blakehall

Wow

On Friday I'm making the trek up 94 to the Twin Cities with some of my "pals from Web414":http://web414.com for the "F1 Overn1ght Webs1te Challenge":http://www.f1webchallenge.com to defend cheesehead honor. We've been "challenged to a bowling duel":http://www.f1webchallenge.com/teams/8-Web414 by "Kyle Drake":http://www.f1webchallenge.com/users/8 the night before the challenge. The event actually gets underway on Saturday March 1st, at 8:30 a.m. Here's a link to the "flick stream":http://flickr.com/groups/637807@N24/pool/ , "the media page":http://www.f1webchallenge.com/media , and a youtube video all for your enjoyment.

Hopefully we'll be able to hold similar events in Madison, Milwaukee, and Chicago in the future. I know lots of nonprofits with small budgets that could use some help. I'm actually leaving the event a little early to catch my flight to "DrupalCon 2008 -- Boston":http://boston2008.drupalcon.org/ . I'll try and post some photos, and a writeup if I don't pass out on the plane.

While drupal-related work occupies a large chunk of my time, I don't always feel like I'm a "contributor" to the project.

I try to balance my drupalkarma with things like DrupalCampWI, and the Madison Drupal Users Group.

Reading the various Drupal 6 release announcements, I came across one from webchick that credits all the contributions to the latest version of drupal. Curious, I checked out greggles contributor calculation, and the results.

With 3 patches I'm # 79 :P

Hopefully I'll see some fellow Wisconsinites on the list for Drupal 7, and maybe I can break the top 50.

After almost a years worth of work, by thousands of developers around the globe Drupal 6 has been released.

This version of Drupal has many UI improvements (especially for site administrators) that are pretty exciting. The block and menu pages now utilize drag and drop for reordering (no more weight system -- at least from the UI). The "sticky" table headers are are a big help on site permission pages.

Now it's time to help module and theme developers upgrade their contributions to Drupal 6, and help with testing (at least that's where I"ll be spending a good chunk of time before DrupalCon Boston).

If you're near Madison, drop by the Drupal Meetup tonight. The event announcment is cross posted at groups.drupal.org/wisconsin and thePHP Meetup group.

I gave my first Drupal talk at the first BarCampMilwaukee, then again at BarCampMadison. By the time BarCampMilwaukee2 rolled around we had 17 participants who tagged themselves with drupal, and two more sessions. In Milwaukee we decided that we might just have the critical mass to have a *Camp dedicated to drupal, and DrupalCampWisconsin was born.

Now we're ten days away, and have 41 folks signed up on the wiki, sponsors to cover the food costs (thanks again Web414, Fresh Coast Ventures, 2XL Networks, Palantir, Cruiskeen Consulting LLC, and EC Connection), and some great sessions lined up. As far as I'm concerned the 19th can't get here fast enough.

So what's next?

I gave a talk at the Madison PHP Meetup Group in November on drupal which drew a good sized crowd. After the talk several folks expressed interest in having a regular Madison-based Drupal User Group (or meetup). I figured it wouldn't be too hard to organize a drupal-related talk once a month, so we're going to give it a shot. The first official gathering of this new group will be another joint-meeting with the PHP group (January meeting info on meetup.com). Hopefully by February, after a successful DrupalCamp we'll be able to spin off and start separate meetings. If you're interested in the group shoot me an email (blake # blakehall * org), or leave a comment.

And don't forget to Sign up for DrupalCampWisconsin if you haven't already!!!

The drop is (finally!) coming to Wisconsin. We've got space secured for a DrupalCamp in Milwaukee on January 19th, 2008. While I've been batting the idea around for quite awhile, I've also done a fair amount of foot-dragging. There were a lot of questions to be answered:

• Can we find space?
• Can we find sponsors?
• Can we find enough people willing to lead sessions?
• Will people show up?

There's definitely some work to be done on some of these fronts, but so far things look pretty encouraging. We've got great space (and wifi) at Milwaukee School of Engineering.

If you're a Drupal ninja, or just wanting to learn more about using Drupal to maintain your web site, I'm sure DrupalCamp will be a good time. You can sign-up here, and since it's free you don't have much reason not to!

BarCampMilwaukee2 -- about a month ago already-- was a great success (more in depth write up coming next week ;)

Pete and I led a session on Creative Commons that seemed quite popular. During BCMKE only about half of the photos tags barcampmilwaukee2 on flickr were CC licensed. As of this morning 1,468 out of 1,600 are (just under 92%). Way to go BarCampers!

I noticed on Lessig's blog this morning that CC has a fund raising drive going on. Since I'm a big fan, and supported of the CC movement I figured I'd let all 6 of you who read this know. So go donate something!

So for those of you following me on twitter, you'll notice that I resigned this week.

Thanks to lots of hard work, and help from Eric (@DANEnet) the drupal conversion of sportsinwisconsin.com is just about done (still some bugs to squash). Eric has also done a great job on the volunteer registration site.

That said, a great opportunity presented itself recently. I am about to become a Senior Web Developer with the folks at the Center for Media and Democracy. With CMD I'll have the opportunity to work on a bunch of cool projects like SourceWatch, PR Watch, Congresspedia, and some other stuff still in the pipeline. I'm really looking forward to working with the group behind some really great books.

From the initial sound of things I've got quite a few drupal projects on my plate already, and I can't wait to get started...

Planning for the second annual BarCamp in Milwaukee is well underway. BarCampMilwaukee2 is scheduled for October 13th and 14th. We've archived the original BarCampMilwaukee Wiki in favor of a Drupal powered site this time around (set up by yours truly).

I claimed a session called BarCampMilaukee.com in Ten Minutes. A bit of an exaggeration? sure. But that's how you get people at your session right. In all reality it didn't take long to set up the site, thanks to the power and flexibility of drupal.

Not to give the whole session away, but here's a brief outline:

• Wiki Install Profile
• CCK
• Views
• + a little bit of clicking-configuration type stuff
• fix bugs

That's really the power in where drupal's been headed the past six months. With very little custom code I was able to setup a functional (while not beautiful) site to organize a BarCamp.

There is already a bit of chatter on technorati about the event. It should be a great time. This year we can only accommodate 250 participants, so be sure to sign-up early. Next step for me is to compile a list of folks I'd like to see there, or like to meet (drupal ninjas -- I'm looking at you)...

Thanks again to everyone who made it out to our reception. The folks at the Candlewood Suites were great hosts. It was neat being their first event; Aside: their grand opening was three days before the reception. I've got the photos on flickr, comment away.

Jeni and I are planning an August 2008 trip to London to visit Ronnie and Liz. I'm hoping to catch a Premier League match. Maybe by then Watford will be back in the league; Aside2: I was a year behind Jay DeMerit in High School, so it was fun watching him play for the national team this summer. In any case I hope to get a round in at St Andrews as well (being the birthplace of golf and all). It should be a fun trip to plan and research...