This Site

Video of My 5 Minute Talk at Ignite Seattle

leelefever — Wed, 14 Feb 2007 17:06:43 -0500

Last night I was one of 25 speakers at an event called Ignite Seattle (Flickr Tag) which is the brainchild of Bre Pettis of Make Magazine and Brady Forrest of O'Reilly Radar. What an awesomely geeky and fun-filled time. It started with an "egg drop" contest with a giant slingshot being used to shoot objects at a brick wall. Fun stuff, or as Bre called it "Egg-Night Seattle".

The talks were also fascinating and it's the first time I've spoken under such constraints. Each presentation has to be 20 slides long and each slide shows for exactly 15 seconds - the presenter has no control over the slides - they auto-advance. 15 seconds on each slide is not very much time, trust me.

Sachi shot this 5 minute video of my talk about how we used technology on our trip around the world last year.

I mentioned a few blogger that we met along the way and I want to point you to them here:

Mongkol from Cambodia (currently a Fulbright Scholar at Boston College) [More on TwinF]
Gen Kanai in Tokyo [More on TwinF]
Dina Mehta in Mumbia India [More on TwinF]
JF Groff in Southern France [More on TwinF]
Robin Good in Rome, Italy [More on TwinF]
Wanna and Vuth in Hanoi [More on TwinF]
43 Places and Guarav [More on TwinF]
Jake Ludington from Seattle [More on TwinF]

Video of My 5 Minute Talk at Ignite Seattle

leelefever — Wed, 14 Feb 2007 17:06:43 -0500

Sachi shot this 5 minute video of my talk about how we used technology on our trip around the world last year.

I mentioned a few blogger that we met along the way and I want to point you to them here:

Video of My 5 Minute Talk at Ignite Seattle

leelefever — Wed, 14 Feb 2007 17:06:43 -0500

Sachi shot this 5 minute video of my talk about how we used technology on our trip around the world last year.

I mentioned a few blogger that we met along the way and I want to point you to them here:

Comments Are Working Again (Mostly)

leelefever — Fri, 26 Jan 2007 02:22:55 -0500

I've had an issue with broken comments on this site that was related to MT-Blacklist (a now-obsolete tool that helped curb spam). Sorry about that. Instead of trying to fix it, I'm just going to turn off the Blacklist and leave comments open on the most recent posts.

What does this mean to you? It means that if you'd like to comment, please do so quickly, before I turn them off. I'll stick to this strategy until Common Craft moves to Drupal.

Thank you for your attention.

UPDATED: In a not-so-ironic development, the comments on this entry are now disabled thanks to repeated spam comments.

Choosing Drupal 5

leelefever — Thu, 25 Jan 2007 21:22:51 -0500

Before this blog went into hibernation in 2005, I knew the blog platform (Movable Type 2.65) was in need of an upgrade. A year later, it's obvious to me that I'm driving an El Camino when everyone else has upgraded to a Prius. A change is coming soon to Common Craft.

Movable Type (MT) is a great product and it served me well for a few years, but after using Drupal for all of 2006, I count myself among the firmly converted. Going back to the old version of MT from Drupal 2.6 has not been fun. Here are a few of the differences I see between the two.

Movable Type is, at heart, a blogging platform that can be used for content management. Drupal is an open source content management platform that also does blogging and community functions very effectively.

Every time you post or edit an entry in MT, you have to wait for the site to rebuild. What a pain. Drupal posts immediately.

Editing a page in MT is only possible through the control panel and it takes 4 clicks. You cannot visit an entry and click "edit" directly from that page. In Drupal, the interface integrates admin controls into every page.

While I prefer the way MT provides the html code when an image is uploaded, I got used to simply dragging and dropping my photos from Flickr into the entry using the rich-text option in Drupal. We made this video "How We Do It: Manage a Travel Blog" that demonstrates how it works.

I like to change what appears in the right side bar of my site and MT 2.65 relies on templates to make it happen. Managing where items appear on the right bar means dealing with messy programming code. Drupal's "Block" system takes the geekiness factor down by making each part of the sidebar very manageable without contact with code.

MT was perfect for me in 2003 when I got started. Since then, MT has become a different sort of product while Wordpress, TypePad, etc. have become the choice platforms for individuals and small businesses. I'm choosing to move to Drupal because it does blogging well, but also comes with a huge selection of modules that offer an amazing set of capabilities. By moving Common Craft to Drupal, I know I can take the site in any direction I want in the future.

So, I'm becoming a Drupal fan boy, but I know it's not perfect. I still think the organization of the administration controls are overly complex. The process of uploading images is goofy, the learning curve can be quite long and it's still just a little too geek-centric for my taste. Thankfully, with each version it takes another step closer to becoming the killer app of community building tools.