admin's blog

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

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

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.

*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

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

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 »

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!