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Like del.icio.us but I'd rather have it on my own website, thank you very much.

Anita Martin Graphic Design

Meeting Anita Martin

This past spring I had the pleasure of working on a project with Anita Martin. The project was relatively complex - not because the work was technical, but because the client was really a community of about 30 involved people and over 10,000 total potential "customers". Anita was very helpful and understanding as the liason between the community and me.

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What is google doing with their new features?

People often say "what is google thinking with {insert name of their new serivce}?"

Google and Open Source Project Hosting

At the OSCON this summer they announced Google Code Project Hosting a Sourceforge like open source project hosting environment. It's inline with some of their other projects like Summer of Code, a project where Google pays university students to spend their summers working on open source projects. A system where Drupal got 14 projects (a value of over US$70,000 - listen to a summary of the progress in Lullabot Podcast #23).

Now, when they announced the whole Project Hosting thing it seemed like a nice thing for them to do for up and coming projects - but it also seemed more than a little redundant. If you're a small or medium project then Sourceforge will work great. If you're a larger project then maybe you need to use the OSUOSL (consider donating to them). Either way, it seemed more than redundant for Google to offer this hosting.

Mozilla Talkback

Mozilla has long used a system called Talkback and it uses a closed source, proprietary system that requires a license and is owned by a company called SupportSoft. People complain about this system all the time in forums saying "mozilla should build their own talkback system" to which the response is "why don't you build it as your own open source project and let us use it" to which the repsonse is usually something like "oh, I don't code, you should write it for me on your own time". You can guess how I feel about this exchanges...

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IKEA Store Located in Commerce City, Denver, Colorado

Today I mentioned my fascination with IKEA stores opening in Denver. A friend was talking about how she wanted some new office furniture - Room and Board felt too expensive for what she needs and Scandinavian Design was her best choice. What should she do? I recommended IKEA and lamented the fact that we didn't have one...

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Mountain Biking Community site

Your Mountain Bike YADS

Last night I got reintroduced to the YourMTB.com website which is a pretty cool mountain biking community site. It's built on the Drupal platform and is the first in a series of adventure sports enthusiast sites being created by Enthusiast Group. It's great to see, first of all the functionality that they were able to create, but also a well done, high-quality and attractive site implemented using everyday Drupal modules. Making it Yet Another Drupal Site - YADS.

Mountain Biking Social Networking/Citizen Journalism

It's a social networking and citizen journalism site wrapped up into one with the niche focus on the mountain biking community. So, you can see reviews of mountain biking products or user submitted mountain biking photos but it's also got a community aspect in multiple forms such as forums and community events.

Support the IMBA

They currently have a pretty cool deal going on where if you become a member and add your moutain biking photo to the site, they'll give $5 to the IMBA. That's a great deal and they haven't hit their limit yet!

Fun Features for Drupal

When I say "well done, high-quality" the stuff I'm talking about is some of the small details they've implemented. Specifically, creating new content redirects you to your user tracker page. At first this struck me as an odd place to redirect rather than the page itself. Then I realized the motivational effect this could have - it's like saying "here's the stuff you've created, why haven't you created more?". They are using the userpoints and buddylist modules to help promote networking and giving content to the site. The theme is littered with calls to action to post more photos, videos, stories. This worked well for me - after joining one of the little "calls to action" is what got me to upload my photo - and get the $5 donated to IMBA.

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127 is the magic number (so is 128 and 32 and...)

So, today I'm working on a fun module I plan to use as the basis for my presentation at BarCamp and I, um, keep running into unexpected situations. Most of the time these involve the number 127 in the database. I bang my head on the problem for a couple seconds and then add in enough debugging statements to see that the database is either stopping duplicate keys or rounding a number down to 127 or...

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