Blog

Three presentations tonight, followed by usual natters at the lovely Last Jar afterwards.

I love pitch events, I love hearing ideas good and bad and watching people's passion in what they do… This will be the first I attempt to summarise and my first attempt at live blogging, of sorts.

Over the past year I've been slowly building a list of gotchas, mistaken assumptions and potential slip ups that have hit projects I've been involved with several times, or seemed so blindingly obvious after the moment that they just had to be documented. This is one of the many articles I have that may grow over time as I discover more useful tidbits.

<p class="p1">Drupal has a plethora of ways to power your mobile apps and websites, including:<ol class="ol1"><li class="li1">Responsive design</li><li class="li1">Offline storage</li><li class="li1">Integration with frameworks such as PhoneGap and Titanium Appcelerator</li><li class="li1">Utilising services to feed apps data</li><li class="li1">And much more</li></ol><p class="p1">This session will touch upon these various options, looking at when they are relevant, their complexity, their advantages and disadvantages, arming you with a toolbox for the next time a client asks for a mobile site or app.

I&#39;m working on a book/presentation/series of workshops/who knows what covering integrating lean and agile practices into a non-profit or social enterprise. As a sub set of that will also be &quot;What the non-profit world can learn from the tech world and vice versa&quot;.

Developer says to designer &quot;blah blah blah&quot;</div>Client says to developer &quot;blah blah blah&quot;</div>Project manager says to developer and designer &quot;blah blah blah&quot;</div>&nbsp;</div>And so it goes.</div>&nbsp;</div>A lot of the time we don&#39;t understand each other in our projects due to a lack of clarity, explanations, context and assumptions on all sides that go continually unchecked.</div>&nbsp;</div>How can we all understand each other much better, reducing heart ache, money wasted, time spent, mental and physical violence?</div>&nbsp;</div>Let&#39;s figure it out and end the session much happier.</div>

CiviCRM like many open source tools is a blank canvas and a set of paints that different implementers will take in many different ways based on their myriad uses and requirements.

&nbsp;<p class="p1">What can the non-profit sector learn from from the tech sector and vice versa?<p class="p1"><span style="line-height: 1.538em;">Two sectors that are traditionally diametrically diverse, one moves slowly and is resistant to change, the other moves quickly, keeping up with trends and developments, constantly evolving to meet new needs and requirements.<ul><li class="p1"><span style="line-height: 1.538em;">However in the changing global landscape, both need to be more efficient, different, offer extra value and change their ways of working.</li><li class="p1"><span style="line-height: 1.538em;">What can each sector learn from the other? What are some work practices that could benefit each?</li><li class="p1"><span style="line-height: 1.538em;">We look at some practical examples of each sector to lead a valuable discussion.</li></ul>

I've been having some thoughts recently on the paths that many open source projects seem to follow and who they are really designed for, the developer or the users?

He must works nights as I rarely see him, we've never spent a night together, just watching TV or anything like that, but he must have a set in his room, and a penchant for cheesy old horror films, because sometimes in the middle of the night I hear odd muffled shrieks and yells coming from his room.

A few weeks back I needed to create an ability for certain products in Ubercart to be available for 'price on application', there were a few modules floating around that pertained to do this, but none seemed to work in Drupal 7, so I racked my brain on how to accomplish this as simply as possible and came up with something quite tidy...

I decided to upgrade my Samsung S2 to a Nexus 4, there were several reasons for this...<ul><li>I dropped the S2 on a rock and it had a large hairline crack in the screen, not that bad but noticeable.</li><li>I rooted the phone and installed Cyanogen Mod, it ran really well until recently, and a stable version of 4.2 looks like it was never gong to happen.</li><li>I came into some money and thought I'd treat myself</li></ul>

I am honoured, happy and excited to have been asked to speak at a Web Directions event, <a href="https://code13melb.webdirections.org/" target="_blank">Web Directions Code</a>, here in Melbourne on the 2nd and 3rd of May.

Take your Drupal sites offline with HTML 5 AppCache and turn it into a webapp, perhaps with something like PhoneGap.

That snazzy website your looking at took a while to make didn't it? What do you reckon? Maybe it took the developers a few months to make. Perhaps its taken them a few years of iterative development to create and perfect something more complex.

Completing the tricefta of talking about <a href="https://civicrm.org" target="_blank">CiviCRM</a> at every user group for every platform it&#39;s available on in Melbourne, I&#39;m talking about CiviCRM and <a href="https://joomla.org" target="_blank">Joomla!</a> at this weekend&#39;s <a href="https://melbourne.joomladay.org.au/" target="_blank">Joomla!Day</a>.

Someone recently put me on to <a href="https://www.insynchq.com/" target="_blank">insync</a>, a new way to use <a href="https://drive.google.com" target="_blank">Google drive</a>. I've had two main issues with Google's drive application:<ol><li>That it will only work with one Google account (with three active ones, that's not very helpful).</li><li>That when you open a file in finder/explorer it opens up a browser, which seems a rather pointless user of a desktop application.</li></ol>

I've been using buffer for ages, but not got around to writing anything about it, so now I met appear to be following the pack somewhat.

I&#39;ll be delivering the new improved version 2 of my &#39;<a href="/presentation/extending-drupal-crm">Extending Drupal with a CRM</a>&#39; talk at <a href="https://www.meetup.com/drupalmelbourne/events/97620592/comments/143010552/" target="_blank">Drupal Melbourne&#39;s inaugural meetup for 2013 on the 8th Jan</a>. It will be new and improved with a tour through integrating external commercial CRMs with Drupal, Drupal native CRM tools and more pictures of cats.

A CRM (Contact Relationship Manager or Constituent Relationship Manager depending on your sector) is a fantastic way to take your Drupal installation further and streamline your business practises.

<span style="line-height: 1.538em;">In this sessions we look at utilising a variety of Drupal modules, tools and techniques to create standalone campaigns for your non-profits (or company&#39;s) site. These could be sub sites, micro-sites or pages with a different look and feel.

2012 has been a big year, equal good and bad, extremely busy moments and dull moments to. I&#39;ve been to umpteen conferences, meetups and worked on about a dozen projects. Green renters stated the year really well, but dropped off massively after July, as did many other sustainability organisations and that was a hard hit for us.

Webform is a module that has equal parts lovers and haters... On one hand it makes creating complex forms with no technical knowledge extremely easy. On the other a lot of it's functionality is handled in a 'non-Drupal' way, although this has got somewhat better recently.

<a href="https://www.packtpub.com/news/new-drupal-mini-books" target="_blank">Part of Packt publishing's new _Mini Drupal series_</a>

I know it's kind of tacky, but this flyer attracted my attention at <a href="https://www.ntenonline.org/eweb/DynamicPage.aspx?webcode=NTCSessionsCurrent" target="_blank">NTC12</a> and I thought it was kind of clever... If a waist of dimes that I'm sure the homeless folks of San Francisco would have appreciated...

As is usual from my blog posts, this may or may not grow as I remember things&hellip;<ul><li>The visual discrepancy between rich and poor in San Francisco is extremely stark<ul><li>Add to that, the gap between white/Asian and black/Latino is even more noticeable.</li></ul></li><li>A lot of the Not-For-Profit sector seems obsessed with money and how to make it.</li><li>The tipping culture is weird&hellip; In that people don&#39;t tip because they want to, but because they feel obliged to. Which makes tipping and the divvying up of bills an awkward and bizarrely scientific process to watch.</li><li>Americans table manners, especially the way they treat servers, are peculiar&hellip; Perhaps related to above.</li><li>Sales people very open and friendly, I assume because they want to sell you something. On the other hand, Customer service, especially civil service, quite unforgiving and unhelpful.</li><li>A lot of things in Australia aren&#39;t as expensive as people think. Especially food and fuel.</li><li>Conferences in Australia are a lot more multi-cultural, with more people from overseas and we&#39;re more interested in those from overseas.</li></ul>

Here's a quote/analogy I've been using for a while to overarchingly describe a strategy for engaging on social media that I've found helpful and descriptive.

It's simple, updates regularly, synchronises between devices almost seamlessly and for the most part it's free! <a href="https://www.evernote.com" target="_blank">www.evernote.com</a>

With Green Renters we find the iCal feed from CiviEvent (part of CiviCRM) invaluable to keep track of events and workshops we have coming up, generally we use the feed pulled into our personal iCal and Google calendars for internal organising, currently the feeds aren't available to anyone outside of staff.

I love living on the cutting edge, many times to my detriment, but it never ceases to dissuade me. So after a brief delay due to being away from home and nowhere near a backup drive (which, of course, is essential before a major system upgrade!) it was time to get my hands dirty.