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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.

At the time of writing this website isn't quite finished and maybe you can't quite tell that I love <a href="https://www.civicrm.org" target="_blank">civicrm</a>. I won't go into too much detail of why and what it is now, best you do a bit of searching and find that out for yourself.

I've sometimes been critical of drinking control ads in the past, generally wondering how effective they really are, but I really liked this one I found in a London toilet.

After two weeks with staying with family, we were pretty desperate to get to <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norwich">Norwich</a> and hang out with friends and kick back for a few days. Hence our enthusiasm on the journey there, punctuated by the discovery of a ridiculously cheap pub whilst transferring in Peterborough, that turned from a relaxing drink to a last minute mad dash to catch a train.

The <a href="https://www.skegnesspier.co.uk/windfarm.html" target="_blank">Skegness Wind farm</a> as you can see from the photos, they've located a wind farm in the sea, a great way to reduce NIMBYism.

I generally find that in the process of migrating a website to a new system or framework, importing and moving data is the most fraught, frustrating and troublesome part of the process. If you're moving content from a vanilla installation to another vanilla installation you might be in luck, but really, what are the chances of that?

It's amazing what you can find in the country with a little digging...

I kept noticing these silver scratch panels on some receipts in china and assumed they were just some form of official symbol but it turns out there actually a cunning behavioural change policy on behalf of the Chinese government.

China is one crazy country. Even before we left Australia, <a href="https://www.google.co.uk/url?sa=t&source=web&cd=1&ved=0CD0QFjAA&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.airchina.com%2F&rct=j&q=air%20china&ei=Em8tTsH-H4fOhAfM2bmqCw&usg=AFQjCNGNWJqlHZ88hV2xYX6QjMI1QzFf1Q&cad=rja" target="_blank">air china</a> gave us a taste of the break neck speed 'efficiency' some of the Chinese like to operate on.

Take a listen (or read) to a light hearted and 'cheesy' romantic (and slightly explicit) short story I recently wrote about Doug, who bored in his office cubicle, fantasies about Julie...

Coffee is a very personal business.

According to a list I read some years ago, I regularly use several words in my lexicon that are considered 'old fashioned'. As that list was published nearly ten years ago and I'm still using most of those words, my language must be increasingly old fashioned.

'Concept albums' generally raise the heckles of most rock music reviewers, and an album that contains an 'artistic statement' emblazoned on it's inside front cover in two different languages even more so. It seems that Ember Swift travelled to China in 2007 and felt an unnerving feeling of having been there before, of deja vu and of an unusual one-ness and comfortable familiarity, thus creating the urge and need to write an album about her experiences.