For those of you whose first language is English rather than binary: Drupal is a software product called a Content Management System (CMS for short). It’s used to power dynamic web sites with features such as blogging, media integration and community participation. Digital Eskimo has been using Drupal for several years, and we’re proud to support Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) and its largely volunteer community. In terms of ethics and philosophy, Drupal is closely aligned with Digital Eskimo. We’ve launched several successful Drupal sites recently, including our “experiment full of experiments” live local.

Quick wrap of my favourite presentations this weekend:

• Liz Henry: Abandonment Issues. First talk of the conference, and in my opinion the best. Liz came out here all the way from the USA, to discuss with us the cold hard fact that Drupal sites need to be maintained, often for a very long time, and that developers often don’t stick around for terribly long at all to do so.
• Angie Byron (webchick): Drupal 7. D7’s mega-enthusiastic lead developer (especially visiting from Canada) gave us a terrific demo of the highlights of the upcoming new version, which is currently in alpha. Angie also invited us all round to her place last night for a hackfest, where I learned how to write about 2% of a core SimpleTest.
• Chris Burgess: doesn’t play nicely. Just when I thought there was nothing new to hear about Drupal module development gotchas, this talk (which rapidly expanded into a facilitated discussion) clearly summarised some issues that Drupal coders experience far too much, and talk about far too little.
• Giuseppe Maxia: Blaming the unknown. Database guru Giuseppe’s talk was more of a general coding talk than a Drupal-specific talk. His basic message hit home to everyone: “it’s always your fault”. We always blame first what we least understand. Honest, upfront, and very informative.

I also gave a quick lightning talk, in which I gave a demo of the Migrate module, which (of late) I’ve been working with extensively here at Digital Eskimo. I’ll be blogging in geekier detail about the conference on GreenAsh — I’ll post the link in the comments (below) when it’s written.

Related posts:

1. DrupalCon DC: reporting back

Two weeks ago, I was lucky enough to make it to DrupalCon DC (a.k.a. “DC/DC”). For me, the conference consisted of excessive geeking, excessive beer-drinking, and sleep deprivation.

Naturally, I expect nothing less from a web developer’s conference. DrupalCon DC was big, it was passionate, and it was jam-packed with high quality presentations.

I don’t want to overly repeat what I’ve already written elsewhere, so here’s a very quick summary of the conference highlights:

• Most popular presentation: Why I Hate Drupal
• I found most interesting: Staging and Deployment – A Panel Discussion
• Most super-cool evening party organiser: mortendk (a.k.a. “King of Denmark”)
• ASATU/hr (Average Single Attendee Twitter Updates per hour): 274

I gave a presentation last night, at the Sydney Drupal Users’ Group, reporting back on the nitty-gritty of the DC/DC highlights (link is to my slides). I also blogged in detail about the staging and deployment sessions that I attended.

Related posts:

1. Jeremy goes to DrupalSouth Wellington

Of course, Digital Eskimo is very big on sharing. Everything from our work culture to our strategy planning is based on encouraging collaboration from our employees, our clients, and last—but certainly not least—our users. Even beyond this, however, the whole idea of sharing is actually central to our business model because (for instance) we proudly use free and open source software. In fact, most companies use free software in one capacity or another.

Free and open source software is great because it provides the building blocks of world-class products for none of the cost…but this isn’t going to be one of those posts that preaches about the philosophies of FLOSS. Instead, I’d like to direct your attention to two small utilities I developed in-house that I’m happy to say are now available for public use.

These are the beginnings of our code contributions back to the free software ecosystem …

First, chkrelease is a filesystem verification utility that checks to see if the right files and folders exist on a server based on a certain release of source code. This turns out to be extremely useful in verifying that every thing’s working properly on any given machine. Second, git-archive-all is a utility that creates release packages of source code (for possible use with chkrelease later) from a git repository, our source code management tool of choice; it’s useful because it gracefully handles git repositories with submodules.

While seemingly minor, I’m actually very excited about making these internal tools available to the public. In the Internet business, much more of our work is actually open source than many people realize. This is because the ability to “view source” equals open source. That’s just one reason why we hold ourselves to a higher standard and, of course, holding ourselves to a higher standard is why we wanted to make chkrelease and git-archive-all open source in the first place.

So I guess all I wanted to say was that, for us, sharing the love comes in many shapes and sizes.

Related posts:

1. Digital Eskimo shares the love …

Colophon is a word not often heard outside of conversations between typography nerds. But it’s a word worth adding to the web nerd’s vocabulary.

A colophon is a brief description on the inside cover of a book that credits the designer, typographer and printer for their work and identifies the typefaces, papers and printing and binding methods used in the book’s creation. Colophons have been popular since the renaissance and remain common in printed material (most notably in design books, which feature comprehensive colophons, some of them ludicrously detailed).

Website and blog colophons, where they actually exist, are rarely more than a copyright notice and a handful of icons that link to html and css validators at the bottom of each page. Rather than clutter a site with icons that for most users have no meaning, a dedicated colophon page could:

• credit designers, coders, hosts and other contributors (with contact details and links to their websites)
• demonstrate the site’s accessibility and compliance with web standards.
• demonstrate the site’s accessibility and compliance with web standards.
• Give further information regarding copyright and attribution (it may be the case that copyright details are required on all pages, but attribution for icons, photography or other intellectual property may appear on the colophon page).

If colophons were to become standardised features of websites, the design and web communities could more easily share their knowledge, and admirers could more easily contact the designers and coders who produce them.

Examples of Colophons:

• Wittenburg University Library’s colophon
  
• 1976design’s colophon
• Vinny Carpenter’s colophon
• Anti-Pixel’s colophon

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