John Fiala's Website

I've recently been digging into the Aegir Hosting System, both because we're starting to use it at my current NREL gig, and because I've proposed to do a session on it at DrupalCamp LA. In short, Aegir allows you to easily administer a number of Drupal sites from a common site, itself built on Drupal. It's really slick, and a lot of the functionality is built on Drush. (Also see http://drupal.org/project/drush .)

Lunch complete I head back to the Boulder Theater, but as I reach 14th & Pearl I realize that I'm more interested in the next session at Atlas Purveyors, so I continue down Pearl to arrive there before the session starts. The place is packed with a mixture of WordCamp folks and civilians, and I'm lucky to not only find a seat, but one that's near a power strip, allowing me to charge up my netbook.

Wordcamp Boulder 2010

Wordcamp Boulder is set, naturally enough, in Boulder, which is a fantastic place to have a conference where the locations are spread out like this. Walking from room to room allows you to enjoy Boulder's laid back atmosphere and the eclectic stores spread around the Pearl Street Mall and the Boulder Theater. It's just a bit of a shame that two of the three locations that Wordcamp is using are overcrowded and standing room only! (Well, a shame for my back, at least!)

Signup was quick and easy, and although the badge they hand out is simple cardboard that you write your name on, they've cleverly printed it so that inside the fold is the schedule – also cleverly printed upside down, so it's easy to read when you're wearing it. The Boulder Theater is a lovely building, and I wish I had more excuses to go there.

Here's where I'm posting the various files that I promised to deliver - these are the files I used in my DrupalCamp Colorado 2010 presenation on extending Solr.

One of the events I look forward to each summer is the Capital Hill People's Fair, a huge collection of food (most of it bad for you) and art/nick-nacks all crammed into the Civic Center Park. It's usually crowded, and was this time, and it's usually very warm, which is why Tammy and I were very happy to find the straw hats we'd bought at last year's fair to wear to this one.

So, I'm finally back home after a week in San Francisco. The trip had two main reasons - one was to attend Drupalcon SF, the other to spend some time visiting my brother in law, Tim. Things went well on both fronts, and I got in some bonus treat as well.

Talk given by Young Hahn - @younghahn on twitter.

This is a talk that focuses on three modules that were developed as part of Open Atrium.

Context triggers reactive behaviors on pages.

Basically, in the past putting content all on the same page was a pain. You have a snippet, say, that says 'This bit should show on blog pages', and you've got it spread throughout your site in half a dozen places. Context replaces this by having a system that asks 'are we in the blog section?'. There's also things like a global context, or a login context. (such as when an anonymous user is browsing).

Context is basically an additive system - a page can be in the global context, the blog section context, and the blog post context.

Note to self - do we need a page that lists all the blogs under all of their contexts for easier display?

The sheer size of Drupal, and of DrupalconSF, was brought rudely to your attention as you walked into exhibit hall A, which looked to be about the size of room you would need to store a few decently sized airplanes, and saw the rows and rows of chairs set out for people to sit back and hear Dries talk about the State of Drupal.

In short, he thinks it's doing pretty good.

Well, I've arrived in San Francisco and dropped bags off at the house we're staying at. If someone wants to reach me, I've got my phone on me - 303 - 668-9778

Today is exactly one week before I leave for San Francisco for Drupalcon, and so I decided I needed to go by MicroCenter and pick up a few supplies.

For one, when I'd been typing up some notes in Open Atrium the other day, my house's power blinked, and my computer shut down, and restarted. I almost had a heart attack, and the waited on the edge of my seat to see if the browser (Google Chrome) would somehow magically remember what I'd been typing. Happily it had, and I quickly saved the entry before finishing it up. But that really taught me that I need to have a UPS if I"m working from home.

For two, my KVM switch had been dying slowly recently and this morning it had taken three successive restarts of my computer for the switch to work. That was pretty much the end of the line for me - I suspect that's why it wasn't working with my Mac recently either.