Last month, while on vacation at a lakeside cabin in BC, I received an email asking permission to use one of my photos on Flickr for a magazine cover. "uh, sure? it's creative commons, so have at 'er. Can I have a copy?"
I got my copy today. Is that ever cool. It's for a petroleum industry magazine "The Negotiator" (sounds like a movie starring Clive Owen or the like), and lo and behold, right on the front cover, is my photograph:
I've just moved the Provisionator module onto Drupal.org's CVS server. The current version of the module is far from complete, but it does function. Specifically, it does:
It's got a lot of room for improvement, and more than likely needs some tightening down for security and Doing It The Right Way, but it works. It also currently assumes MySQL, and a very specific shared hosting pattern where Drupal isn't in wwwroot itself, but is exposed by adding multiple symlinks within the wwwroot directory.
I bought my Canon Digital Rebel XT back in June, with the timing of the purchase a direct result of Canon Canada's $100 rebate offer. I bought the camera at that time specifically because of the additional rebate. Otherwise, I would have likely held off a month or two, probably waiting for the release of the XTi. (an aside on the timing - I actually jumped the gun, buying the camera 2 weeks too early to be eligible for $400 back from work, so actually lost $500 in rebates and benefits because of the timing - that's almost half the price of the camera)
I don't have a long, deep post for this Remembrance Day, other than wanting to say how grateful I am to the men and women serving in the forces.
To my grandfather for fighting in WWI.
To my uncle for fighting in WWII.
To my cousins, for acting as peacekeepers, and paying the ultimate price.
This world would have been radically different without their contributions.
Since we switched to Drupal to power the department website recently, we're able to have RSS feeds to keep up to date on stuff as it gets added to the site. It hadn't been exposed previously, but I just took a few minutes to expose 3 of the "main" feeds for the site.
I also used my blog within the site to describe what I'd done. My first non-hello-world blog post on our site (although only marginally non-hello-world, but still, it counts).
I've been involved with a shared Drupal hosting project with BCIT and BCCampus. Part of it is based on an easy way to create new Drupal sites via a web interface, complete with database creation and population, Drupal site directory creation and settings modification, symlink creation to make the site visible to Apache, and management of a Drupal Sites Manifest table to keep track of sites.
At first blush, it seems rather similar to both sympal_scripts and the Drupal 5 installer, except for the management of a sites manifest table, and creation of the symlink to expose the site to Apache in a shared setting.
I just finished the first pass at "fixing" the TLC website. Now, it's not nearly as slick or effective, but is chock full of compliance. mmmm.... compliance... please, sir? may I have another?
TLC Website - with UCalgary "B" template
During this latest sustained spam attack, this blog has been a little less responsive than I'd like. I'm thinking it's related to Akismet's need to talk to the mothership to verify each comment. As an experiment, I've switched back to Spam.module, disabling Bad Behavior and Akismet. It's a bit of a risk, switching spam blocking strategies in mid-attack, but whatever. That's what backups and phpMyAdmin are for.
Already, the site feels slightly less unresponsive. I've never been really happy relying on an active network connection to the Akismet Mothership to check each and every comment, and Spam.module is a completely self contained solution. It's closer to Spam Karma 2 - the best spam blocking plugin for WordPress. Bayesian voodoo checking the content. Link counting, IP checking, etc...
I recently discovered the photography of Frans Lanting, via a profile an the Apple Pro Profiles website. He took 7 years to travel the world, photographing various places and things for Life: A Journey Through Time. His eye for composition, and skill at storytelling, combine to inspire and awe.
The Life: A Journey Through Time project resulted in a book, a website (with slideshow and timeline), and much more. The website is one of the most compelling things I've seen online (or off). 86 photographs presented in a slideshow intended to give a feel for the power of life on earth. Evan and I just watched the whole thing again. Amazing stuff. The composition and lighting are simply breathtaking. The narrative is interesting, although somewhat inaccurate at times (jaws and teeth didn't form on land first, etc...) but the message is powerful and compelling.
This blog has been under a pretty heavy sustained spam attack for the last couple of days. In the last 12 hours, over 500 attempts got past Bad Behavior (gods know how many were blocked in that period by BB) - but not a single one got past Akismet, which handles anything that isn't obvious spam. I was trying to figure out why the sudden attack, and then it struck me - the Google Pagerank of the site must have changed, making it a juicier target.
We launched the new website the other day, after many weeks/months of planning and implementing. It's only about half-way to what the Big Vision is for where we wanted to go, but it's still much better than what we had. I've received a lot of feedback (blog comments, IMs, emails, Ouija messages), and every single comment has been extremely positive. It's a well designed, (relatively) well structured site that is an order of magnitude more usable than what we had before.
We just launched the new website for the Teaching & Learning Centre at The University of Calgary. It's been a long time in the making, with heavy use of themes, custom CCK content types, events, signups, views, and a bunch of other Drupal modules and tricks. King worked his usual magic in putting together the CSS for our theme, which uses the same HTML templates as the official www.ucalgary.ca site.
The new site should make it much easier for us to keep content up to date. We're also planning some potentially cool community features for down the road a bit, once the dust starts to settle after The Big Website Launch.