Matthew Saunders

I'm thrilled.

I love working with nonprofits and particularly arts nonprofits. My background is as a painter and a theatre lighting designer. I also worked for Le Groupe Dance Lab for a summer after completing my Certificate of Arts Administration from the University of Ottawa.

I was so pleased when I was asked to Web Produce the rebuild of the Paul Taylor Dance company's site at work at pingVision. I think the end result shows how visually powerful and beautiful Drupal can be. It is a testament that Drupal can look like anything you might want. It is wonderfully flexible.

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This afternoon, at pingVision, we spent the very end of the day carving pumpkins. The pumpkins ranged from my Druplicon to scary faces to kitty cats.

It became a bit of a family effort when Karyn Cassio's son and husband showed up to join in.

We're hoping that tomorrow we'll have candles to light them all weather permitting. The Metro Denver region is supposed to be blanketed in up to 14 inches of snow in the next 36 hours or so. Still, more pictures should be expected of the pumpkins, the people, and probably the snow!

The photos that I took can be seen on Flickr. So Happy Halloween (just a touch early)!

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OpenX is an opensource adserver with similar functionality to other ad services. The difference is that you run the service yourself and it is free if you host it yourself.

I am often faced with Drupal clients who are interested in selling ad space on their sites but don't want to use a paid service, need more flexibility than the ad module available for Drupal, and don't want want to use a service like AdBrite or Google Ads.

This little tutorial will show you how to install the ad server on your localhost to play around with it. First off, you need some kind of *amp stack on your computer. I personally work on a Mac, so I use MAMP. This also means that the tutorial is Mac centric.

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A couple of weeks back I announced my new art online presence. I wrote about this return to my roots at the time. I'm a mixed media artist and really needed a way to showcase my work. My day job (and second love) is in Web Development. So, I built a system to show and sell my work. I wanted to do it with as little fuss as possible. I wanted to use open source software. I used Drupal and some key contributed Modules and a contributed theme. I needed a shopping cart, carousels for images, blogs, and static pages. I wanted to be able to phase in additional features as I have time.

While I was constructing it, it seemed to me that what I was assembling was:

• replicable
• of value to other artists
• visually simple - allowing art to speak for itself (thanks Acquia!)
• Robust in its shopping cart (thanks Ubercart!)

I talked to a few artist friends who looked at the site prior to my launching. They all seemed pretty stoked by what I was doing and thought it might be of use to others. Shortly after launching the site, I made a sale.

So, last night I finished off a little site to market assembly of similar sites for artists at minimal cost but with maximum flexibility. From the little marketing site, I'm offering:

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Recently I was chatting with a friend, Adin Miller, on Skype. Adin and I met about a year ago after being introduced by a mutual friend, Beth Kanter. Beth introduced us because the Grants Manager Network was looking for someone to present on a social networking panel. I was delighted to be tapped as that resource.

Adin shared with me that he needed someone who could create a few static web pages for him on his 1&1 shared server and perhaps link a Wordpress blog to those pages. We chatted for a while, and it became evident what he really wanted and needed was a way to:

1. Bring all his content under one "roof"
2. Have easy ways to update and add content
3. Have a blogging platform
4. Be able to richly tag his content
5. Have something that could start to raise search engine rankings
6. He wanted RSS
7. Social networking links
8. "Categories" like Wordpress
9. Include static informational pages
10. Spam Control

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I've been publishing to this domain since 1999 in some fashion. I've been blogging since August of 2004. I rolled over to Drupal in November of 2006 at which point I started tracking stats. Traffic has had its ups and downs but basically has been increasing. Moving to Drupal improved my SEO rankings quite nicely.

This past month has been a bit of a bonanza of traffic on this little site of mine. First of all, Drupalcon Paris occurred. I was lucky enough to be there and I took quite a bit of video. Those videos were available within a day or two of the session itself. September 7-9th proved to be some of the heaviest traffic I've ever enjoyed. Part of that had to do with posting four sets of videos. I must admit to a tiny bit of embarrassment--the videos were pretty shaky as I hadn't packed a tripod. Some videos weren't complete due to battery failures. But, by in large, folks seemed pretty happy they were being popped up on line quickly. This had come off of a nice series of videos at Drupalcamp Colorado that I had posted in June and July.

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Much like many people, I am a person who lives different roles all at the same time. There are instances where different aspects of my life overtake other aspects.

I am deeply interested in the FostAdopt and Foster Care sphere, having personal connections with that world which led to my founding TraumaAdoption.org - a community site. I have a love of technology, and while I'm not a programmer, I have been managing technology projects for many years ranging from the development of ArtistsRegister.com to Web producing the re-build of Popular Science. I love the development process and helping people see what they imagined become a reality. I have worked in the theatre as a lighting guy - theatre was my minor in University. I have also spent most of my life as an artist.

I've started painting again.

This led me to the realization that I needed a presence for my artwork. Over the last few weeks, I have been building a gallery in my spare time in Drupal. I've become extremely comfortable with Drupal - starting that journey with WESTAF in 2006 and continuing it with my employer, pingVision in Boulder.

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First off, an apology. I have much of Chris' Keynote on video, but due to technical difficulties I lost the last chunk of it. I debated posting what I had and have come to the conclusion that some video is better than none.

I thought that Chris had a lot of good points in his presentation about who the Drupal audience/consumer is and how we (as a community) value or diminish value of different contributions.

Whether you agree with his remarks or not, he was animated and interesting to watch.

So, without ado, my shaky video from the second keynote.

Part I

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Greg Knaddison (Greggles), Ben Jeavons (Coltrane) and Brad Bowman (beeradb) gave a session on modules you might consider using when you build a Drupal site. This was kind of the followup to the session at Drupalcamp Colorado. The first set of videos can be seen on the Camp post - and I had a tripod there so the video is quite a bit more steady - but the presentation in Paris was a little different.

Posted below are the videos from that presentation. I hope they are informative.

Part I

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Mark Boulton gave a great presentation at Drupalcon Paris on using grids for design covering his design process.

This series of videos covers the session. Sorry, no tripod - the videos were taken with my iPhone.

Hope you enjoy them.

Part I

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The Economist project really reflected a collaboration between quite a few shops out there with the Economist as the central hub of activity. They worked using several teams all using Scrum meaning that there needed to be a scrum of scrums each day. I found the informal style of the talk easy to watch. Here are my shaky videos of the presentation.

NOTE: Sorry about 5 and 6 being QuickTime - I'm waiting on the embed codes from blip.tv. Click twice to start those videos or click twice to stop them.

Part I

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Roel De Meester gave a talk on Aegir at Drupalcon Paris. These are my notes.

The Aegir session covered a basic overview of what and how the system can be used to rapidly deploy instants of Drupal. It culminated with three short case studies of how it is currently being used.

What is Aegir? Aegir is simply a bunch of linux scripts plus a Drupal site. You can think of it as one site to lead them all. The current beta (0.3) is a stable release and can be deployed.

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I'm sitting on a plane from Paris to Philadelphia after Drupalcon. My feeling was very good about the Con. The presentations that I attended were, in general, good. There were a few that were not-so-great, but that's pretty normal. Not all sessions will be great. I took quite a bit of video - not all sessions, but quite a few. I took some notes. I'll get my notes and video up on line as I'm able.

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Here are the shaky videos I took yesterday from Dries' "State of Drupal" keynote. Most are on YouTube - one ended up on BlipTV because it ended up being 17 seconds longer than the 10 minute mark.

I hope you enjoy them!

Keynote 1

Keynote 2

Keynote 3

Keynote 4

Keynote 5

Keynote 6

Keynote 7

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On August 8th, Ian Cairns and Matt Tucker presented on Open Atrium. Video was taken from several angles and cut together by Laura Scott, the President and Creative Director of pingVision. Laura posted the video this morning on blip.tv - I mentioned I'd link to it at the time I posted my comments. Thanks Laura!

Here it is:

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At tonight's DBUG meeting in Boulder Ian Cairns from Development Seed and Matt Tucker from pingVision demo-ed Open Atrium. These are my rough notes from the presenation. pingVision has taken video which will be posted in the near future.

Open Atrium is an install profile (albeit a complicated one) to create a client based intranet.

Open Atrium is an intranet in a box that has group spaces to allow different teams to have their own conversations. It comes with six features - a blog, a wiki, a calendar, a to do list, a shoutbox, and a dashboard to manage it all.

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It seems every 6 months or so I'm writing a post similar to this one. A contingent of us from pingVision will be making the trek over the pond to attend the conference. We have, once again, rented a flat near a metro stop rather than getting hotel rooms.
There are several benefits to this kind of arrangement.

• It is cheaper per person.
• Given that we are away from the office for a week, it is helpful that we're able to use the flat as a surrogate office, at least a little bit.
• We can purchase food from the local market rather than always eating at restaurants.

If you have a group, consider looking for an apartment or flat before finding a hotel. They are good value.

I generally use Vacation Rentals by Owners when looking for a place, but there are other services as well.

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I didn't catch the video for the Panels portion of this presentation, but I did manage to get the majority of the Skinr demo and discussion. Don't expect any panels information in this post or in the videos.

Thanks to Stephanie Pakrul, Chris Fassnacht, Jay Wolf, and Chris Bryant for presenting.

A podcast of the whole presentation is available on archive.org here:

http://www.archive.org/details/PanelsAndSkinr-StephaniePakrul-Drupalcolorado

The Skinr project can be found on Drupal at: drupal.org/project/skinr

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David Lanier from Amarillo Texas attended camp in Colorado this year and presented on Taxonomy.

My notes are a little light from this session and I was at the back of the classroom - meaning the video isn't great. You'll probably want to wear headphones for the dialogue.

David managed the session like a meetup encouraging questions throughout.

David started with Concepts, and then looked at some Implementations, finally he looked at Alternatives.

Taxonomy is a system of classification, categories, tags, and naming. Taxonomy makes things easier to categorize.

The Terminology Of Taxonomy is helpful to define.

• taxonomy is the "system"
• vocabulary are "facets"
• terms are "categories or tags"
• tags are then applied to nodes

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