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Growing Venture Solutions Stickers - Want One?

Some would say, what is a company without stickers. Others would say what is the weird fascination with stickers. At this week's Denver Drupal User's Group meeting - people said both things!


I'm really happy with the way that our stickers turned out. They were the result of a morning spent consulting with Anita Martin of A Cuppa Creative. She tried out a few things and we ended up with an oval with the tree and the company name.


Matt Tucker


Brian Hiatt

Do you want a Growing Venture Solutions sticker? If so, we'll be at DrupalCon DC handing them out or I could probably mail some if you comment and leave your e-mail I'll be in touch.

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Presentations Past, Presentations Future: Drupal FTW

I've got presentations and Drupal socializing on the brain.

Last week I gave a presentation to the Western Region Alliance for Community Media. I provided my standard Introduction to Drupal presentation and collaborated with Brian Hiatt (of CivicPixel) and Ann Theis (of Deproduction) who provided the perspective of using Drupal as a tool to help run a Public/Educational/Governmental television station (PEG). Brian has a lot more insight into the importance of the conference to Drupal and of Drupal to PEG. One comment he had is:

There are soo many different PEG technology/open source projects being developed at the moment, but very few (if any) that are being deployed at more than a handful of stations. There is a lot of curiosity tempered with fear over these solutions as they stand now.

That sounds pretty familiar. It's the classic adoption process and I think that the Denver Open Media folks are doing a lot of great stuff to help promote a sound station philosophy based in Open Source.

Eclipse and OpenID At Denver Drupal User's Group

Tonight was the Denver Drupal User Group meeting where we had a solid presentation from Michael Graves of JanRain. Al Steffen of pingVision got us all up to speed using Eclipse to increase our productivity.

DrupalCon DC 2009 - Token, Security, BOFs, oh my!

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Mollom - Out of Beta and Ready to Eat Your Spam (without bothering your normal visitors)

My experience with Mollom has been highly enjoyable. I used to get lots of spam comments on various sites I run which I blocked and cleaned manually. Then I installed the CAPTCHA module which helped a bit, but was annoying to users, let past some bots, and wasn't entirely accessible. I installed Mollom when it entered Beta a few months ago. The concept of only presenting a CAPTCHA when the content is likely spam really appeals to me. It's better for users and admins alike (as long as you don't mind shipping your data off to someone else's servers...which I don't).

Busy Summer for Mollom

This has been an exciting season for Mollom. They started the Summer (Northern-Hemisphere Summer anyway) by hiring Wim Leers who proceeded to build and document lots of tools which were also released to the community. Quite a nice contribution to the community both by Wim and Mollom.

Perhaps most interesting to folks, though will be a little data I've gathered about Mollom (I figured why let them have all the fun of inspecting my data - I'll look at a bit of theirs!)

Of course I'm not talking about cracking into their site to steal data, just using the data provided on their front page and a little OpenOffice.org fun to make a graph of their growth in terms of number of sites and spam blocked. It's kind of surprising to me that the two lines are shaped so similarly - then again maybe it shouldn't be.

Out of Beta - Still Accessible as "Mollom Free"

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Thoughts on Chrome "Beta"

I don't boot into Windows very often, but had to this morning and felt it would be worthwhile to test out Google's new Chrome Browser.

Great Features of Chrome

The speed of page rendering, JavaScript, and tab opening/closing are all great. Kudos to Google on that one.

They provide a lot of the great features that Firefox popularized like a tabbed interface. Providing separate processes per tab is something that many people may not care about very often, but once you have a single bad web page crash a whole browser...your friendly geek will remind you "Try Chrome - it doesn't have that problem."

Chrome also makes one big change: the tabs are above the URL bar which generally does make sense to me: both because inserting the tabs into the area normally reserved for titles is a great space saver but also because the URL bar and back/forward is attached to the page instead of floating above the tab and switching randomly.

And now some dislikes about Chrome

This seems like a bad idea, though, because it fixes a problem that nobody has (logical disconnect between the URL bar above the tab) and also means that if I have lots of tabs open I can't read the full title of the page.


Look at the tabs in this image. What is that tutorial about? Which GMail search is that? Bay Area Drupal...what?

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Introduction to Drupal 6.x Classes - Starting September 27th from 9:00AM to Noon

This course is made up of four sessions every Saturday morning for a month. Start the month as a newbie, end it a Drupal rock star. The sessions will cover Drupal 6.x, though most of the content is applicable for 5.x or 6.x.

_EDIT: Class is over...the next class will be in January.

Where: 1045 Acoma Street, Denver, CO 80204
When: 4 Saturdays from 9AM to Noon starting September 27th.
What to bring: Yourself and your laptop. If you don't have a laptop, let me know when you register and a computer can be provided.
Cost:

  • Per class - earlybirds pay $45 if you sign up by September 23rd. $60/day for all
    registrations after that.
  • Get all four classes discounted to $150 (save $30 over earlybird price and $90 over the normal price)

How do I sign up? Complete a signup request form.
How many people? To ensure a high quality class, each class is limited to 8 people. I expect that every class will be full, so if you are interested you should sign up now. I will update this page as people sign up.

Sep. 27th: "Introduction to Drupal" - (hint: It's not pronounced droo-PAWL)

  • Covers installation, commonly used jargon and design patterns, and common “gotchas”
  • Content creation, editing, and moderation
  • How to successfully interact with the Drupal community (finding modules, getting your bugs fixed)

Oct. 4th: Turn Your Site Up to 11 - the most popular core and contributed modules in Drupal

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Denver/Boulder New Tech Meetup - August 2008

This was my second New Tech meetup (review of July meetup) and it was much better than last time, which is saying a lot because last time was pretty good. Perhaps that was because this was the 2 year anniversary, perhaps it was because all the demos were from TechStars, perhaps it was because I got there earlier so I could partake in the beverages and announcemens (like the wifi username/password).

Once again I'm keeping track of presentation software, browser, operating system, and this time I'm also keeping track of any software used to build their website and what their YSlow! rating is for their homepage.

EventVue Providing "community" Features to Conferences

Used Keynote and Firefox on mac osx. Blog: WordPress. YSlow: "C" (73).

EventVue participated in TechStars2008 and presented about a year ago at the NewTech Meetup. 2 weeks after they presented at the NewTech Meetup, they closed $250,000 in venture capital (they were very proud of this and challenged this year's crop to do the same).

In the past year, they've supported 28 conferences with their software (~2 conference signups per month). They signed up 9 new conferences in the last month.

The point is to make your time spent at the conference more valuable by helping you connect with conference attendees you already know or should know. They did a demo on the Defrag 2008 site where you can click on "who from my network is going" and also "invite people who aren't going" based on your LinkedIn network.

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The Dao of the Drupal Community

Greg Knaddison

Growing Venture Solutions

July 2008

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DrupalCamp Colorado - Welcome!

Greg Knaddison

greggles

2008/03/05 9:00

DrupalCamp Colorado

Best DrupalCamp Colorado Ever!

The bathrooms...

Big thanks to Denver Open Media.

Big thanks to Aten Design Group.

Do-ocracy
Drupal(Camp) is what you make of it.

tag it: drupalcampcolorado

drupalcamp

(on monitor upstairs)

Lightning!

S5 Presentation Layer.
Simple Standards-Based Slide Show System
(no, it's not SSBSSS nor S2BS3)
(because Eric Meyer said so)

<!--pagebreak--> + words = presentation!

Where are the slides?
Oh...they're already online in a shareable format.

Greg's picture

Quick Introduction to Views 2

Greg Knaddison

Growing Venture Solutions

July 2008

DrupalCamp Colorado

What is Views 1?
The views module provides a flexible method for Drupal site designers to control how lists of content (nodes) are presented.

What is views 2?
The views module provides a flexible method for Drupal site designers to control how lists of anything are presented with a kickass Ajax interface.

Questions?

Demo!

Raffle for Komodo
Advanced help
Non-node tables

Session list (and block)
Basic node list
Overrides

Comments + moderation

Image + ajax + minipager = carousel...?

Stump the Chump!

Greg's picture

Goodbye DrupalCamp Colorado 2008

Greg Knaddison

greggles

2008/03/05 13:30

DrupalCamp Colorado

Thanks Sponsors!
aten design group
CMS Website Services
Remy Corporation
New Media Denver
Monarch Digital
A Mountain Top
Denver Data Man
Integrated Alliances
Growing Venture Solutions

Thanks In Kind Sponsors
Denver Open Media
Active State
pingVision

Thanks Volunteers
* Paul Coughlin
* Kevin Reynen
* Brad Bowman
* Kevin Bridges
* Tony Shawcross
* Al Steffen
* Matthew Saunders
* John Fiala
* Brian Choc
* Don Hajicek
* Amy Tremper
* Laura Scott
* Brian Hiatt

Best DrupalCamp Colorado Ever!

* 4 (or 3?) times more people
* 6 times more sessions
* 100000 times more bofs
*

Favorite Moments?

Feedback
Input...number johnny 5 need input.

Stay involved...

State of Drupal Survey
http://groups.drupal.org/denverboulder-colorado-user-group-dbug

Help Next Year
Please.

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