *and* to a multitude of other spaces/networks/platforms that collectively make up the most true and lag-less online corpus they've ever been able to have.

For many people around the world just now adopting the Web, Posterous [and the virtues it upholds + copycat service providers + innovators to follow] may offer the ability to exist online more sociably and effectively than ever before - participating actively in previously closed-door or otherwise inaccessible conversations, with conceptual freedom that is a core facet of the Web, and technical ease.

Development Seed's just announced that their Open Atrium distro/'installation profile' of Drupal is just about ready to be released.

For those of you who haven't heard of it yet, Open Atrium is an interesting Drupal-built Project Management package (basically, some modules, Drupal 6 and a custom theme with some config options setup when you install it).

I'll get into a fully hands-on review of it soon, but for now, pop over to Development Seed's blog to read the deets and be sure to watch the video below to clue into this cool free project.

As anyone managing multiple Drupal sites knows, it can become a nightmare to either try and keep them up-to-date via old-school download-modules-then-upload-via-ftp or svn methods.

Last week Walkah blew my mind by showing me his new setup that used the Aegir Hosting Method and Drush Make to rapidly deploy new sites from known profiles (oooohhh Drush Make..) as well as easily upgrade modules etc for existing sites.  I'm about to switch over to this method for hosting all of our client and incubator sites over @ Design Guru and I thought to clue you all in to a great write-up on how these things come together, thanks to mig5.net [read it here]...

In the interview, Mark Kuznicki (remarkk.com) details some experiences gained through his work establishing and developing the changecamp.ca platform, which aims to address issues of citizenship and the nature of government in the 'age of participation.'

On a snowy morning walk to the office today I came across a Grand & Toy delivery truck parking - immediately I noticed their advertisement on its side and am intrigued by the campaign it referenced; Grand & Toy is now offering online customers 48 hour delivery - in attempts to bundle their delivery commitments better and relatively do a better job of impacting the environment less.

Hats off to the Royal Bank of Canada for finally taking a stab at making their online banking experience better; they've just announced a redesign is upcoming and detailed what the new interface will look like as well as offer functionally through a micro-site.

Its nice to see a bank go through the effort of showcasing how they are trying to offer better service to customers using the web but I was shocked, looking through their redesign announcement-microsite that there's no feedback call!  Read more »

Posted via web from Design Guru notes

Whilst in an airport newsagent this holiday season I ventured away from my usual selection of publications and picked up a copy of .inc magazine.  As I expected, the issue was yawn-worthy - in it was a piece (why oh why did Time Inc shut down Business 2.0?) entitled 'Five years of Start-up Insanity' that described some hurdles a chap by the name of Philip Walker experienced whilst attempting to launch a new Life Insurance company.

The piece itself didn't get me thinking too much - but it did trigger some reflections on projects I launched under the Design Guru banner this past year and whether or not they were themselves capable of being 'start-ups' - in the tech/business community there's a lot of hyped lingo and expectations around what that term entails which, in the rapid world of agile-(web)development is easy to ignore.

I haven't quite written out a list of New Year's Resolutions for 2010 but when I do, I'm certainly going to include 'take another look at the projects Design Guru has started and incubated (http://designguru.org/project-incubator) over the past few years to asses their potential for financial sustainability'.

You see, in-between developing projects for clients its always fun to develop new skills and ways of thinking by very quickly trying to solve a problem on the web without being hindered by a profit motive - but once that solution's first iteration is live we often don't find regular time to go through further iterations or ('development rounds') which could turn these passion projects into vehicles for turning profit...

Perhaps some articles Om Malik just posted will help this thinking process... More to come soon...

The Essential Startup Reader: 10 Lessons In Entrepreneurship:
http://gigaom.com/2010/01/02/startup-company-lessons/

There are so many reasons to making your site easily visible on Social Networking websites and platforms - they raise general visibility and offer access to communities which may not otherwise find the information you spend time publishing in your posts.

Of course, one of the most agile word-of-mouth Social platforms on the web is Twitter and you may have recently noticed a pretty cool widgety thing people are using on their blogs/sites to include a 'retweet' link and counter of how many times a post has been tweeted - its powered by a site called 'Tweetmeme' and installs pretty easily on any website - whether using static html or a CMS like Drupal.

When you take a peek at the tweetmeme page containing the necessary embed code it may not be too easy to tell how to use it with your Drupal site - and though there's a module out there for Tweetmeme, it may not offer the flexibility you require for clean theming.  Fear not, there's an easy way to go about embedding this and all it takes is a small modification of the de facto embed code. 

All you have to do is:

• copy the following code,
• replace 'http://mysite.com' with your own root URL and:
• replace 'twitterhandle' with your twitter handle (if you want reweets to automagically incude @yourtwitterhandle - you can opt to delete that line from the code otherwise.

<script type="text/javascript">
tweetmeme_style = 'compact';
tweetmeme_url = 'http://mysite.com<?php print $node_url ?>';
tweetmeme_source = 'twitterhandle';
</script>

The trick then is to take this code and include it in the appropriate version of node.tpl.php for your theme - for example, if you only want the tweetmeme widget to be displayed in blog posts for a content type called 'blog' then bung it into whatever place you want in your node-blog.tpl.php file.  You can learn more about versioning the node.tpl.php file for this purpose in the drupal.org theming guide.

Basically what we've done here is include some php to tell the embed code the specific URL for each post - without this php it will only work on full-node view pages and not Views/Panels that list multiple nodes.

*You can see the widget in action here on this site below - just to the right of the tags for each post.

Designbump is sort of like a Digg for Designers/web-creatives and they just published a piece worth checking out - its a list of 45 great websites for all sorts of different communities/organizations/individuals which are all powered by Drupal.

Drupal is an excellent framework for building websites and offers tremendous flexibility for creating beautiful interfaces (its actually our main weapon of choice for client + incubator projects) - check out Designbump's list and see for yourself :)

Incase you missed the big news back in September, there are some major things happening in lieue of Drupal 7's imminent release - specifically related to making it easier than ever to use.

The video above introduces Aquia's new 'Drupal Gardens' project; which will provide a hosted-Drupal platform that people can create sites with very very very easily, aided by a custom theming engine which seems to work very much like Squarespace's.

it looks like Drupal Gardens won't be available to the public until Drupal 7, and the base set of modules Acquia chooses to include with it, are stable.  When it is out though, I perceive Drupal suddenly becoming much more attractive [or just less daunting?] to graphic designers, hobbyists, and developers who want to make quick-turnaround, simple Drupal sites.

Imagine - finally being able to have a Drupal-run site without worrying about what modules you need to build it, or any considerations of database/hosting/code stuff.  Of course, they haven't yet announced how updates or feature advancements will be handled by their central hosting platform, let alone the module set that their hosted Drupal Garden sites come with.

its been quite some time since I last posted here on whydrupal.com and its not because of anything more than being totally engrossed this past year in exploring some amazing things you can do with Drupal 6.  Okay well it sounds like there's a ton of stuff I could have clued you into right?  Well unfortunately I was moving too fast to keep track of all the tips and tricks I've learnt recently so I'll be putting a couple of massive posts together this week trying to catch up on some essential info. Furthermore there is so much happening in the wider world of Drupal - what with Acquia now being an established company offering excellent commercial service for this great software to the imminent release of yet another major version and people coming together to make its User Interface better than ever to Drupal 6 being stable for some time and that resulting in new modules being created powerfully leveraging the (now standard) Views(2) and Panels.  Given all these developments I'm rethinking what this site's purpose is and how it can achieve it best - please post comments on this if you have them (and yes I'm paying more attention to weeding out spam comments now so your thoughts won't get buried in a see of Viagara links! Ha.)

We've just filled out a profile on 37 Signals' new project called Haystack. 

Carrying forward their love for simple interfaces (these are the guys who changed social project management with their hosted Basecamp web-app), Haystack is an easy to use, light-weight listing service for web professionals that differentiates them by city/country.

It will be interesting to see whether this results in more of you visiting us from Toronto (or elsewhere in Canada)  looking for web firms in the city, or whether this will open us up to potential project partners in unexpected regions of the world (we're used to mainly working with folks in the UK, East Africa and USA).

Wherever you're based, if you've made it here from Haystack welcome!  Drop us a comment below or an email and say hello! :)

Online Advertising is just over 10 years old - that is to say, agencies have been selling space online for attention/action-grabbing purpose for that long (the Interactive Advertising Bureau was founded in 1996 - they're the folks who set standard banner dimensions etc...).

Over the course of this decade not much has changed when it comes to banner ads - perhaps new sizes of ads have become standardized, delivery platforms have become more accesible, ads themselves a now ubiquitous facet ofthe web-browsing experience and visual terrain, but it has only been recently that advertisers began to address how these ads can be unique to the web. 

Don't get me wrong, I know 'Punch the Monkey' spots couldn't be placed in a magazine - soliciting click-throughs with moving objects is certainly an 'interactive' type thing. However, simple ads like that miss the potential for facilitating a true web experience and benefiting from that.  The online ad industry is still young and its obvious most advertisers (if not agencies they hire) are concerned with charging per click rather than per impression - that distinction is their value measure in online space but it relies on success being when someone is sent to a specific destination where a very [print-style] conventional adspace is wholly owned by the advertiser.

People want to keep going until they want to stop on the web, and not stop where someone else tells them to - one simple destination to 'read more' and then end an experience of learning about something isn't very satisfying ands rapidly feeling more un-weblike.

I came across an example recently of one advertiser who has an accurate grasp of this phenomenon when we added a Google campaign on jcreport.com to advertise Google's Chrome browser.  What makes this campaign so reflective of the 'now' state of the web is the campaign's use of web-video; they've created a sort of online short film festival with each entry focused on their product - Google Chrome [browser]. The ad tags we serve on jcreport.com offer a flash video to a person looking at the JC Report - within a banner ad space.  Whilst looking at the space, whether the video is playing or not, you can click through to Google Chrome Shorts' youtube channel to watch more videos - much cooler than clicking directly over to say, http://www.google.com/chrome [where you could potentially learn more about the software and download it.].

I love the Google Chrome Shorts campaign, and thinks it represents an effective use of web-ad space because it :

• Engages people using videos,
• Employs multiple narratives using totally different videos directed/produced by different people etc,
• Takes you to a next step upon click which isn't a dead end, entertainment-wise
• Reinforces Google's youtube website

A lot of lessons can be learned for groups advertising online by this example and checking out the Google Chrome Shorts channel on youtube.

An example video from the campaign is below.

It seems so simple - you charge an advertiser x amount per # of impressions, bung a javascript ad tag they give you into your website et voila, you are making money serving an ad.  However, there are many nuances to measuring the success of how that ad is targetted, and if you have control over variables such as exclusivity or impression spreads through a time period, things can get tricky.

Given how accesible ad serving is today, many people are avoiding Google's Adsense placements and instead looking for their own bespoke implementations of an ad server.  One we work with exclusively @ Design Guru is called OpenX - a great piece of Open Source Software that gives industry leading functionality to any of our clients who need to manage ad campaigns, rather than, say just placing one or two dedicated spots on their site(s).

I got thinking about how confusing the notion of ad serving is today after bouncing some concept notes over to a client and thought it may be useful to repost them here.  This got penned in response to the question: "How come I can't see a particular ad in a spot live on my site even though I've reloaded the same page a few times?"

Well, there is a fine balance between how many ads share a space, the weighting of those ads individually, the periods those ads share the same space and so on.  This all adds up to the fact that a banner advertisement may need many more reloads than you'd assume without working the numbers.

For example:

If there are 10 ads sharing the same space that yeilds 100,000 impressions per month, you can assume that each ad gets shown 10,000 times per month.  However, if they are weighted differently such that some are forced to display more often and thus reach higher than 10,000 say, impression targets (or even less than 10,000 - as is the case with our current Lacoste campaigns), the other ads in the mix will be affected accordingly.

Now, if one of those 10 ads has been set to display with a low weight and effectively captures 2,000 impressions/mo, one would have to reload the same page to see the ad 50 times! [100,000/5,000]

This is where using the stats as accurate guidelines makes sense; the probability of seeing a single ad is isn't as high as you'd expect.

For anyone running their own ad servers who are trying to understand this stuff, I recommend looking through the stats for past campaigns you've run with a calculator - for revising those already running, and better placing future ads, think about how many impressions you want them to achieve per month and whether those should be capped (ie. once reached, the ad auto turns off) or spread through the month by appropriate weighting, or exclusive (as when you want a campaign to gain maximum geo-targetting potential, for example.)

Ad serving can get complex and it helps to have a clear grasp of what goals a campaign should have when it is initiated so we can setup each one appropriately.

Check out some features of OpenX in the video below - if you'd like to place ads on your website, drop us a line - we can help make sense of all this :)

Almost every day I come accross folks who want a website but don't have the cash to hire a professional firm to get them online, or don't have the time or technical confidence in themselves to treat their website as more than a weekend-in-the-garage DIY project.

Often cases for many of these people, a fully-blown content management system implementation is too much for their simple project - I say this because, though CMS' may offer scalability and wonderful modular architectures, they come with learning curves that include getting to know the system in order to start using it.

So, I've decided today to start referring these individuals and organisation to Indexhibit: in their words its:

A web application used to build and maintain an archetypal, invisible website format that combines text, image, movie and sound.

Like Joomla or Drupal or Wordpress, you download Indexhibit and upload/install it on your host/server and enter in information for the database you'll let the software use to store information that makes up your site.

Indexhibit is very very very simple to use - it has an admin side in addition to the main site and basically allows you to create 'sections' which store different articles.  As far as content editing, its got some simple icons for adding links, embedding photos and so on within articles, but accepts html so you can code articles if you want to.

Integrated into the article editing page is the ability to select how that page loads - the 'exhibition format' includes popular displays like 'thickbox' (larger images pop up in a light-box).  

* So if you were a photographer, for example, you could use Indexhibit to quickly create an archive portfolio of your best shots, all categorized and displayed in auto-created thumbnailed galleries with a lightbox effect etc...Pretty cool.

Indexhibit is pretty straight-forward to style and customize and just a few tweaks here and there will give the simplest website characteristic feel.

I'll be playing around with Indexhibit more in the next few weeks and post back about some services I'm thinking Design Guru could offer around it.  In the meantime, check out some sites people have made using this simple software:

http://www.picapica.be / http://www.leesatkowski.com / http://www.danieljhatton.com / http://sixohfour.net

 

(This post is in reply to one that Dries Buytaert wrote on OStatic.com)

I agree with Dries that Open Source CMS' are putting more power into the hands of people who may not know or want to learn code, and that as their learning curves get less steep we will see more people jumping into creating and growing their websites themselves; depending on the type of website they want to have.

We've of course seen the *huge* acceptance of wordpress for simple content publishing (read: 'blogging') amongst all sorts of people ranging from tech pros to near-luddites.  As people use more websites that have richer feature sets everyday they'll no doubt want to see the functionality of those sites in their own; for a while yet, though it may not require custom coding, I think the role of 'web master' or 'web developer' or whatever-you-want-to-call-them will be around for quite some time.

That role will continue to exist but may change to focus on conceptualizing the end result and making it happen with the right combination (and configuration) of 3rd party modules/extensions; whether through just hand-holding/teaching people wanting to develop their own sites or actually putting the pieces together themselves.

I'm really excited for Mark Boulton's redesign of Drupal 7; right now a major hindrance to non-technical people using Drupal is its stratified admin interface, which often leads to developers custom-creating UX per-project to suit each client's administrative needs.

To help people jump-start their web projects we've taken a hard look at another Open Source CMS called Joomla for example, and come up with a packaged solution called Seedling (http://www.plantseedling.com).

Seedling's distribution of Joomla is cool because it comes pre-configured and loaded with a suite of extensions and easily changeable theme; so people can develop their web projects a lot quicker and with more power under the hood.  Plus, it comes with optional email/ticket support - so new adopters of Joomla can get help when they need it.

Until core installs of Open Source CMS' are a lot more user friendly I think solutions like Seedling will really help bridge the gap for those folks who want to learn via DIY and/or can't afford the services of web developers.

We just recently flipped the switch on a new online shop for our friends at JUMA - one of the premier Canadian fashion houses.

JUMA now sells pieces from their current and past collections for men and women through a storefront completely integrated with their Joomla-powered website (which we designed and developed for them back in 2007).

See it in action (and go buy some great clothes) at:

http://www.juma.ca

At the end of last week, our Seedling initiative announced that we'd be focusing on providing support for Joomla through our distributions of it.

What this means is that now anyone can download Seedling's distribution of Joomla for just$49 and optionally choose to add 1 year of email/web ticket support for just $25/month.

Read more about this in the Seedling Blog.

Okay okay, I've totally ignored this blog for ages - sorry y'all, been mad busy @ Design Guru lately with our launch of Seedling, an open source distro/support initiative. Our initial release is a package of joomla and you can read about it @ http://www.plantseedling.com

Anyhoo, until I get a second to drop word on some cool Drupal stuff I've been playing with (expect a few catch-up posts next week), peep these shots from drinks in Toronto tonight; walkah got a few of us together for pints cause Rob from Acquia was in town.

I'm pleased to announce the availability of our newest in-house project from Design Guru.  Its a distribution package of Joomla we're simply calling 'Seedling.'

Our aim with Seedling's distribution of Joomla is to make it much easier to get started using this great content management system.

We've been using Joomla for around 5 years now.  Ultimately, in that time its gotten so difficult for people to pick through the over-4000 3rd party extensions available that the Joomla learning curve has gotten too steep for a lot of people.  In my opinion, that's not cool - Joomla is a great piece of software, and I really want to see more people feel comfortable using it as soon as they start - not after months of pulling their hair out.

The distro is commercial GPL and we're keeping the price really low - its just $249 CAD per copy.  Non-profits + educational institutions get %15 off and all customers receive an automatic %20 discount if they're installing Seedling Joomla for 5 or more sites. 

You can find out a lot more about Seedling over @ http://www.plantseedling.com and through this walk-through video I put together last week.

* A press release of the announcement is attached in PDF form below the clip.

The World Wide Web is about 20 years old this year and since its inception has become increasingly complex on the whole, yet easier to interact with per interface/site - especially if you are a content producer/publisher.  Gone are the days of the 1990s when a website consisted of hand-coded HTML housed in many many seperate pages; more than ever before we are iiberated from needing to know how a system works in order to use it.

However, there do come times when the system needs attention; last week I began thinking about how best to approach a major software upgrade on our Why Joomla blog.  The [old] site was running an archaic and now redundant version of Joomla and, given that its purpose is to discuss best practice when using Joomla software,it needed a major overhaul.  Of course, anxiety buids when first-considering such an overhaul - you see, probably for the past 2 years I hadn't thought at all about the system which allowed me to post to whyjoomla.com and I was now faced with completely replacing it.

The scale of this upgrade was large because recently Joomla has been re-written from the ground-up; its core-team of developers have greatly improved the software's architecture and I was actually excited to take a stab at the upgrade, just so that once done, my workflow as a contributor to the site would be that much easier and more empowered.

As it turns out, my anxieties were somewhat un-warranted; through the process of discovering my best approach to the upgrade I learnt a lot quickly about my options and that it would take a lot less time that I expected. All-in-all, the migration from Joomla 1.0x to the new and improved 1.5 platform took just 2 hours!!  Though, I did speed things up by implementing a new packaged form of Joomla we're releasing soon under the 'Seedling' banner [check back here for more info soon!] - which gave me all the 3rd party tools such as commenting, pre-installed along with our lovely, very simple, new theme.

Increasingly, experiences like this one are suggesting to me that it is becoming easier to understand web systems/software and that on the whole, more end users will be able to get a higher level of functionalty/use from this.  I'll be reflecting on these notions over the next few weeks as we ramp up to releasing Seedling...

I am convinced, more than ever as I move through my youth, that what I consider a memory is really a composite: a complex confluence of oral narratives, synaptic pathways, photographs, scents, embodied experience. It is rare to have what I have come to consider a true, or unaided, memory: an imprint; a dream-like sequence of images flickering on inner screens; voice, sound, movement, sensation tumbling together just behind or beyond the present. I would say I possess a handful of Memories, and thousands upon thousands of semi-remembrances that have become Constructed Memories.

These are the stories we are told about ourselves by family and old friends, the videos we see of ourselves taken my early adopter aunts and uncles, and the photo albums, vinyl or cyber, that chronicle our lives, more or less consistently and to which we have been subjected or had access over many years.

I am interested in exploring this nexus of sensory stimuli in so far as our selves are concerned. The individual construction of identity is undeniably a social process; the combination of the social acting upon us while we, through our own memetic tunnels and tunes, act upon ourselves. The melodies will be different, so too the colour and light of each re-constituted, re-membered, moment.

The design of our lives must be impacted not only by the design, uncontrolled and uncontrollable in many instances as it likely was, of our pasts, but also by how we filter, reconstitute and carry it.

Whether we put them in small leather pouches and carry it around our necks like water for a long trek, place them behind glass paned cabinetry to be dusted off at arm's length when protocol demands, or whether we keep them in the closet like our grandmother's sweaters and our grandfather's hats, influences how we see ourselves, the world around us, and is influenced by this notion of The Past, our Personal History.

Oral narrative, combined with sensory memory, provides the basis for a new photographic exploration of the objects, sensations and stories that make us believe we remember who we are when, in fact, without them, we may have forgotten. Or we may have decided to be something else, somebody else, entirely.

Fellow Canadian, Boingboing co-founder and contributing Wired Magazine author Cory Doctorow has released a new book called Little Brother - like other science-fiction works of his, its been released both from TOR publishing as well as under Creative Commons license online.  Yup; you can download the book for free in formats like PDF - to bung onto your media player and read on the tube.

I've grabbed a copy online and am excited to read it soon, though it will actually be the first ebook I attempt to read on-screen and to be frank, I'm a little daunted by the prospect - may just end up buying a hard copy if I can find one in the shops [but, I *love* the choice to read it for free of course!]

The book was written in 2007 and is about a San Fransico based character who gets caught up in battling the Department of Homeland Security... Here's a clip with more info:

In the constantly evolving web services industry its hard so take a step back and switch focus from keeping abreast of technological advancements [in order to offer clients supercool new gizmos and feed an insatiable gear-whore craving to learn] in order to regain objective perspective on where your firm is going and what options you have to excercise experience and knowledge to create something other than for clients.

Though not obsessivly a fan like many web professionals, for about 8 years I have been keenly watching the evolution of 37signals - a Chicago based firm now known internationally for their suite of web tools including Basecamp [a simple project management software that has become an almost-utility in the industry].

If you ask the majority of their customers, 37signals is simply a company run by passionate individuals [founder Jason Fried has given numerous Steve Jobsian talks at tons of conferences, campuses etc...] who want to make working easier using the web.  However, the company hasn't always been a software company - and their understanding of making applications that work well is rooted in experience streamlining web-design process.

Having just jumped onto archive.org's wayback machine to see whether there's a trace of how 37signals has evolved, I was pleasantly surprised to see extensive archival of their [static] site circa early 00's.  In fact, if I'm reading the URL correctly, even as recent as 3 years ago, the firm's main offering was not software but design and redesign services.  in 2005 their rate sheet saw 3 services priced between $7,500 and $15,000 to not create dynamic sites employing databases and scripting languages, but basic html/xhtml pages empliying clean, simple user interfaces.

If you visit 37signals.com today you'll see their McDonalds-claim of over 1,000,000 people subscribed to their software services [they dont sell software but provide it as a monthly subscription service] and its neat to see this hallmark of their success - both in terms of making more money [assumedly ;) ], and being now in a position to apply the years of experience/knowledge they gained from working almost exclusively [re]designing web interfaces.

Quite frankly, implementing WYSIWYG editors (and choosing the right one) for Drupal websites has been a pain in the ass the past few years.  For a while I bounced between FCK and TinyMCE - both integrated in the right fields fine and played well with IMCE for image uploads, but I remember finding their markup dirty (lotsa br tags etc..) and clients getting quite confused with line breaks in the editor not being truly mirrored on live content.  Of course, some of this is due to configuring Input Formats properly, but then there's also general interface and aesthetic issues with those mentioned editors.

Recently I've begun implementing HTMLbox on a bunch of sites - its simple, seems to markup html pretty well, and affords site users the basic buttons for simple formatting and link embeds [look out for a more in-depth review soon].  However, one downfall with it is a reliance on IMCE for facilitating embedded image uploads.  For anyone who's ever used IMCE, you'll know how confusing it can be for anyone unfamiliar with inline editing - though it integrates with the editor, its interface is still seperate and requires a lot of styling effort to pretty it up etc...

So, though HTMLbox is pretty nice, I've really been looking for an editor which installs light and easy *and* offers the ability to upload images inline - whilst editing a piece of content.  Added bonuses are future scalability and options for extending editor functionality to include things like seamless Flickr image and Youtube video embeds.

Guess what?  I found all that in YUI Editor - a module for Drupal which lets you use the Yahoo User Interface Editor within your own site.  I highly recommend installing it and playing around; you'll be using it in no time and find that all the basic functions are there... though as Nick Lewis recently blogged, there are downsides with this Drupal implementation limiting the extensibility of the editor. 

Personally, I love the embedded image handling with YUI Editor but hate how it offers a very basic, Wordpress-esque, feature set - ultimately, there is no imagecache-style on-the-fly image sizing/thumbnailing, rotation etc...  However, as you'll be using the YUI module in order for the Editor to work, your sites can now benefit from other Yahoo User Interface widgets like their Calendar and html button override.

A few days back I was trying to book a flight on Porter Airlines - a small airline which flies out of the only downtown airport here in Toronto.  After hearing rave reviews of their excellent in-person service, I was absolutely shocked at how badly their poorly built website reflected such reviews.

After spending nearly an hour trying to submit site registration and payment processing forms across two browsers (Firefox and Safari on a Mac) to no avail, I threw up my hands in dispair and attempted to simply book over the phone or at least let the supposedly good fellows @ Porter know their website is broken and won't communicate this to me in a simple message I can understand; instead forcing me to figure out nuances of its irregular behaviour through not blatantly appearing disfunctional...  Well, they don't operate as late as I was awake trying to solve this issue (11PM-ish) and only have a contact form without a field for attachments - so the screenshots I tried to send them to help them diagnose their web problems couldn't be sent!!!  Read more »

One thing clients always leave to the last minute and *love* striking off the time/budget for projects is the copy that, when used correctly, can really add character to your website and help form/define the personal attachment to it that its users feel.

This copy mainly exists as general system messages and automated emails.  When using Content Management Systems like Joomla or Drupal, all of these messages are usually included with the software in default robot language - they don't read personally yet their purpose is very personal; to warn, inform and relate to the site user out of concern for their relationship.  Such stock messages can usually be easily customised yet clients often feel [wrongly] that since the messages are already there, there's no point in drafting new ones.

I like many things about Vimeo, an online video upload/hosting/etc service, and one of them is the real-time communication they maintain when you upload a video - first off the website tracks the upload progress and gives you a realistic expected time of it being published, whilst allowing you to edit the video's description, add tags etc.  Then, when the clip has been converted to flash video and is online, the site will send you an email notification (picture attached to this post).

Note: I think Vimeo's email notifications are definately under-designed and through using Times and Arial, with too many font sizes, they read a little roboty...But I love that they hit my inbox as soon as my videos are ready to watch with a thumbnail, description and link to the video!

You may already be familair with the concept of a captcha - essentially a little code for site users to enter into a field before submitting nodes or other forms to your website. Well, Drupal's had some good captcha options for a while now - including images, math questions and ASCII art.

Lately I've been noticing tons of sites on the web using reCaptcha and was happy to just come across a reCaptcha module for Drupal; you can grab a copy for 4.7x, 5.x *and* 6.x!

We're now using reCaptcha on this site so you can see it in action.  As for why its better than other captchas - not only is it a secure way to ensure human form submissions, you can feel good using it as the project was setup to improve Optical Character Recognition technology.

The conventional approach for rounding corners on websites has always involved creating images to position creatively via CSS at the top/bottom/etc... of div's or other html elements (table headers or columns and so on).

That convention is painstaking and not the most agile solution to creating rounded corners - for example, when you want the curve radius to be say 5px instead of 10px you've got to jump into photoshop and roll new images etc...

Well, I came across the Rounded Corners module for drupal recently and *love* it!  Install the module, (& I recommend updating the javascript that powers it to ensure x-browser compatibility) then simply create rules from the admin side for particular css rules et voila!

Something to remember; the background color for the corners will be auto-set to the background of whatever layer is directly above the rounded one in the CSS hierarchy for your site.

Apple's renovating its flagship Toronto store and instead of closing the location, keeping the smallest possible space open to operate out of and renovating around it.. An interesting approach yet:

same # of staff + same # of customers + tiny space = ouch

Funnily enough, I just came across this neat little site via an ad on Facebook (I guess they *do* work! :) )  Dripbook is basically an online portfolio host.  Once you sign up, you can fill out a profile and then add collections of images to your scrapbook - essentially a gallery system.

They've gone with a simple interface using lots of whitespace but when you land on the frontpage it all feels a little crowded - with 36 thumbnails that have static pagination.  So at first glance, I questioned how well the people behind it may have thought out dripbook, however as soon as you jump to a scrapbook (second photo in this post) you see that the sit eisn't there to introduce people to new photographers, graphic artists etc...

Dripbook is an excellent way for visual artists working with still images to showcase their work, without dealing with the fuss of creating their own website.  In fact (this is interesting) - they even have a feature to export a full flash website created dynamically from your portfolio/scrapbook!  Pretty cool - apparently their site will power the content in the one generated for you... so you just use one interface for maintaining your content!

I highly recommend checking out dripbook for any still-image visual artist looking to get online with something snazzy - why not with prices starting @ just $10/mo?

For more convincing, check out their top 10 reasons to join up...

10 years ago there was no doubt in most web professionals' minds that an essential stage in creating a website was to sketch out the Information Architecture (IA) using a series of wireframe diagrams.  To be honest, I've always disliked making them but back when websites were static and tons of html pages needed to be created for them, it was useful to have a map of how they would all fit together.

Now that web development is so sped up and flexible because of Content Management Systems like Drupal, it seems to me that there are better ways to spend your time than drafting up wireframe diagrams... Recently I stumbled upon a new web service called JumpChart - which is a groovy service in allowing clients to login and create pages & menu items.  In fact, I was quite excited when I found it as clients can login to your JumpChart account and essentially build out the core IA of a site, but really fails in only exporting static XHTML files!!!  

Ultimately the purpose of planning IA is to let the developer and client get on the same page about the main content and navigation of a site and well, if your client is savvy enough to jump onto a site which may look bare-bones and un-themed, its good to just get them into the site and familiar with making pages and menu links from the getgo.

This is just one of the many reasons why we use killer Open Source Software to build sites - their power and simplicity let us start building a site with our clients and they immediately see how its coming together, within an aesthetic framework that flushes out as we theme the site - overall, much more effective than explaining the difference between IA and design mockups and rebuilding them into a site once we're done in OmniGraffle and Photoshop ;)

A few months back we created the first ever website for the Metronauts; a community initiative here in Toronto that seeks to encourage conversation about transit in and around the GTA.  This initial website was built in Drupal and featured a few cool tools like a content voting system that automatically gave site users 'karma' for posting comments etc...

After some time online we all decided that first and foremost, our aim with the site was to get people talking - and showcase regular contributers whilst bringing the general public into the fold.  So, we moved the old site into an archive and got a few people together to whip up a Wordpress blog - complete with custom theming, social tools integration and email newsletters - powered by both Feedburner (for auto-mailing of new site content) plus our own ajaxy Design Guru email service (more on that soon).

Check out the Metronauts online at http://www.metronauts.ca !

Some months back I discovered the Asus eee pc - at the time it was the cheapest (and cutest) little computer around; boasting a 900 Mhz celeron processor, solid state memory, a trackpad, a 7" LCD and more for just about $300+. In the past 6 or so months since the eee pc was released here in North America, demand for UMPCs has only gotten stronger and the computer industry has responded.

Whilst on holiday in Mykonos, Greece a couple of weeks back, I was in a rush to move hotels and absent-mindedly tossed my Macbook into a suit-bag (suit-bags; you know those silly things that always end up creasing your suits and requiring you to sit on them in order to make the zipper actually do its thing?). When I got to the second hotel and opened the bag I was excited to stroll into Mykonos town and check my email... Well, until I opened my $2,000+ laptop and found that the screen was smashed and it wouldn't power up!

As soon as I saw the wreckage that was minutes-previously my pride and joy laptop I realised that its quite stupid to take your main/work computer on holiday. Yes, its nice to be able to use your own machine to check email and well, ahem, facebook, but really, the cost when something goes wrong is too much... luckily I have a couple other machines to work off of, but in the meantime my Macbook is idlly awaiting $700 surgery.

Looking back, for that $700 I could instead have purchased two UMPC's!!! Now, I know an eee pc doesn't stack up to a Macbook in terms of sexiness or power but that doesn't mean there aren't other options- Acer recently stepped up to the eee pc challenge with the Aspire One. This laptop has a 1.6Ghz processor and can ship with up to 20GB of solid state memory!! This is great news, especially combined with its professional aesthetic and color options; so you can still rock a pink laptop poolside but actually be able to store your holiday photos on it as you take them, video blog with its in-built webcam and more.

The Acer Aspire One is just one of the nu breed of UMPC's which have hit shops since January and you can expect more to come. Feature-wise, it looks like the 3g craze is moving from smart-phones to laptops with models of the Aspire One scheduled to release in Q3/Q4 08 with built-in 3G and optional carrier data plans in the US.

As soon as my Macbook recovers from surgery its not allowed out of the office - I'll be picking up a 3G UMPC later in the year and just incase anything happens to it whilst on vacation, well, it won't be as tragic :)

For a full review of the Aspire One, check out this post.

I'm bloody stoked about a module I just discovered on drupal.org - its called Movino and may just be one of the most powerful and cutting edge tools you can implement on your Drupal powered website.

As I understand it Movino consists of a program that you can load onto your smartphone/video-enabled mobile, plus a module for your Drupal site.  Once its all installed and configured you'll be able to stream live to your site or have your site record the stream for on-demand playback.

Imagine what you can do with this.  Video-blogging, indie concert broadcasting and well, a million other things.

I'll be testing it out for use with my record label, Indian Electronica, this week - expect a post back early next week with more info.

Without spending too much time thinking about this one; suffice it to say I was intrigued to receive an email this morning from 37 Signals - the chaps who make Basecamp (which we use to 'manage' client projects).  Getting emails from them isn't unusual but the fact that this one was solely dedicated to advertising a couple of new staff positions they have open.

You see, 37 Signals also provides a commercial job board on their website - which, when I checked after getting the email, also had the listings - albeit, on theirjob board the lingo used in describing the job was more informal... the title of one pos, for example; "A designer who can kick our ass."

What interests me about all this:

• The fact that in addition to the job board listing they needed to send an email out,
• Why their email (which is asumedly being sent to 37 Signals' customers) was more formally phrased than the listing on the job board they host.

Groundwave Design Corp (who, in the past, have worked with Flavorpill - the JC Report's previous publisher) helped us out with a new design for the JC Report mailer and based on that, I today began the process of re-envisioning the aesthetic of jcreport.com and implemented the first batch of those changes.  Moving into Spring/Summer, the goal basically was to lighten the screen with softer grays, thinner lines and more open space.

For the past 4 years, the JC Report has existed as an email newsletter - this past December we started working with Jason Campbell and his team to launch a new Drupal powered website that would allow his readers to engage in his content much more creatively plus be able to access a wealth of archived posts.

You can learn more about the JC Report in our client projects section.

I was quite interested to come across a very simple use of drupal today - a British firm called Record of the Day setup a very plain website survey (at http://www.whatpricedidyouchoose.com ) buyers of Radiohead's much discussed (new) album 'In Rainbows.'

The site is built in Drupal and uses the basic Minelli theme. Its developer was rushed to get something up live for Record of the Day and in effect created a great example of how Drupal can be used simply to powerful effect.

Basically, the site asked users just a couple of questions - most importantly; the price they paid for the digitally downloadable album. The implementation uses the webform and webform report modules to good effect; the main goal in the site's architecture was to get an average value for the album and at that they were successful.

We're looking to expand our network of associates who are highly skilled in using Drupal to develop websites that support communities - preferably you would be located in Toronto for these projects, which start in May and will continue through the year, though we're open to working with website producers/developers around the world.

Also, we're looking for people who are passionate about innovating with Drupal that are familiar with things like building dynamic user profiles with Nodeprofile/Nodefamily/Usernode combinations etc... and certainly not people tinkering with Drupal - you must be committed to working professionally with it.

If you're interested in working with us, please send over an email with some links - including any personal blogs/websites plus on online portfolio or examples of work you've done!

I just came across a great little chunk of php to bung into your template.php that will load icons next to actual file attachments in posts on a Drupal 5.x site, thanks to Agaric Design. He's got a basic icon set with MS Word, PDF and a couple more icons you can use - I also recommend looking @ famfamfam to see if anything else strikes your fancy/works better with your theme.

A while back I came across the Email Standards Project through Campaign Monitor - the weapon of choice on our client projects which require email campaigning with html-coded newsletters (such as the JC Report).

They've just made a jokesy video I thought I'd share that overplays relates frustrations we as designers face when trying to make code cross-client compatible with email... Personally, I've been doing this stuff for a decade so I'm used to making things work but it really is time to get email standards up to scratch so that design can get more racey and creative in email newsletters and such.

Et voila:

 

Email Standards Project - Gmail Grimaces from Mathew Patterson on Vimeo.

Something that can get confusing for site users is when you have created 'sections' of your site comprising of blocks, Views, Panels etc - often cases in Drupal 5, the menu system won't follow a Panel, for example as belonging to a menu item (it instead wants to refer to nodes only - which means that even if you use something like the Menu Trails module, you may run into problems).

Well, something very exciting is under foot - the smart chaps over @ Development Seed are working on a new module simply called 'context' - it allows you group things together in a drupal site, irrespective of their nodal identities, and have the menu system recognise the relationship(s) - *plus* you can stipulate rules for contexts such as blocks appearing in a particular context, without, as I understand it, having to assign blocks to particular positions in the usual fashion.  Peep the screencast for more info.

Some of you may have noticed that we've been offline for about a week - for months I've planned to overhaul the designguru website with something fresh that would profile all of our network associates who work on the various projects with me that DG undertakes.

Soon, when you click on 'who we are' you'll see a more fleshed out list of these people - it won't just be my smiling mug up there indefinately :)

Clicking around you might notice some things not working and looking wonky, please drop us a line to point out these errors; like any rushed launch, the site isn't fully where we want it to be - but that's often part of the fun of going live slightly pre-maturely anyway right?

More soon,

q./ 

One main quirk I've had with using Drupal (and other Open Source CMSs for that matter), is that when I need to do some heavy maintenance and take a site down, the default 'site offline' message looks pretty mickey mouse and though I'm proud of using Drupal, I'd rather have my own logo, if one at all, when people see that my site is down - I mean, it looks as if they've reached some page they shouldn't have and something's seriously messed up.

Well, you don't have to waste much time pondering these things like I have - there are two approaches in Drupal 5 that let you beautify the site offline message, and I recommend you read this post:

http://drupal.org/node/58562

About 2/3 of the way down the page you'll see mention of a simple template.tpl.php include which will redirect people to a custom/static page or URL but still allow you to access site login/admin pages. :)

Last note: supposedly Drupal 6 includes phptemplate theming for the maintenance page; I'll try it out and post back soon.

Its funny how often people remark; "I don't know about Drupal - all the sites people make with it, well, look like Drupal!"  Such observations are usually the result of a developer not taking that extra step to override some default blurbs and titles that Drupal comes with out of the box.

Now, overriding Drupal's strings has been quite the pain until recently because you'd have to wrap your head around php and then come up with some snippet including a hook and so on..  Well, thanks to Khalid @ 2bits today I got twigged onto a new module which makes overrides a dream.  This great module is simply titled 'String Overrides' and comes ready to transform your Drupal 5 and 6 experience.  Yay!

Here's a demo video from Rob Loach:

I've spent a little time this week hunting down a well priced Drupal-friendly hosting environment for a client of mine.  Actually, for years I've been extolling the virtues of shared/virtual hosts like Dreamhost who have been bumping up disk space and bandwidth allowances before gmail wet its bed for the first time - but then I signed up @ Rackspace and have fallen in love with how muc quicker Drupal runs when its file structure is on the same machine as its database - especially when that machine solely exists to power your own sites.

The only problem with Rackspace is that it costs over $500 per month - so for most smaller clients - especially NGOs, its out of the question... Anyway - so I was out hunting and came across The Planet, one of the Net's most popular hosts whom I hadn't checked out in a while.  Well, it turns out that not only are their dedicated hosting packages reasonable (I'm signing us up for 1 tomorrow @ Design Guru for $95/month), the company uses Drupal itself!

That's right - check out the screenshot above - look familiar?  Recently, The Planet unveiled its Knowledge Base and I'm happy to say that its been built in a stock Garland install of Drupal :)  Actually, the site is a great example of how Drupal can quickly provide a framework for an interactive FAQ/knowledgebase - simply using CCK and Views.

I'll post something next week to let you know how the new hosting package is working out y'all...

A few days back the second Release Candidate of Drupal 6 was posted for download on Drupal.org .  I'll be blogging a bit over the next couple of weeks about some neat things that Drupal 6 features as opposed to previous releases of the CMS, but for now wanted to note that site theming is getting easier as versions of Drupal advance; which is an exciting development for anyone interested in making sites that are aesthetically unique and provide enjoyable user interfaces.

To get cracking in discovering how Drupal 6 can offer more power in site theming, be sure to watch Moshe Weitzman's screencast introducing the Theme Developer module; a new part of devel which lets you know what theme functions are being called on your site, as you look at it!  Sort of like a Web Developer toolbar or Firebug extension for Drupal :)

I wouldn't recommend using Drupal 6 on a 'live site' for the next couple of months until the contributed modules you may want to use on your site are available - be sure to check in on their status first.

BTW, here's a list and discussion of some new features in d6.0:

http://groups.drupal.org/node/8059

Website developers reading this will all agree - it can be quite a pain when a client is moving from some archaic static html site (or CMS) over to a dynamic site - especially when there is a lot of content to move over.

Well, to make things easier I suggest putting all the old content into a spreadsheet and then dumping it into the new Drupal site you've made for them... "What a second," you say, "how can I dump a bunch of content easily into my Drupal site?"  Well, all you need is the node import module folks; its a great tool that plays nicely with the CCK; so you can prepare a CSV file with all the content you want and then import each row as a node!  When you import the data the module asks which fields map to which column in the CSV so don't worry; if you're focused when doing imports, the whole process should be pretty clean and straight-forward!

When did you first log onto the Internet and what excited you about the experience?

Well that's a good question! I don't remember exactly which came first either in the computer lab in high school or on my mom's AOL account, both happened around 1993. What I do remember is being really excited by the possibilities of communicating and participating in a global network. I was, and still am, very interested in "chat" technologies (IRC, IM, etc) almost more so than email or the web itself.

At what point did you realize that you wanted to make a career out of web work and how did you get started?

I sort of stumbled my way into web development by accident. I was working part-time as a Windows NT4 LAN administrator in '97 while I was attending the University of Toronto (which incidentally ended my relationship with Windows permanently). The CEO of the company knew I was a Computer Science student and asked if I would be interested in developing a web-based time tracking tool for the consultants to replace the clunky spreadsheet based system they were using. So, I set up a "server" in the office running Linux, MySQL, Apache and PHP 3 and started playing around.

Shortly after that, PHP started to really take off and it turned out my having spent as much time with it as I had was very beneficial. So, I started receiving job offers and consequently avoided the whole hassle of having to apply for jobs upon graduation from University. I've been doing various levels of web development ever since.

When you first discovered Drupal, how did it affect your perception of, and relationship with, the Internet?

At the time I discovered Drupal, I was working for a small web company in Toronto building a commercial content management system. In that role, I spent a lot of time watching and evaluating various open source content management systems. Drupal, at that time, had some pretty cutting edge features built into its core - RSS aggregation and distributed authentication being two that I remember specifically.

The very forward-thinking, experimental nature of the early developers certainly influenced my thinking and approach, but the largest impact for me came when I began contributing. The Drupal community at that time was only a small fraction of the size it is now, but already was full of really amazing people (most of whom still actively contribute today). While I was already at that time a member of the Gallery (http://gallery.menal...) development team, getting heavily involved in the Drupal community changed my relationship with free software, my relationship to software development, and ultimately my life.

You're known in Drupal circles for co-founding a company in Vancouver called Bryght in 2004; what was the original mission for the firm and what led you to leaving it?

Well, initially, Bryght was formed by a group of Drupal developers and enthusiasts (me, Boris Mann, Adrian Rossouw and Roland Tanglao) who recognized that this growing community had a real need and opportunity for a commercial entity. Our initial mission was to provide a hosted Drupal service that was packaged and tailored in such a way that we could effectively help bring the power of Drupal to the unwashed masses (or a bunch of them anyway).

My leaving Bryght was largely a personal decision - I felt I needed a change. It was three great years in which I learned and grew a lot, both personally and professionally, but the time came for me to find my next challenge.

Its seems that you're quite passionate about Drupal and the concept of Open Source in general; what motivates you to maintain projects like the Drupal User Group and Drupal Camp Toronto?

The people. The Drupal community, be it the local users and developers in Toronto or the thousands of others around the globe, is home of not only my colleagues and co-workers but most of my best friends. Philosophically, I believe in the power of free software. I believe in open society. I believe in sharing, helping and collaborating. Those ideals work best when you have the amazing people we have in the Drupal community. I love 'em all  ;)

Recently you joined the Drupal Consultancy firm Lullabot (who's team comprises of some core developers) – what's your new position with them and what's on your plate there for the near future?

Officially, I am Lullabot's Director of Education. Practically, it means that I have taken over responsibility for the Workshops and Training segment of their business. On my plate currently is putting together our workshop schedule for 2008, working with my amazing team on expanding and refining our training materials, and helping to co-ordinate the on-site training that we do for various clients. Other than that, we've got a couple tricks up our sleeve, but mostly I am *really* enjoying the chance to work with some of the smartest, most vibrant, awesome people in the Drupal community. I'm having a ton of fun!

What developments are afoot for Drupal that you find interesting?

Wow, there is so much going on it's hard to keep track. I tend to feel the same every release, but I think the upcoming Drupal 6 release is really quite impressive. Between a bunch of the new interface and usability improvements, the revamped internationalization system and some of the new features, it's pretty exciting. Looking ahead to Drupal 7 and our commitment to going PHP5, I think there are a lot of really exciting opportunities there as well.

There are also lots of interesting efforts within the community, particularly in my involvement with the Drupal Association (http://association.d...), as our community continues to grow exponentially. These are interesting times, for sure.

As a person with children of his own; How do you see the Internet developing until a point when they're your age?

I don't know that I can predict 5 years out let alone 25. However, I know what I hope for them and I know what I'm trying to help build and enable - and that is an open, free internet that enables and enriches their ability to interact with the rest of the world. We'll see...

Links:

• http://www.walkah.net
• http://www.lullabot.com
• Photos of walkah on Flickr

So things are getting out of hand with all the crazy web 2.0/social networking sites popping up but if you've got a facebook account chances are you haven't tired of the ability to post your status whenever you want.

Something I noticed recently is that your facebook status is published as an RSS feed from your profile (go to your profile, then click on 'see all' in your mini-feed, then filter to 'status stories.').

What this means is that you can grab that feed and display it on your Drupal website using the feed aggregator module!  Nice!! :)

Okay, so now that you've got your feed URL from facebook (copy the linked blue rss logo as shown above), enable the aggregator module and add the feed to your aggregator.  For my personal site at http://www.qasim.ca I chose to only display the latest status for obvious reasons.

Now, the aggregator module automatically makes a block for each feed you throw into the aggregator - so all you have to do is edit the block, set the number of feed items to show and then publish the block wherever you want!

Notes:

• the Aggregator module doesn't let you display less than 2 feed items in the block - so you'll need to hack it, something I've already blogged about.
• The aggregator module updates feeds with cron.php so make sure you've got a crontab running frequently to update the feed - also make sure to set the frequency of updates within the module itself.

I *love* Drupal's simple RSS news aggregation system.  However, when adding my facebook status feed to my personal site just now I realised that a coding oversight restricts the automatic blocks created for aggregated feeds to a minimum of 2 posts.

Now, for something like showing your facebook status on a Drupal site, you probably only want to show one item - that being your latest status update, not the last 2 or 5 etc...  So, you'll need to go to 'modules/aggregator' and edit your copy of the aggregator.module file.

Look around line 269 for the following code - I've added a '1' to the array - this allows the aggregator blocks to offer you a display of just the most recent feed item.

Note: I found this issue with Drupal 5.1 - it may have been corrected since then...

      $form['block'] = array('#type' => 'select', '#title' => t('Number of news items in block'), '#default_value' => $value, '#options' => drupal_map_assoc(array(1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20)));
      return $form;

I just came across a little introduction to what Drupal is - with a simple overview on how to get started installing and setting up a Drupal site, over in Tech Republic's article section.

Though the article is titled 'Build a community Web space with Drupal,' it doesn't go into any detail on how one might, well, actually do that!  Its a more involved topic than the brief piece could detail - and one I think I'll be posting more on in the next couple of weeks - so stay tuned to this space.

After an upgrade from drupal 5 to 5.3 this weekend I ran into an error on a client's site - which wasn't hosted on one of our servers, so I couldn't look into their server error logs as I didn't have permission!

It was a pretty frustrating place to be as I couldn't tell why I was getting a blank white screen when I tried to access only certain node/add or node/edit pages - at the time I didn't realise that those particular node types used a certain taxonomy that was working with the form tweaker module to make term selections checkboxes instead of lists!!

Anyway, I found a tip that helped me out; add the following line to your settings.php file (in sites/default via ftp) et voila - server error messages will be printed on the not-so-blank white screen, which you can then use to trace the error - which for me was something funky with the form tweaker mod.

ini_set('display_errors', 1)

A couple of days back I had a terrible fright when the Drupal Developers Network went down! (Its a new site I just launched  to help Drupal professionals with gig and job listings).

It looked like the site started spitting a 500 Internal Server Error as soon as I had enabled the devel module; which I love for its crafty menu links like 'clear cache.'  After a couple of days of pondering why devel would muck up I came across a post on realjenius.com that details why the module won't work on Dream Host!

Well, the site's back up and running thanks to the helpful fellows at Dream Host and fact that they include automatic backups of both files and databases with their virtual hosting packages! Phew.

Alas, I won't miss the devel module thaaaat much; at least I can create custom menu items to do things like flush the site cache.

One of the coolest stock features of Drupal is that it can display tables of node editing/adding activity to general site users - both for all activity on the site as well as per user (on their profiles).

Some of you may be familiar with this functionality from social networking sites like Facebook (the Wall on user profiles), and thus know that sometimes all information shouldn't show by default in these listings.  For example, you may not want to display every edit an admin makes to somewhat-static page content. 

Guess what?  Drupal's so cool - it not only shows you tracker info, but also lets you customize the display of it!  All you need is to firstly activate the tracker module, then install Views and activate the stock-packaged tracker view.

As with any other View on a site, you can customise your new tracker but be sure to keep its location and name unchanged; that ensures it'll over-right Drupal's default tracker.

Now, if you want to also customise the tabs labelled 'Track' on user profiles, you'll need to clone the view you just activated.  This new clone you can call whatever you wish - such as 'usertracker.'  The usertracker can be again customised in terms of fields and filters etc...  Note: do not change its location - make sure it is 'user/$arg/track' so that Drupal sees this new view and loads it instead of the default.  Save the view et voila; it should show up on user's Track tabs; this affords you tons of flexibility to show/hide node types, add header text and stylesheet calls (in the view header) and much more! :)

Remember, you can re-write the URLs leading to your user trackers to sync em up with how you've setup your general user profile aliasing; just be sure to write the appropriate rule in the user-tracker settings of the Pathauto module (e.g. 'community/[user]/track').

Drupal's native URL-rewriting functionality is pretty groovy; with a stock install of Drupal you can simply write the custom, semantic/human-readable URL for any node when creating/editing it!

However, things can get a little messy if you plan on writing URLs each time you add new nodes to your site; its makes sense to apply rules to how the URLs are written; such as making all blog entries follow a pattern like 'site.com/blog/[date]/[nodetitle]' - in case you're not familiar with it, there's a module which can do this really simply; its called Pathauto.

I use the Pathauto module on every site that we build in Drupal at Design Guru, but and in keeping up with the latest releases have noticed a change in workflow with the module I'd like to share with you - up until recently you could change the URL role for, say, a node type, and then simply click a 'bulk update' checkmark at '/admin/settings/pathauto' and that would over-write any existing URL aliases you've created on your site.  Great feature eh?  Well, supposedly there were some hiccups with large sites so the module developers have removed this check...

If you're using the newest verison of Pathauto and want to rewrite a rule for a node type etc, you'll either have to edit your database tables to delete the appropriate URLs, then change the rule and update node paths for non-existing aliases (the only option now available in the module) or delete all aliases (easily done at 'admin/build/path') on your site and then chage the appropriate rules, and create new aliases for all nodes using the Pathauto module settings.

I'll be posting something later today about what options you have when considering wysiwyg editors for Drupal websites but firstly want to make note that its very important to pay a visit to your input format options to make sure things are setup properly per project you work on.

You can typically access the input formats at 'admin/settings/filters' - a lot of people simply use the default Drupal inputs, which are great but when you use a wysiwyg editor some customisation may be required.

Specifically - with a wysiwyg (like FCK or TinyMCE), you may not want to let anyone but admins use the editor; if you're not adding new roles on your site for admins because just one person logs in as the site-wide general admin, there's nothing to worry about but if you have other people doing administrative tasks you may want to create admin roles and then assign the 'full HTML' input type to just a couple of them.

Once you've made sure that the right roles are configured to use the full HTML input type, remember that wysiwyg editors will auto-format line breaks, so to void premature line-breaks and funky formatting in general, be sure to turn off the line-break feature of the full HTML input type...

With the advent of Drupal 5.x administrative features moved to the '/admin' URL (with clean URLs on of course), which is really nice because you can see, at a glance, pretty much all of the things you can do to administer your site.

However, until you become super familiar with how drupal's admin is laid out (Site Configuration vs. Site Building etc...), it can still be quite time consuming to look through the admin page... in comes a couple of 3rd party modules that can not only save you time but also make site administration more intuitive and fun!

First up - the Drupal Administration Menu (aptly titled eh?!); its a great little module that throws a drop-down menu atop your site that's powered by the navigation menu itself; which means you don't need to move any menu items into a new menu or anything.  Oh, and it works with most themes pretty seamlessly; the module's menu is completely CSS - so no javascript code to mess with other scripts!

Secondly - Instead of creating a new place on your site to administrate the site, why not make the standard Navigation menu admin options easier to use?  I suggest installing the DHMTL menu module; which automatically makes duplicates of your menu blocks which use a simple javascripted/dhtml approach to facilitating collapsible menus! That's right folks; now you don't have soooo many page loads when working through hierarchical menus. :)

Personally, I like using dhtml menus because it gives site administrators the same UI that all site users have.

Like any new software, if you've never used Drupal then you'll have to suffer a learning curve... though, if you're excited about doing amazing things with it that will change the world, then this won't be an issue :) 

I highly recommend not jumping into the deep when when you're a newbie; that means - don't feel pressured to learn everything about Drupal because you have a project deadline!  Its much better to have the peace of mind going into a paid project - knowing both your limitations as well as those of the software you're using.

First step: read up; there's a wealth of knowledge over in the Drupal Handbooks and they read pretty easily.  Get cracking with Drupal terminology and try to think about examples in your life where you relate things with conceptual taxonomies, for example.  It may sound geeky to philosophize about software but once your brain understands how Drupal works, working with it will feel much more natural. :)

If you've got the time to think about working with Drupal, do it until you can't wait to play around and then its time to setup a dev server - something I'll be posting about soon!