Drupal

Open source <acronym title="content management system">CMS</acronym> powered by PHP and MySQL.

Attending Writing Open Source June 12th to 14th

In a week, I will attend the Writing Open Source conference in Owen Sound, Ontario. I'm excited to meet some of my colleagues in the field of open source documentation, having written the bulk of the support materials for Bryght, the Drupal-powered hosted service. I'm particularly interested in meeting those working to document open source tools other than Drupal, to gain some perspective on what's out there and what's needed.

Writing documentation was my first task at Bryght back in 2004. I recall spending part of that Christmas break furiously jotting down the important steps to creating dynamic and community websites. This included checklists, instructions and descriptions of module settings and how people could take advantage of them. The initial push of documentation made the subsequent job of supporting customers easy: instead of each time having to explain how to do something, I quickly pointed to the documentation, either through a link or a copy & paste. Along the way I even heard from non-customers thanking me for the handy references. After the second time someone asked we documented the answer. (We even wrote documentation after the first time someone asked a question.) Sometimes it didn't work, and sometimes the documentation wasn't all that great or hard to find. We allowed comments and opened the forums and listened to feedback when what we wrote didn't make a whole lot of sense. That's the experience I'd like to share with the conference, and I'd like to hear of others' experiences in making complex software more understandable.

After the weekend conference, I'll spend a couple of full days in Toronto proper, getting some much needed distance from Vancouver. I'd like to meet with some of the Toronto Drupal heads, and others I know (but haven't met) from other online communities I'm part of. Sadly, my favourite baseball squadron, the Toronto Blue Jays, play on the road in late June. Surely a local pub will have the games in HD?

The themes at Writing Open Source have a lot in common with two sessions I attended at FSOSS (the Free and Open Source Symposium) in 2006. I wrote two well-received pieces about the symposium, both notes on sessions at the conference:

(Audio and video for both presentations are available at http://fsoss.senecac.on.ca/2006/recordings/)

I'm looking forward to the sessions in Owen Sound next week, and to sharing what I learn there!

Cherry Blossom Theme 1.0 Released

Screenshot of the Cherry Blossom theme for Drupal

More than 5 years ago now, I sat down with Raincity Studios' Mark Yuasa to discuss the redesign of this blog, Just a Gwai Lo. It was springtime in Vancouver, and the cherry blossom trees around the lower mainland were blooming, so I suggested that as the visual theme for the blog. Then powered by WordPress, Mark delivered two designs in a few weeks and a few months after choosing the overwhelmingly pink comp, I switched to Drupal, bringing the theme along with me.

It's now time to release the theme to the general public. If you visit the Cherry Blossom theme project page on Drupal.org, you can install a Drupal 6-compatible version of the theme. I put up a demonstration site so that you can see the theme in action, as I've long moved onto another theme (currently the Deco theme). One known issue that I'd like help with is an alignment problem with Internet Explorer 6, after fixing I'll release a 1.1 version.

Mobile Theme 1.0 Released

If we are to believe in timestamps, on October 7th, 2006, I took over maintainership of the Mobile theme for the Drupal CMS. At the time there was no iPhone, and stripped down graphics-free versions of websites made it easier for people with small screens on their phones to get to the information quickly. Now, relatively larger screens coupled with effectively unlimited data plans make websites more consumable by tiny devices. My maintainership of the theme continues unabated, as today I (finally) released official 1.0 versions for Drupal 5 and Drupal 6, and dropped official support for the 4.7 version. m.justagwailo.com serves as the Mobile theme's demonstration site. Thanks to Bèr Kessels for originally writing the theme and webschuur.com for its original sponsorship.

A note about version numbers: when the new system for CVS tagging came out way back when, somehow it occurred to me that "DRUPAL-6-4" was the correct version number to assign to a developmental release. What that meant in practices was the version number for the theme ended up as "4.x". Looking at the usage statistics, at this writing, the overwhelming majority of sites that have deployed the Mobile theme use that developmental release. It is my hope that they all move to the 1.x branch, either developmental or official, as that's where all development will happen from now on.

As with any software, there are <a href='http://drupal.org/project/issues/mobile?categories=All">feature requests and bug reports, and I encourage anybody using the theme to give me feedback there. The theme is not to be confused with the Mobile Theme module, which cleverly detects whether a browser is a mobile device and serves up a "mobile" theme for that device. I have the combination of the Mobile Theme module and one of two iPhone-friendly themes at PDXphiles, my Portland-lovers blog.

The front-end database is powered by Drupal. Includes a video demonstration.

Changes

Unless the list is crazy long, like it can be for operating systems, I realized that I read software changelogs pretty closely. This site now has one, with an RSS feed. It will be a sort of commit message, listing additions and changes worth mentioning about the live site. (Can somebody remind me later on to tell you how I setup my staging environment? Yes, for a personal blog.) It will not include updates to Drupal modules run on the site unless it makes a dramatic difference. The changelog will include changes to layout or the underlying Drupal theme and addition of content sections. The first entry? That I created a changelog in the first place. You can find out which version of Drupal I'm running via the usual open secret method, though I will make a note of it when I do upgrade.

Just an iPhone

If you really must know, yes, I'm getting an iPhone. It was not a no-brainer until very recently, when Rogers/Fido offered a promotional 6 GB plan for $30 on top of a voice plan. Still not a no-brainer, because after some speculation, about whether my plan was eligible for the most coveted of mobile computing platforms, I called Fido today to find out if I'm eligible for that which must be worshiped and/or bitched about. The plan has nationwide Fido-to-Fido calling, necessary for calling the girl while we had our long distance relationship, my being in Vancouver and her being in Toronto; unlimited weekends and evenings; something called "Can. ID" (can someone enlighten me as to what that does?); and that's it for exactly 30 dollars a month. That last point is important because it qualifies me for the $249 8 GB iPhone, not the $199 8 GB iPhone, which comes with a plan of more than 30 dollars a month.

Added to my current plan are Caller ID and 50 monthly text messages. No voicemail for quite some time now: it was always quicker for me to call the person back and ask them what they were calling about then to listen to the message, find a pen to write down the number (which requires rewinding not being as fast a write as people are talkers) and forget to delete the message, then listen to my voicemail later on wondering if it was a new message or not. Visual Voicemail looks interesting, but I don't get enough phone calls to warrant paying for it. Forgetting to ask the helpful French-accented Fido representative if I could keep the add on features, I still assume the answer is yes.

Frequently Asked Questions

What am I going to do with the iPhone?

Re-document my world, using Drupal of course, since the phone has GPS and there are going to be all kinds of cool applications on it. (Drupal + Location is in currently in a state of flux and I already have some geolocation stuff happening on this site and am planning more.) And listen to music and watch videos. Not making or receiving many phone calls, I don't really care all that much about the phone part of the iPhone.

Could I have bought an unlocked N95 at a cool $600 from an unknown Craigslist posting?

Absolutely. The 3-year contract the Rogers/Fido alliance goes in the "cost" column, and at $400 maximum to exit and not anticipating a move outside Canada in the next 3 years, that's something I can handle. The N95 is nice, but I can't stand the complete lack of usability on the Series 60 operating system. Everything's a pain. Everything on the iPhone looks so smooth.

When am I getting it?

Not today, and likely not this weekend. I'll wait until next week when the rush dies down a little bit. People are saying that stock is low today as well.

Does that mean you, dear reader, should get an iPhone too?

You don't have to get an iPhone.

What about your existing iPod mini, GlobalSat DG-100 GPS logger and Nokia N70 cell phone?

I never got Internet sharing between a Series 60 phone (like my Nokia N70) working with my Mac, and now I don't have to! The iPod, GPS unit and N70 will get new lives for people that don't have an iPhone. Since I don't have the latter yet, it'll be a few months before I give them away.

How to use Drush (command line Drupal) locally with on a Mac
For those of us who spend half the day on the command line and the other half working with Drupal. I have this setup now on my server.
Embed Quicktime gives you code to create clickable thumbnails which lead to videos
With a WordPress plugin and Drupal module.

Omnibus: Vancouver Blogger Meetup, Northern Voice, and Shared Items

Jan has the recap, and Raul liveblogged it: on Wednesday I attended the Vancouver Blogger meetup and met with some people who actually read this blog. Jan, among others, encouraged me to keep writing this thing, not to worry about quality too much. There are times when I'm in "flow", and I finally realized that one of those times is after having read offline materials for about an hour. Yet again, the solution is to read more books!

At the meetup, I continued to work through what I thought about citizen journalism. NowPublic has a great concept for a site, but I've been following the 'vancouver' tag for over a year and have yet to find a story they've broken or led with in reporting. The overwhelming majority of stories are conspiracy theories or re-posts of stories from established media. For one very recent story I had hopes for (happening on a college campus, so you know there's going to be lots of intelligent, web savvy energetic young folk with cell phones and cameras), a NowPublic user kept me up to date with the lockdown of a building at the University of British Columbia. I heard about it first from Phillip Jeffrey's Twitter stream. The NowPublic story fueled rumours that the police were responding to someone with a gun. Any confirmation on that, two days later? There's also the usual social media triumphalism in the comments, but don't we hate it when CBC and CTV and CKNW claim they had the "exclusive"?

I met lots of people I had only heard about, and some I hadn't.


I'm speaking in a few weeks at the Northern Voice blogging conference, 2008 edition. About blogging. Yes, the very subject I once declared I had lost enthusiasm for. You'll see me at 10:45 AM on the Friday, during the Internet Boot Camp. That's later in the day than I thought it would be, happily so. I'm looking very much forward to Dave Olson's "Fuck Stats Make Art" presentation and Stephanie Vacher's "Apparatus for the Future" talk. Otherwise I will try the conference lobby provocateur role this year, talking with as many people that I've only heard about as possible.


http://justagwailo.com/shared/feed is the link to my "shared items" feed. It will never change (the one to my Google Reader account might). It reflects only what I find interesting, without comment, and includes not only my Google Reader shared items, but also my YouTube 'favorite' videos, my Flickr 'favorite' photos, and my Digg "diggs". There are individual feeds for each (there is no official RSS feed for my MetaFilter 'favorites' sadly: if there was, I'd include those too), so I feed them through the Drupal aggregator here on justagwailo.com. To track how many subscribers there are to it, I then use FeedBurner. http://justagwailo.com/shared is the "HTML" version of this, but I don't like the idea of syndicating other people's content on my site, so it just looks like they're big links. There's something to be said about aggregating decentralized low-threshold sharing mechanisms. I'm not the person to say it, at least not yet.

On This Day module at Drupal.org
I took some "community time" at work and published my module to the Drupal contributions repository. It shows posts made on this day for however many years back you want. Still needs work, but now there's a bug report and feature request tracker for it.

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