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Likemind.orl and Drupal June 19, 2008

Posted by Ryan in : Tech, Drupal, Events, Coffee, floridacreatives, Likemind.orl, Teaching, open source , 2 comments

In about 10 hours a group of likeminded folks will get together for good coffee and conversations with friends and strangers. We do this once a month at the Lake Eola Panera Bread.

Likemind.orl Likemind Orlando is part of a larger group of events which started in New York with two guys who were having good conversations online, and decided to move them to the coffee shop. Their friends in other cities liked the idea, and now, Likemind groups meet in more than 50 cities around the world on the same day every month.

Chris Scott will now be officiating over Likemind with me, since Alex left and got himself a house and a life on the East Coast (of Florida). Congrats and best of luck to Alex and Kathryn.

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Also coming up in the next few days is the 3rd installment of he Florida Drupal User’s Group. Myself and Mike Anello will be teaching classes on CCK and Views, respectively. You are all certainly invited to check out this event and ask tons of questions - we have left ourselves 4 hours to cover these topics, as each of them is kind of a big deal on its own.

You can get information and directions about how to get to the MindComet offices on groups.drupal.org/florida - the office is in Maitland.

Florida Drupal Group
Saturday, June 21st
1pm - 4pm
MindComet - Maitland

New Drupal Tutorials June 17, 2008

Posted by Ryan in : Site News, HowTo, Drupal, Teaching, open source, Programming , add a comment

Yes, I have yet another blog: this one is all about Drupal. Right now there are exactly 4 posts, but two of them came this week, so there may be an upturn in the posting over there. If anybody out there wants to write some tutorials, I’d be open to that.

The first howto was sort of “scratching an itch”. I got really tired of manually downloading, unzipping, uploading and activating modules when it was time to install a new Drupal site or update an existing one, so I came up with a workflow that gets it all done in record time: Using AWK to Download and Unpack Drupal Modules

The second one was a question delivered to me via chat: How to create a “related pages” block in Drupal 6, but we can’t find any useful modules and my personal recommendation, Panels, is not ported to version 6 yet. Therefore, with some Arguments magic, I bring you (now, new and improved, with 15 screenshots!): Using Views 2 and Drupal 6 to Create a Related Pages Block

In other Drupal news, the Florida Drupal User’s Group is having our 3rd meeting this weekend, June 21st, at the behest of MindComet in Maitland. I’ll be giving a talk about CCK (the Content Construction Kit), specifically using it with Drupal 6, and Mr. Mike Anello will be giving a talk on Views. The whole thing lasts about 4 hours - from 1 to 5 PM. The first two meetings were absolutely worth it, so I highly recommend coming down to check it out, if only for a shorter portion of the marathon.

The next stage for this Drupal Easy project is to build out some wiki pages that outline key Drupal concepts and relate them to each other, wiki-style. It’s something folks have been asking me for ever since the move to Bonnier and the “Drupal Expert” label, so I’m going to see if I can deliver. If that all goes well, there just might be a print version up for sale at LuLu.com as well. No promises, but that’s the plan.

P.S. Not that I want to brag, but Angie and Nate from Lullabot are coming to Orlando this week to train the staff at Bonnier in the use of Drupal. This is the only public mention I’ve made in quite some time, but I’m pretty damn excited to meet the gurus.

Orlando PHP Tonight: Drupal May 27, 2008

Posted by Ryan in : Tech, Orlando, Drupal, Events, floridacreatives, Teaching, Programming , 1 comment so far

At DeVry University near the Mall of Millenia, tonight at 7PM, I will be presenting at the 2nd ever Orlando PHP user group meeting. David and Derek asked me to come talk about Drupal after my peanut-gallery comments during last month’s framework shootout event.

Topics for discussion:

I will also be showing off some of the features we used to construct the OrlandoFringe.org, FloridaCreatives.com and Petentials.com websites.

For those curious to learn more Drupal, we have a whole slew of lectures planned into the fall through the Florida Drupal group on groups.drupal.org - our meetings are second? Saturdays of the month at the MindComet offices in Maitland, just off of 434.

In other PHP UG news, the Meetup.com PHP group, hosted first Thursday of the month at the Bonnier Corporate HQ in Winter Park Village (above Brio) will be coming up June 5th. 4 programmers representing Zend Framework, CodeIgniter, CakePHP and Symfony will be building a blog in 10 hours using the same database tables, then taking another 10 hours to extend the blog platform. Hopefully this will serve as a fun and informative hands-on introduction to the strengths and weaknesses of these 4 popular PHP frameworks.

P.S. See Eric’s Blog for a description of the Shootout rules.

May is a Kickass Month for Arts Events in Orlando May 15, 2008

Posted by Ryan in : Orlando, Music, Drupal, Events, Film, Fringe, floridacreatives, Likemind.orl, OrlandoScene, Arts, bloggingfringe , add a comment

Why is May such a great month for holding events? Sure, for our Northern friends, it means the end of bad weather, the opening of roller coaster parks, and a change in the scenery as the trees and flowers start to show their summer colors, but here in Florida, it’s more like the start of the summer’s hot, humid, rainy monotony, the arrival of the tourists, time-share owners, kids on summer vacation, religious zealots protesting Gay Days, and of course, bad drivers in rental cars.

The main reason I look forward to May every year is the arrival of the Orlando International Fringe Theatre Festival (Thursday the 15th through Monday the 26th). Every year, theatre companies, dancers, comedians, clowns, musicians, improv actors, writer/directors, solo acts and large ensembles, exuberant teenagers and road-hardened veterans alike grace Loch Haven Park with their creativity and energy, and Orlando gives every ounce of it (and more) back to them as many of the national and international acts begin their Canadian Fringe circuit, which brings them to a new city every two weeks. Show prices range from free (as in free software) to $10, and all shows require the one-time purchase of a $6 festival button - 100% of your ticket money goes to the artist. This is one of the only unjuried, uncensored events I know of in Orlando outside of a few open-mic nights, and even some of those are passing judgment on the performers (the other best example here is BarCamp).

18 months ago, I started gathering a group of my friends together every third Monday of the month for an event called Florida Creatives Happy Hour (Monday the 19th, 6PM @ Loch Haven Park). Now, those original 8 friends are hardly in the same room, but the group has grown to something resembling a small political party representing the creative professionals and hobbyists here in Central Florida (with a group getting started in Jacksonville as I write this). This month’s Florida Creatives falls during the Fringe Festival, so at 6PM on the 19th we will be descending upon their “Green Lawn of Fabulousness” to have a beer and some soul food and socialize. At 7:45, we will be attending American Squatter, starring Barry Smith, the creator of last year’s sell-out hit Jesus in Montana. Tickets are $10 plus your $6 Fringe button.

Despite the fact that Fringe starts on the same day every year, another festival seems to think they are better than the Fringe, by starting on the exact same day. Yes, the Florida Music Festival runs Thursday the 15th through Sunday the 18th this year, at pretty much every available venue downtown. In past years, you’ve been able to buy a one-time pass that gets you in to all the shows for the whole weekend, as well as nightly passes - buying a ticket to just one show will hardly do such an event justice. The festival also has a short film as well as an art contest, check these out too if you can find the time in between all of the other events happening at the exact same time.

What other events? How about that bizarre craft bazaar held semi-bi-anually at Stardust Video & Coffee, Grandma Party? (Saturday the 17th, 10AM to Sunset) For some reason they opted out of celebrating Earth Day in favor of overlapping with FMF and Fringe this year - the reason why is left as homework for the reader. Actually, if you find out, please try to explain this one to me too. At G-ma Party, you’ll not only find loads of handmade goods, like the cereal-and-eggs inspired work of the Breakfast Bunch, but trendy t-shirts, buckets of buttons, live music by some of Orlando’s best local bands (at least those who are friends with the festival organizers), a bal-looney community pool, and of course rummage piles and raffles.

Not as culturally significant, but still worth a mention, the second ever Florida Drupal User Group meeting will be held at the offices of MindComet in Maitland this Saturday (May 17th, 1PM). Check out the event and any follow-up at groups.drupal.org/florida.

Still more to come in this round-up of events, because I couldn’t write such a blog post without mentioning the Corazon Art and Music Festival being held at the Orlando Brewing Company (Sunday the 18th, starts 1PM, All Day). As I’m writing this I don’t have access to any listings, but I know tickets are $5, and I can give a serious recommendation, as this event is being thrown by Robert and Jonathan from Gamble Records, the folks who brought us the ELLA Music Festival in October. I expect you will see lots of singer-songwriter type acts, and you can trust Robert Johnson’s rolodex to bring you some great music (and art?).

There must be more happening during the next two weeks, but isn’t that enough? Of course, we can’t forget about this Friday (May 16th, 8AM-11AM) and the Likemind Orlando coffee meetup at the Lake Eola Panera Bread. This month there will be free coffee and hopefully a few free copies of a book called Murketing - I don’t have a lot of details about it, but I know the publishers of the book are sponsoring the coffee and snacks all over the US, so they get serious props.

If I’m missing anything here, please leave a shout-out, and I’ll try to include it in the next bulletin. Until next time, have a great May!

For Post’s Sake! April 23, 2008

Posted by Ryan in : Tech, News, Blogging, Orlando, Links, Drupal, Events, floridacreatives, Likemind.orl, OrlandoScene, Friends, Petentials, PopSci , add a comment

Feeling like I haven’t blogged in a while, so here are some things that have happened.

I saw (and played a bit at) an awesome marathon show by marc. with a c. on Saturday at Stardust. I used to be in the band, and I remain a fan. Marc just released his latest album, Linda Lovelace for President, on Amazon MP3, official plastic + DVD due out this summer.

We had a super-awesome Florida Creatives Happy Hour last night - HUGE thanks to all the first-timers, and of course our repeat offenders. If you haven’t seen or registered for the new site yet, surf on over and create a group, get organized, or otherwise try to toss some useful information in there.

Went to an inaugural Refresh Central Florida and Orlando PHP group (seperately). Refresh may or may not be the “tech association” that everyone has been hububbing about - there was talk of turning it into a “United Arts for Geeks”, supporting local groups and individuals. Actually, I was thinking of using United Arts as a channel to have a Florida Creatives professional grant that gets specified in all the same ways the regular UA grants go, just sponsored by us.

Things have been going gangbusters for pet dating site Petentials.com in the last few weeks our US ranking for Alexa is hovering around 100K (we’re more like 400K globally). We’re currently on the second page of Google for “Internet Pets”, but not too high for “pet dating”, hence the googlebombing you may or may not want to participate in… ha!

We’re planning a downtown Orlando photowalk as part of an episode for OrlandoScene.TV - this will be either May 10th or 11th, barring weather, number of RSVPs and other factors. Bring your SLR and your eyes. We’ll be doing interviews with photographers and linking to photosets and whatnot. The idea is to get a little co-promotion on, and get a hold of some much-needed production stills for Orlando Scene. In the AXIS Mag article, well, globe with a network cable… yikes.

Did I mention the kick-ass Drupal meetup we had last week? That was a fun time. I signed up to talk about Drupal Theming with Zen and… I think Views sometime this summer, but I know for certain that our next meetup will be held May 17th in Maitland. Check the Florida Drupal Group page for more info.

Ah, let’s not forget Likemind - we ARE still doing that - now we’re back at Panera Bread by Lake Eola. The next one of those should be May 16th. I have a picture of that somewhere… check the Ryan Price and the Media feed for those bonus Flickr pics you get in there from time to time.

I’m sure I’m missing lots and lots and lots. I have been SO busy lately.

BTW, over at Bonnier (the makers of PopSci) we’re hiring a MySQL Admin. If you are an experienced database administrator, or you have several years of experience with MySQL, send us an email.

P.S. I almost forgot! If you like the movie Clue, Improv Comedy, theatre, mystery, games, or if you’re my friend then you MUST MUST go and see “Murder We Wrote” over at Rollins College this weekend. YOU WILL THANK ME.

5 Essential Firefox Plugins for Web Developers March 13, 2008

Posted by Ryan in : Tech, Links, Drupal, Reviews, Browsers, Standards, Web Sites, PopSci, Programming , add a comment

Since I have a new job, I had to sit down at a fresh installation of Windows today and get my machine developer-ready. I already miss the Dock and Transmit and the Terminal, but I’ll deal.

One thing I noticed was my reflex-like action to go download 4 plugins no web developer should be without. They are, in no particular order:

  1. Measure It! How wide is that sidebar? Don’t pull out the DOM inspector or Firebug, just MeasureIt! I also like that once you drag the box it persists on the screen and you can drag it around to compare measurements.
  2. ColorZilla Sample any color in your browser - don’t open Photoshop, just hover over a color you like and voila! Also generates Photoshop pelletes, but I don’t open Photoshop, so I don’t use that feature.
  3. FireBug I can’t actually tell you how awesome this is. Being able to see the http response of every file that was loaded and how long each file took to load is already a killer app, not to mention dead-simple editing of any markup, CSS or JavaScript on your page, and being able to execute JavaScript on a live website without having to open any windows.
  4. Web Developer Toolbar My #1 used feature is the Resize menu. So many pages break my window from being exactly 1024 wide, and I also want to check things out at 800 wide as well. This just feeds the my OCD streak and lets me get on without worrying.
  5. Honorable mention: FasterFox This wasn’t on my list, but it is now, if only for the nifty little timer in the bottom-right-hand corner of the browser that tells you how long it took for the page to load.

These don’t include any of my plugins for personal productivity, web browsing, media sharing, or Search Engine Optimization. Instead, these are 5 plugins I think should come pre-installed on every developer’s machine.

Also, if you’re doing Drupal development, I hear very good things about this Theme Developer Module for Drupal 6. I’m not using 6 on any production sites yet, but I think it will prevent you from having to open up TextMate and do a “Find in Project”.

Leave your favorite development plugins, or other kinds below.

iPhone Web Clip Favicon Fun! January 28, 2008

Posted by Ryan in : Tech, Links, HowTo, Drupal, Browsers, Trends, Design, Web Sites, interface, Branding, phone, Petentials , 1 comment so far

If you have a web page of any kind - blog, business, social network, whatever - take 3 minutes out of your day and hook this up.

Everyone has a fun little 16×16 favicon to sit in the bookmarks section, links bar, or tabs of their favorite browser (Flock, Songbird and Firefox come to mind). This has been a long-running tradition with webmasters and SEO companies to give you that last bit of branding: the favicon!

Now with mobile devices and desktop apps (rich internet applications, too?) getting into the mix, there is a need for favicons larger than squint. Enter, the apple-touch-icon and associated rel tag, which is even easier to implement than a favicon. No special file formats, no special programs needed. Instead of a screenshot of the web page, you now have a degree of control over a bookmarker’s (webclipper’s? that sounds nice) touchscreen.

All you have to do is name the thing apple-touch-icon.png and throw it in your document root. According to the primary vivid, it should be 57×57px, but that’s actually the rendered size and not likely the size Apple uses internally. If you go to http://apple.com/apple-touch-icon.png, theirs is a nice round 129×129, which is roughly 2 1/4 times larger than 57×57. I figure Apple must know something we don’t, so I’ll play along.

And now, a handy diagram to show you what’s up:

Favicon

Favicon
16×16

Apple Touch Icon

Apple-Touch-Icon
57×57

Apple’s Official Icon

Apple
129×129

Once you get your image loaded, borrow the boss’ iPhone and add the webclip to your home page. There is also a preview screen that lets you know instantly if your icon is working (not pictured).

Apple iPhone Logo

The iPhone even added a nice glossy, buttony finish to the experience. Ahhhhhh…! You’ll also notice the edges of your icon may get trimmed (which caused the boss to make a face). This is, as far as I know, normal. If you don’t want the boss to make a face, center the icon and leave some extra space around. Using the Apple example may be a helpful guide.

Last but not least, you may be wondering: “Why do I have to name my icon something so specific, and why do I have to use the document root?” Looks like you don’t. Again our friends at vjarmy.com tell us that there is a rel-tag we can throw in the header if we want to place the icon elsewhere:

<link rel="apple-touch-icon" href="/path/to/my-cool-icon.png" />

If you don’t want to use a .PNG, you have smelly feet, but if you’re OK with being known as the smelly foot man, by all means, don’t use the best web picture format. I also had to dissuade my boss from experimenting with transparency in the .PNG, because I’m quite afraid of the results. Imagine a person with a naked woman on their iPhone desktop; now imagine your company’s logo displayed distastefully close to (or on top of) an unmentionable portion of said woman’s body - with a transparent background! Yikes. I would feel very sorry for Six Apart on that day…

I find the apple-touch-icon tag to be a scoche proprietary for my taste, but so are iTunes tags in podcast RSS feeds, so I guess we must needs put up with a little bullcrap every now and then.

I also heard someone recently complain about sites that have a default iPhone interface, and I mostly agree. They should put the interface on a subdomain so you can get at the regular functionality of the site, but I believe a truly useful service should be user-friendly through multiple interfaces, and traditional web apps are not always suited to touch screens.

If you have any questions (or if I forgot something) buy all means, let me know.

I am also hoping to make a small and fun Drupal module that encourages you to upload a 129×129 image to use as your site’s official webclip instead of a screenshot, so be on the lookout for that. Would you like to see other iPhone-friendly features integrated, like style sheet includes, javascripts, etc? I’d love to know.

Drupal Easy January 23, 2008

Posted by Ryan in : Tech, Site News, Career, Podcasts, HowTo, Drupal, Video, Liberatr, Web Sites, Facebook, Teaching, open source, Branding , add a comment

A while ago, Charlie and I were talking about how we could share our love of Drupal with the rest of the world. Our natural desires to create original content and extend the reach Cervo Systems helped us develop the idea for a website, a podcast and a community around making Drupal accessible to people with no knowledge of programming.

Welcome Drupal Easy to our family.

Today, I answered the first question on the site, about pathauto aliases and XML Sitemaps. I hope we keep getting some mid-level questions like this, but also some much simpler questions.

I have a screencast planned for the near future that compares Drupal against industry standards for security. This will hopefully be the sort of thing PHP haters and team leads will be able to use to understand that Drupal is awesome.

One day in the future, I’d also like to come up with a coherent set of lessons we can sell in a video book format.

I also have a Facebook page which currently has 8 random fans attached, and that’s actually how I got the first question.

I think this is going to be lots of fun, and maybe help us make a little cash once we get that part of it going. Who knows?

What a Week! August 31, 2007

Posted by Ryan in : Tech, Site News, Career, Blogging, Podcasts, Orlando, Cervo, Links, Drupal, Events, Coworking, Wikipedia, Trends, Earth, Liberatr, Web Sites, floridacreatives, Entrepreneurship, Teaching , add a comment

Exciting stuff, and I’m sure there’s more, like new podcasts with awesome interviews and awesome Internet TV too. There must be more getting tangled up in all the excitement. If you’d like to hear more about any of these endeavors, I’d be happy to chat. There are a dozen ways to contact me mentioned on my blog, so just pick one.

Dries Buytaert on Drupal | on the luck of seven August 27, 2007

Posted by Ryan in : Tech, Blogging, Podcasts, Links, Drupal, Video, Coworking, Trends, Standards, Earth, Travel, Web Sites, Charity , 1 comment so far

Noel Hidalgo is running around the world sleeping on couches, twittering, docu-vlogging and digging up a layer of the new open-source Earth bedrock. By the way, he’s accepting donations (I’ve donated), in the spirit of the movement, just to help him get where he’s going. His most recent video introduces us to the accidental general of a powerful army of Drupal fanboys - and I’m one of them. (link)


Video thumbnail. Click to play
Click To Play

Recoded: 26 July 2007

Locations: Antwerp, Belgium

Tags: drupal, open source, linus torvalds, angela byron, history of drupal, kernel trap, inspiration, empowerment

Music: ana (captain planet remix), vieux farka touré and captainplanet

About: after much wrangling and rescheduling, dries and i finally caught up to talk about the history of drupal, his inspiration, and most importantly the empowerment of community.

important links to note…

- drupal.org

- groups.drupal.org

- buytaert.net

- kernaltrap.org

- slashdot.com

- amnesty.org

- greenpeace.org

on a side note, thank you OpenCraft for giving me a home to edit this video!

also, i’d like to thank dries and karlijn on their new boy and omar for his hospitality in cairo.