After seeing her work for a while, I finally got to meet Lauren Roth at the Drinks and Drupal party I hosted in May. I took the opportunity to ask her how one becomes a Drupal design ninja. Lauren was gracious enough to share the knowledge.
Lynn Bender: You first started with Drupal after seeing a presentation as SXSW, yes?
Lauren Roth: SXSW Interactive is a fantastic way to come upon new technologies and 2006’s was no exception. As someone with a writing background, I could understand having enthusiasm for a content management system, but the more I found out about Drupal the more I wanted to use it myself. It is now my primary development platform.
Lynn Bender: In the last year, I’ve noticed that many folks who’ve been designing sites in WordPress are starting to look at Drupal. I’m guessing that you’ve noticed this too.
Lauren Roth: WordPress is the grilled cheese sandwich to Drupal’s double-stacked club sandwich. Both have bread and cheese, but Drupal comes with lots of extra delicious parts. Both are written in PHP, use template files and CSS, and separate presentation from site logic.
Lynn Bender: Nevertheless, a common complaint I heard is that Drupal is extremely difficult to design for. What are the things that people tend to have problems with when beginning to design themes for Drupal?
The date is approaching, and we’re ready to kick Linux Against Poverty into high gear.
For our friends in other cities, we’ve made a few changes. The initial Linux Against Poverty event will be in Austin only. Although I’ve been hosting events for almost 20 years, and Ken and the Helios team has been averaging 350 donated computers per year, this is the first time we’ve attempted a large scale install fest. We will no doubt encounter snags. When problems arise, we’d like to give them our full attention. In addition, we would like be able to share with everyone how we overcome these problems — so that no one else has to stumble through them.
Once we get through the initial Austin event, we can document it, and provide folks with a blueprint of how to organize their own Linux Against Poverty — from start to finish.
Finally, by not having simultaneous events all the same day, we will be available to provide assistance to our friends in other cities, because we won’t be busy hosting our own event.
So, first Austin, then your town!
The Austin event is scheduled for Saturday, August 1st. The tentative location is Union Park.
If you want to donate computers for Linux Against Poverty, the Helios team has two publicly accessible dropoff points. If neither are convenient,
send an email to Ken Starks at helios@fixedbylinux.com
If you want to volunteer to install linux on computers,
send an email to Tom King at kingttx@tomslinux.homelinux.org
If you are interested in sponsorship opportunites,
send an email to Lynn Bender at linearb@gmail.com
I’ve had a fascination with all manner of data analysis since my days as a bookstore owner. So when I first heard news of a local web analytics group, I had more than a little interest. I asked Jennifer White, the chief instigator of Web Analytics Wednesdays Austin, to give me a little background on the group.
Lynn Bender:: Jennifer, tell me about the group.
Jennifer White: Web Analytics Wednesday is the world’s only social networking event for web analytics professionals. Eric T. Peterson, an author and a global web analytics community leader, founded Web Analytics Wednesday as a global effort to put “faces with names” and to get local members of the web analytics community networking. I started the Austin group in 2 years ago in July.
The local group focuses mainly on web analytics, but we also talk about analytics for other media such as Twitter or search, but those tie back to web analytics. For example, how does Twitter influence bounce rate (which is when a visitor comes to only one of your web pages and leaves the site immediately)?
Lynn Bender:: What about non web data — like email? Are e-mail response rates, direct mail campaign data, sales and lead information also part of web analytics?
<understatement>Four Kitchens is one of the premier Drupal consulting firms</understatement>. Fortunately, they call Austin home. In the last few months, I’ve had the opportunity to work with and get to know them. Aaron Stanush, one of Four Kitchen’s co-founders, is also a member of the Drupal.org Redesign Team. I recently coerced him into meeting me for coffee and talking about Drupal.
Lynn Bender: Following your trip to Paris to work on the upgrade and redesign of the Drupal.org, you took the lead on the redesign effort. That’s a massive site. How is the process going?
Aaron Stanush: One of the things that really helped focus the redesign effort was that we had an actual style guide to work off of. The Drupal Association hired Mark Boulton Design to rebrand the Drupal product as well as the drupal.org website. Even with a rich style guide, it’s a massive site and it takes awhile for the community to decide the best way to re-engineer the content/layout or to remove elements all together.
Last weeks Drinks and Drupal party, co-hosted by GeekAustin and Four Kitchens was a whole lot of fun. Expect more in the future. I promise I’ll try to keep the Drupal posts to one a week. This post doesn’t count toward that.
The Austin.Javascript LinkedIn group is continuing to grow. Kyle Simpson and Joe McCann are bringing in a range of speakers for the monthly meetings. If you want to get up to speed on the latest Javascript libraries, this is the group to meet.
The Agile Austin group is hosting Ask an Expert tomorrow at Mangia Pizza. Tomorrow’s host will be Walter Bodwell, the CEO of Planigle. Planigle provides consulting, training and tools to help teams adopt and get the most out of agile development. To keep abreast of Agile Austin events — and there are many — join the Agile Austin Yahoo Group
If your looking for something closer to the Discovery Channel with beer, check out Nerd Nite Austin. To accommodate the crowd, they’ve moved the event to Buffalo Billiards. Att tomorrow’s event, Dr. Jonas Moses will demonstrate how bio-medical innovation happens (or doesn’t) in his presentation “The Accidental Innovator”, JC Dwyer will explain how arcane politics become modern social policy in “From the Black Plague to the Bread Line”, and Philip Wheat will ponder what happens when everything around you gets smart in “Bits & Atoms - the rise of Smart Environments.” — with beer.
I’m happy to announce that David Timothy Strauss, of Four Kitchens, will be speaking on the following topic at the Drinks and Drupal Party:
Quick and maintainable site-building for charities and non-profits using Drupal and CiviCRM
We’ve reserved our home base, Union Park Austin, for Wednesday, May 20. We’ll have drinks out front and presentations in back. We’ve been sending personal invites to Drupalistas throughout Texas. So, if you have any unanswered Drupal questions, this will be the place to find the answers.
-Lynn
Drinks and Drupal
Co-hosted by Four Kitchens and GeekAustin
Date: Wednesday, May 20, 2009
Time: 6:30pm - 10:30pm
Location: Union Park Austin
Street: 612 W Sixth St. Austin, Texas 78701
RSVP on Facebook
The Drupal Texas LinkedIn group:
http://www.linkedin.com/groups?gid=1812268
The Austin Drupal Users facebook group:
http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=92094071680
We just wrapped up the MySQL Associate Certification Prep a few weeks ago. It was a sharp bunch of folks, and a lot of fun.
Below are the upcoming classes which will be scheduled over the next 4 months.
1) Introduction to Drupal - This is a beginning level class. It will begin around the end of the May, and will meet downtown each week for 8 weeks. The curriculum will be based on Jeff Robbins’ book - Using Drupal.
2) Intermediate topics in SQL - This is a four session class covering intermediate to complicated joins, multi-level subqueries, and related mid-level topics.
3) The Apache Config File - Special Topics - This is a one session class focusing on three issues which frequently trip up webmasters: virtual hosts, aliases, and mod-rewrite.
To reserve a place in any of the above classes, send a note to linearb@gmail.com
The classes below are tentatively scheduled for the fall:
4) Beginning CSS — This is an 8 session class
5) MySQL Developer Certification Prep
6) Basic Unix/Linux for DBAs
We have had offers from instructors to teach beginning C/C++ and Java classes. If you are interested in these let us know. If there is sufficient interest, we’ll arrange a time and location. We had originally planned to host an Introduction to PL/SQL class and a MySQL Administrator Certification Prep class. We may do these in 2010.
We plan to open source the course materials and put them up on GeekAustin for folks to download. However, we are still converting the course notes into useful documentation.
If you have any questions regarding the classes, send a note to linearb@gmail.com
-Lynn Bender
GeekAustin
When the word got out that the City of Austin was considering a 750K contract with an out of state firm to rebuild the city website, there was outrage, heated discussion, facebook groups, and subsequent news stories — which ultimately caused the council to postpone it’s decision.
Most people were angry that the city was using an out of state contractor. Yet, few people remarked that the city had not, in any broad public fashion, asked the citizens what they wanted in a website.
whurley, long-time open source advocate, used this as an opportunity to test his recent ideas on crowdsourcing and open collaboration, and quietly began work on a platform to bring the process out into the open.
Last Friday, Stacey Higginbotham of GigaOM let the cat out of the bag. However, she didn’t say where the bag was. So, here it is:
From the title page:
OpenAustin is a community-based effort to crowdsource the requirements and development for the new City of Austin web site using local software developers, marketing experts, and graphic designers that have been displaced from their jobs due to the current economic downturn. This will produce a superior web site for the citizens of Austin at a fraction of the cost of the city’s lowest bid.
Seems like a pretty clear mission statement.
Nevertheless, I suspected more was afoot, so I called whurley to get more details:
GeekAustin: Whurley, it’s not like you gave the city any choice. You’ve given the folks a platform to discuss what they want in a city website, and how they want it implemented. How do you recommend that the city respond and participate in OpenAustin?
whurley: That’s an excellent question. This isn’t an anti-city government movement. It is a community movement based on some very simple principles. One of these is that it’s simply not right to design web-based application services or content without involving the very people who are not only using it on a daily basis, but are also your source of funding. This doesn’t mean that we intend on excluding the city or anyone else from the process. In fact it’s quite the contrary. I’m hoping that this will if nothing else helped reduce the over $700,000 that was bid byas much as possible. In a perfect world the city would take full advantage of this to not only reduce their research and development costs but to reinvest in the local community at the same time; something I think we all can agree would be good for Austin overall.
GeekAustin: You and I have been in many meetings where the discussion goes on endlessly, and the the decision finally comes when someone with a strong arm says: “This is how we are going to do it.” Is http://openaustin.org/ merely a massive RFP, or do you envision it as a place where decisions can be made.
whurley: The website will do wonders for collecting requirements. Still, we’ll have to actually relevance rank each of the recommendations and then provide a simple analysis of time, scope, and cost for the overall feature set. This is something that many are questioning from a feasibility standpoint. Nothing could be further from the truth. In fact when managed properly this type of community involvement can produce returns far in excess of what’s invested while making both the city and the citizens happy at the same time.
In regard to decisions being made, that is something that is still to be foreseen. Again this is no affront to the city. This is a large group of people, talented people, who are stepping up to try to bring a resolution forward to a situation that has turned much of the tech community on its ear. This shouldn’t be seen as something we’re doing “for” the city, but rather something we’re doing “with” the city. After all, what is a city that is not made up of its citizens?
GeekAustin: I’m surprised that you didn’t use an open source solution, like Drupal, for OpenAustin. Why did you use IdeaScale?
whurley: Well, there was a small issue of timing and scale. Building a custom solution would’ve taken days or weeks, and not be the minutes and hours that openAustin.org was built in. For the actual website, I strongly recommend and support the city using an open-source solution. It is my understanding that they were looking at using Plone. While that’s not a bad solution, I do think something like Drupal might be a little more well-suited to community-based effort because of the large existing base of Drupal developers we have in Austin. At the end of the day though, this is my choice. We all have a say in the investment the city is going to make in the website that will not only represent us, but provide us with basic access to city services.
GeekAustin: What will be the key to everyone being successful in this project?
whurley: That’s simple, everyone involved from an individual citizen to the
city’s leadership needs to understand a couple of key points:
1) There is a difference between control, and influence.
2) This is not about the me, it’s about the we.
3) There is really no limit to what we can achieve if we truly are
open in working together on this effort.
GeekAustin: While I have you on the record, I have a few more questions. Assume that, unlike Stacy Higginbotham, I won’t tell anyone. Which of your upcoming projects can you tell me about?
whurley: (laughs). First off I think Stacy did me a huge favor in not only publishing about the effort but bringing up some very legitimate questions; which by the way have been added for open discussion on our website. Now, while I always have a number of projects going to bounce this back to you since I believe we have a little party going on on the 20th. Perhaps you should tell your readers about that and the Linux Against Poverty effort we’re working on?
GeekAustin: You just did. Besides, I’m asking the questions here.
GeekAustin: Although some of the folks downtown might think otherwise, OpenAustin doesn’t seem like the kind of thing an evil genius would do. Are you thinking of taking a new moniker?
whurley: Absolutely not. Everything I do in my professional and personal life has always been very counter intuitive to most people. So I see no reason why should change of my style midstream.
GeekAustin: Can I tell people about that other project?
whurley:
It’s Drupal month at GeekAustin, and Mopac University is in session.
To gear up for the GeekAustin Drupal Party in May, I’ve been listening to the Lullabot podcasts. For over 3 years now, Jeff Robbins, author of the O’Reilly Using Drupal book, has been hosting a series of podcasts on everything Drupal. This is high quality and informative stuff. If you’re just starting out, two of the early podcasts, Intro to Drupal Part 1, and Intro to Drupal Part 2, are a great introduction to the vocabulary– although the framework has changed a bit since the recording.
Lullabot produces the Drupal Podcast, Drupal Voices, and well as videocasts.
Drupal Voices is a series of short interviews with luminaries in the Drupalverse. The series kicks off with an interview with Jeff Eaton on the CMS Showdown panel at SXSW. The second interview is on theming — conducted with Colleen Carroll during SXSW ‘09 as well. Several of the interviews cover Drupal and the Semantic Web (numbers 17, 18, and 19). The most recent interview is with Larry Garfield on the new database layer in Drupal 7.
However, the real meat is the Lullabot Drupal Podcast. There are about 70 so far. They run from 30 mins to a hour in length. Listening to these is a great way to get a blow by blow history of the development of Drupal from 4.6 to the imminent release of 7.0. I burned the whole series to CD and should get through them — by the time of the party.
See you on Mopac!
Ever since we announced the Introduction to Drupal workshop as part of the GeekAustin Free Classes, we’ve been getting emails asking: “So what’s the big deal with Drupal?“, “Why should I use Drupal instead of Word Press“, “Isn’t Drupal really hard?“, and the occasion comment from some moron in Canada asking: “Why don’t you use Plone?”
Sounds like an excuse for a party? Yes!
We’ve reserved our home base, Union Park Austin, for Wednesday, May 20. We’ll have drinks out front and panels in back. Panels? Yep. We’ll be bringing in local experts to discuss and debate topics such as: “Why should I use Drupal instead of Wordpress?”, “Isn’t theming hard with Drupal?”, and “Why would the City of Austin use Plone instead of Drupal?”. Ok, well maybe not the last panel.
I’ve been sending personal invites to every Austin Drupal user I know, as well as quite a few throughout Texas. So, if you have any unanswered Drupal questions, drop by.
-Lynn
What’s the deal with Drupal? (an evening of Drinks and Drupal)
Date: Wednesday, May 20, 2009
Time: 6:30pm - 10:30pm
Location: Union Park Austin
Street: 612 W Sixth St. Austin, Texas 78701
RSVP on Facebook
The Drupal Texas LinkedIn group:
http://www.linkedin.com/groups?gid=1812268
The Austin Drupal Users facebook group:
http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=92094071680
Daniel and I already have a pretty full schedule for the spring GeekAustin free classes. However, following the kerfuffle surrounding the City of Austin’s website design, quite a few folks came to us asking if there were any local resources for learning Drupal. There is at least one Austin Drupal user group, but it’s members are mostly folks who already have some facility with Drupal.
So, following some conversations with those who expressed interest, we have decided to host a (free) Introduction to Drupal workshop. This group will be halfway between a class and a study group. The group will meet once a week for 8 weeks. We will start from the very beginning — installing Drupal on a Linux machine. Over the following weeks we will cover several mini projects including: setting up a job board, an event calendar, and a wiki. We will also cover the basics of theming. We will have guest speakers at several of the classes.
The two books from which we will draw material for the class are: 1) Using Drupal, by Jeff Robbins, and 2) Pro Drupal Development, by John K. VanDyk. If you don’t already have a Linux-based computer, we are making arrangements with local computer shops to supply them for about 50-65 dollars.
Tentatively, the first session is set for the last week of May. For more details, or to reserve a space, send a note to linearb@gmail.com.
Let’s make Austin a Drupal town! - Lynn
Austin Drupal users Facebook group
Normally I don’t post jobs on GA. However, 1) quite a few SEO folks come to the GA parties and follow the blog, and 2) this is calendars.com. They’ve been around since the days when I was still in the book biz.
I’ve been overwhelmed putting things in motion for Linux Against Poverty. Meanwhile, all sorts of other cool things are going on in Austin’s tech community:
Damon and friends just published a directory of Austin on Rails members.
Austin IxDA has been gathering steam recently. They have a panel on effective prototyping coming up on April 21 at Frog Design offices on Congress. RSVP here.
The Agile Executive just posted a history of Agile Austin (The Agile Austin Blueprint for Building a Community). Scott Killen and colleagues have done a great job building a local “community of practice” surrounding Agile methodologies.
Jim Freeze and friends have been bringing the Ruby community together. They have been holding evening meetings and weekday luncheons. You can find out more at the Austin Ruby Google group.
Austin Linux Group just updated their list of Austin area Linux User Groups.
As a follow up to the earlier post on GeekAustin today: I received the following note from Brewster McCracken’s office:
“Investing taxpayer funds for web operations only makes sense if the investment dramatically improves government efficiency and stimulates the local economy. I am not satisfied that the website redesign proposal before Council meets either objective. Therefore, I cannot support the current proposal to spend over $700,000 on a website redesign.
“My specific concerns include:
• a new website must make it possible for citizens to pay their bills online, including by credit card
• a new website must make it possible for citizens to obtain any service online for which they currently have to drive to a government office or conduct by telephone
• any new website proposal must be part of a comprehensive government efficiency improvement effort
• given Austin’s significant local talent pool in website architecture and software, any new website solicitation must include aggressive outreach to local companies. If at all possible and financially feasible, we should tap local talent and support the local economy.”
Despite the argument that twitter is little more than than a forum for people to shout what they had for lunch, it is a great tool for spreading new quickly.
And the news that spread like wild fire yesterday was the Austin Business Journal story that the Austin City Council is voting this week on whether to award a contract to a California company to redesign the city’s Web site. The value of this contract could be between 700K and 1.5M.
In the story, Austin City Chief of Staff Antony Snipes said that “while the city tries to contract with local companies whenever possible, it also has a responsibility to get the best deal for the money“.
Most of the responses to the ABJ story were strongly in favor of contracting locally. Randall Baker, of PuraVida Ventures, made one of the more detailed arguments:
“This is an incredibly irresponsible move by the city staff. First, the taxpayers monies they speak of - 32% of it comes from technology related business, many of them web design firms. Second, of the 3000 technology companies based in the Austin/CenTex Region several hundred are web design firms, one international firm is located within 100 yards of city hall. Third, If no companies from the region either submitted responses or their responses did not meet the city staffs criteria then I would submit that either the city staffs criteria is wrong or the bidding process precludes firms not based upon their abilities but rather some irrelevant city bid criteria. For the city to have even been working on this project for over 15 months shows the inability of city staff to even understand the industry in which they are attempting to operate. In the period they have been “working” on the design, over 30,000 people have moved to our region the internet has doubled in users and over 4 extabytes of unique information has been generated.”
Within hours of the story’s appearance, a facebook group devoted to this issue appeared; and thanks to rapid dissemination through twitter, it passed 200 members in the first 24 hours. At this rate, the public hearings should be packed.
As of this morning, it appears that most of the discussion on the issue is going on in the facebook group.
