geekcons

Twitter lists

Oct 28th

Posted by adam in geekcons

2 comments

As my reader will know, I’m rather fond of lists. For a while, i’ve held back against Twitter Lists, not really seeing the point of them: my current client, Tweetdeck, after all, has categories for me; I rarely use the twitter website, and my pytwerp config/template is easy to grep, if I need to.

But, erm, yeah. I’ve made a start, and given how shit my memory is, I thought I’d explain (to you, and me) how I’ve categorized:

  • @adamamyl/foodies — people who write about food. Or like food
  • @adamamyl/burners — burners. as in burningman/nowhere/decompressions. fucking hippies
  • @adamamyl/uber-kewl-kids — mainly shops/products I really like
  • @adamamyl/lawyers — i seem to follow a few of ‘em: let’s put ‘em all together
  • @adamamyl/academics — self-explanatory, really
  • @adamamyl/public-life — better than “slebs”
  • @adamamyl/music-folks — people in the music industry, in one way or another
  • @adamamyl/technologists — people who fiddle with tech, new products, that sort of thing
  • @adamamyl/mafia — people who (will) run things.
  • @adamamyl/web-folks — people involved in web stuff and maybe social media, may include ruby people, as they’re not proper geeks ;)
  • @adamamyl/usual-suspects — child-eating, crack-dealing refusniks (hi Stef!) who still won’t give up.
  • @adamamyl/politicos — those with political interests/aspirations. can also include current affairs/news
  • @adamamyl/representatives — people who’ve been elected, usually
  • @adamamyl/geeks — lovely people, really
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UKGovWeb Barcamp

Nov 24th

Posted by adam in geekcons

No comments

Hum, so there’s another UKGovWeb Barcamp in the pipe-line. Good-oh, says I.

To work around my hatred of PBWiki’s “notification” system, I’ve just re-appropriated (and made ‘ukgovweb-check‘) my dell-order-checking script to work for the wiki-page; changelog is that the script now uses lynx instead of wget, and that we send the difflog, rather than the whole-bloody-changed file.

If you’re still in the dark-ages like me, and haven’t written one yourself, here you go. If there’s a demand and people are feeling lazy, I suppose I could whip up a list.

Let me know if you do.

There’s some discussion going on on email, I do believe.

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Drupal for NGOs

Jun 11th

Posted by adam in drupal

2 comments

Ah, right, well, yesterday, I made it along to a new meet-up/group, Drupal for NGOs

bloody good turnout, and quite a few people with experience in the field, along with those of us who’ve been playing around, and those thinking about Making The Switch. (like what no2id are to be doing soonish)

I saw on the upcoming comments that someone was after a few notes, so, erm, here are mine…

casestudy 1: greenpeace uk

Greenpeace UK (gpuk) used to use a legacy system of coldfusion, dating from the late 90s, and strove to gain better communications with their supporters, to recruit/engage others (vide: user module, forum). One of the cool things that’s on their site are the context sensitive blocks — targeted ads and stuff. Rock on!

Navigation’s made possible via both menus and tags, making use of the Tagadelic module.

Their local groups functionality draws in data from elsewhere, and as the sign-up process mail goes to the punter and the co-ordinator for that group: useful. Local groups are a specific Content Type.

To tweak some of the text, the locale module’s used

An extensive list of modules were used, the ones in my notes include:

For their data stuff (the idea to link in the Drupal with their supporters database/CRM) is to use SOPERA, something that uses SOAP, and can act (as I understood it) as an intermediary.

For importing stuff, they used a couple of scripts, and then manual tidy-up.

casestudy 2: oxfam international

Migrated from Plone → Drupal (site not yet live)

They use 14 core modules, and 29 custom modules, a few the same as gpuk, but also Custom Breadcrumbs and Lightbox 2

From start to finish, it’s taken them about 6 or 7 months.

In terms of clean-up, i can’t read my notes…

Their press releases, though were structured data, and imported in.

Nightly builds take place from their subversion repo.

For content specific stuff, they’re making use of the Cue node.

Apart from those, there were a couple of other Q&As, some of which focused on large-scale sites/optimization/techy concerns — the idea of PHP optimizers (there’s a blog somewhere comparing versions of PHP & Apache), and running a lightweight httpd were suggested, such as lighthttpd / ergdex. along with something like squid/varnish. Some modules it seems involve onehelluvalot of database queries (250) per load, so for large-scale stuff, re-writing may prove useful.

There are some load sims out there, too.

For proxying, appliancesys.com (hum, maybe I mis-heard) was mentioned as having proven useful

Looks like the start of a London Drupal community, which could be useful…

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