Two days ago it was announced that pingVision has become an Acquia Platinum Partner.

I've heard Acquia described thusly as Redhat is to Linux, Acquia is to Drupal. Acquia offers commercially supported Drupal, "providing products, services, and technical support for the open source Drupal social publishing system."¹

The pingVision site has re-launched with a new look and a brand new version of Drupal. Laura mentioned that there has been almost a year of architecture invested in the site. Almost to the day today, I was hired by pingVision and one of the first things we were doing was working on brainstorming the architecture.

At Drupalcon Boston, Kevin Bridges (of pingVision) and John Mahoney (of Popular Science) were interviewed after plenary was completed and pingVison's work on the Popular Science site was recognized. It was a short discussion on the collaboration between pingVision and Popsci in the Drupal development of the Popular Science site. The interview was posted on the Sun Media Cast site.

Want to take a listen?

I compared it to winning the Oscar for Best Picture. Yesterday, pingVision won the top Drupalcon Boston award for Drupal Web Development for its work on the Popular Science migration from Vignette 7 to Drupal. Both Megan Miller and John Mahoney are to be congratulated. They worked hard with the pingVision staff to ensure the project went smoothly.

Today, the switch was flipped. Popular Science is now officially launched as a Drupal site. Three weeks ago, I wrote a bit about the process the team went through to develop the site and today it launched with imported content from Vignette 7 (a proprietary CMS) and Typepad. It involved a huge effort on the part of pingVision and the Popular Science team and was a model for collaborations between developers and clients.

On Friday night I made up my mind that I was indeed going to attend Drupalcon in Spain next week. I have been thinking long and hard about it.

• It is expensive--but my employer is offsetting costs making the trip possible. Thanks pingVision!
• I just got back from over two weeks in the UK a short while ago.
• We have a ton going on at work right now.

On the other hand

• The registrant list reflects some of the best talent in the Drupal community.
• The program track looks very strong.
• It is in Barcelona!

So, Friday night I bought my plane tickets. On Saturday I found a flat for the Boulder pingVision attendees to hang our hats in. On Sunday I paid for my registration and worked out the metro.

Greg Knaddison took this little video of part of our crew prior to a new staff photo being shot.

There are often misconceptions behind open source. There is the idea that if you don't shell out big bucks for software, that it can't be any good.

This is what I hear...

1. Open source is garbage, there isn't a company to back it up
2. Open source is hard to load onto your computer
3. Open source can make your computer crash or worse

Choose any one of the three and it could be correct, however the well built open source software is often better quality than the commercial counterpart and it is certainly less expensive.

For example, if you compare the feature set of Open Office to Microsoft Office Suite, you may be surprised at how well they compare. At my place of work, only about a third of the staff uses the Office suite. Most use Office instead. Part of this, certainly, has to do with working at a very geeky place, but part of it has to do with thriftiness.

I find myself reaching for my headset to talk to designers and programmers.  It became a preset when I was working at WESTAF.

It used to be that I would talk on a daily basis with folks from BrownRice Internet about a project via Skype in places ranging from New York to New Mexico to Oregon to Colorado.

Moving from a company that outsourced most of its programming to a company that has talent in house has changed my needs for Skype. 

Now I talk with developers and designers who are six steps away from my desk...and yet, I still find myself using Skype's IM a lot even with that proximity. Often a three word IM is more efficient than a poking one's head around the corner--I just haven't used the voice part of it since I started at pingVision.

Tomorrow is my first day with pingVision. I am quite excited by the move and think I'll get/learn a lot from the new position. This has had me reflecting on my time at WESTAF. During my time there, I built or helped build:

• www.artjob.org
• www.artistsregister.com
• www.performingartsregister.com (retired)
• www.writersregister.com (retired)
• CultureGrants Online (twenty granting makers using systems)
• www.zapplication.org (now used by 100 different arts festivals)
• www.callforentry.org
• www.denverculturefeed.org

I have enjoyed delving deeply into Web 2.0 which brought me to Drupal. I have given hundreds presentations/talks/workshops.