A personal take on Web 2.0 and how it can be used to increase reach, communicate with constituents, and broadcast a message with a heavy focus on the Drupal CMS.

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Adams 50 School District Honor Choir - Final Concert

Posted Sun, 2010-03-14 14:13 by matthew

The district wide honor choir performed at 7:00 pm on March 11th, 2010. These kids have been practicing since near the beginning of the school year with Kathryn Donaldson and Tara U'Ren for an hour and half a week. I think that the practice really paid off - they sounded great. The children performed eight pieces all together in this second and last concert for this year's participants.

Amazon Cancels Colorado Amazon Associate Accounts

Posted Mon, 2010-03-08 23:46 by matthew

Early this morning I received this email in my inbox:

We are writing from the Amazon Associates Program to inform you that the Colorado government recently enacted a law to impose sales tax regulations on online retailers. The regulations are burdensome and no other state has similar rules. The new regulations do not require online retailers to collect sales tax. Instead, they are clearly intended to increase the compliance burden to a point where online retailers will be induced to "voluntarily" collect Colorado sales tax -- a course we won't take.

We and many others strongly opposed this legislation, known as HB 10-1193, but it was enacted anyway. Regrettably, as a result of the new law, we have decided to stop advertising through Associates based in Colorado. We plan to continue to sell to Colorado residents, however, and will advertise through other channels, including through Associates based in other states.

Aten Design Group's IE6 Funeral Party

Posted Fri, 2010-03-05 01:28 by matthew

Ie6funeralThe buzz has been around for quite some time now. Google announced that they were no longer going to support IE 6 and the clever folks at Aten Design Group snapped up ie6funeral.com to announce the next Aten Office party. They asked folks to RSVP and leave thoughts on the site. Little did they know that it would suddenly be a top trender on Twitter, that the BBC would pick up on the scheme, that they would get Techcrunched, featured on the front page of Slashdot and get on the front page of CNN.

I arrived with friends, suitably attired in my black suit and slowly made my way over to the casket where the corpse was lying in repose. I had to meander past folks with protest plackards and through a group of mourners surrounding the pine box. Ben gave his last respects and ended his personal moment with a crossing of his chest.

Drupal Gardens Beta - First Impressions

Posted Sat, 2010-02-27 21:29 by matthew

gardenshomeA few days ago I was hanging out at a the Denver Boulder Users Group meetup. One of the topics of conversation was Drupal Gardens and the potential shift Gardens could have on Drupal's place in the instant blog-o-sphere. Much like Wordpress allows you to set up a blog almost instantly, so too does Drupal Gardens. The home page claims to allow setup of a site in 15 minutes, and it makes good on that claim.

Currently you need a beta-code to make use of the system. There is a signup on the the Gardens' site to get you in the queue to get in on the fun.

First off, I have to say that Gardens is extremely slick. The interface is exceedingly easy to use. Setting up a site is as easy as entering the name for your subdomain on Gardens and clicking a button.

Scan Developer

Posted Mon, 2010-02-22 20:19 by matthew

SCAN DEVELOPER – JOB DESCRIPTION

As a Developer, you will be responsible for participating in the design, development, implementation, testing, quality assurance, and maintenance of all layers and aspects of our products and systems. This position has significant hands-on coding responsibilities on a high-volume high-availability production system, and requires a strong background in computer science and web development with knowledge of the full software development life cycle. The position additionally requires an individual capable of forward thinking particularly with respect to performance and scaling requirements.

Our team is spread around the world and a successful candidate will work in close communication with the rest of the team, so good online communications skills are important. This also requires the developer to work flexible hours that accommodate other team members and production requirements, with at least half of the work time overlapping the Pacific Time zone regular working hours.

Adams 50 School District Honor Choir

Posted Sat, 2010-02-06 16:55 by matthew

My kiddo is part of the Adams 50 School District Honor Choir. This morning they had their first concert. If you enjoy listening to kids sing, I took a little video.

Drupal Basics: Insert Module

Posted Wed, 2010-01-20 23:01 by matthew

When I was working on the California Watch site, we needed an easy way to allow non-technical folks to add photos to the bodies of articles. There was a fair bit of effort put into setting up alternate solutions prior to settling on using quicksketch's fabulous Insert module.

A few housekeeping items.

  • You need cck 2.5
  • You need to have WYSIWYG setup
  • It helps to have FileField
  • and ImageField
  • and ImageCache
  • and of course the Insert Module itself

Unpack the module in your sites/all/modules directory (I like creating a contrib directory inside the modules directory so I can separate out various kinds of non-core modules.) Enable the module at admin/build/modules

I added a new field to my page content type by going here: admin/content/node-type/page/fields and added a field image_uploads

Examiner.com Community Developer Post

Posted Wed, 2010-01-13 17:02 by matthew

A few days ago I wrote about the Drupal 7 redesign of the Examiner.com website and that there were recruitment effort ongoing for front and back end developers. Thanks everybody that took the time to send in a resume.

The team is also working on a second important project in Drupal 6 that will be used to foster Examiner community and communication. It is hard to call a site that targets 10's of thousands of users as an Intranet, but that is kind of the way it is being built.

Vintage Digital LLC - Step 1 - A Blogging Platform

Posted Mon, 2010-01-04 13:40 by matthew

vindigscreenshotVintage Digital LLC needed a voice. It needed a place for the team members to talk about what we are up to, things we're working on, conferences we're attending, and things we're thinking about. You know the drill. Basically we wanted a place that we could blog together. The team is busy on different client work causing us to suffer from the classic Cobbler's Dilemma. We really needed a pair of shoes, even a modest pair.

We have launched a very simple blogging site for the time being. The intent will be to create a more robust and visually interesting site in the future. For the time being, this gives us a collective voice on the Web. In the near future, you should look out for an interesting article on Ubercart from John Fiala plus many more tidbits as the New Year unfolds.

California Watch Launches in Drupal

Posted Sun, 2010-01-03 23:19 by matthew

caliwatchThe last project that I worked on at pingVision, prior to becoming a free-agent, launched in the last couple of days. I'm thrilled that California Watch has joined the ranks of the Drupal community. The Center For Investigative Reporting is a fine non-profit that has been doing good work since 1977 engaging in in depth investigations on issues that concern Callifornians.

I had the pleasure of Web Producing the development of the California Watch site and also engaged in some light configuration of various modules including quicksketch's excellent Insert module. I hope I get the chance to write about that module in the near future. Both the teams on the pingVision side and on the California Watch side were a real pleasure to work with and for. It was a fun "swansong" project for me.