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 .)

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.

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.

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.

When I first started working in Drupal, I was astonished to hear that the logging function that Drupal provides is called - of all things - watchdog(). I complained that it was a bad name, but continued using it, along with the dblog module, happily throwing things into the watchdog table and looking them up there.

So, last night here in Denver was the original ie6Funeral party, and I showed up. There was a lot of booze, a lot of really tasty snacks - Forest Room 5 did a fine job there - and finally, there were remembrances. And here's the one I came up with:

Now, there's a bunch of others that my friend Matthew Saunders posted on his blog, so if you want to see more about the funeral, and see a picture of the deceased, I suggest heading there. It was a lot of fun.

A mixture of short items I thought I should mention.

• My friends and I have started up a coop of developers and web designers, called Vintage Digital, and now we've got a website and you can see a picture of me from when I was visiting Boston for Drupalcon there. I also posted a huge blog post going over how to update Ubercart so it can handle multi-currency. If you're interested, have a look.

Firehouse.com, the last major project I worked on with pingVision, has now been officially launched! I worked as lead developer on this project with the able assistance of Matthew Saunders & Elizabeth Hause on the web producing side; and Ben Jeavons, Matt Tucker, Al Stephen, Kevin Bridges and Zach Meyer on the development and theming side.

Firehouse is a large site which includes articles of fires and fire-handling topics, pages for each fire station who wants to be hosted there, photographs of stations and fire equipment submitted by users, editorial cartoons on the firefighting life, Webinars, an online store for buying subscriptions to the magazine, and even A digital copy of their magazine, month by month, and probably some other stuff I'm not even remembering. Oh, and some blogging, too.

I'll probably work up more of a 'this is how we done it' post later, right now I'm basking in the glow of success.