rare pattern thoughts in a blog

Lo and behold, this past Wednesday, after waiting all day for the Drupal 6.4 update that was rumored to be coming out, it finally was released at around 6:30pm MDT. We saw it at the DBUG Meetup during setup, and I knew that once again it was time to do some updating. At pingVision, we have an entire dev/test/production process for all of our clients' and our own sites. But when it comes to my own sites, I prefer to do it myself as much as possible so that I can keep my fingers in code and configuration, even while my more official presidential responsibilities tend to pull me in other directions.

And yet my own sites are still under Subversion, so it's not just a matter of uploading the new code and being done with it. No, I have to do it through SVN.

Now if you are like me (and unlike our developers), and have a general preference for a good GUI over using the command line, and are working on OS X and using version control like Subversion, then you likely have run into the problem that the architects of Finder have not deigned to solve: You cannot "merge" folders in OS X using Finder. No, Finder will overwrite folders completely.

Why is this a problem? Anyone who uses Subversion (or other version controller) will know what I'm talking about: If you try to just overwrite wholesale a folder that's under version control, you end up deleting the hidden .svn folder, which has the versioning information. And that leads to Dante's SVN Inferno, where all sorts of error demons torment you while you wail with pangs of regret: Oh, why didn't I merge that folder instead of replacing it?

Using Unix command line, you can of course use mv -v to merge folders, but that forces you to use command line. Since OS X is built upon Unix, I and many others wonder why Finder does not offer this option, not even with contorting combinations of control, option, command and shift.

It's ridiculous. –Especially when you consider that your basic (s)ftp applications can merge folders without a problem. This isn't rocket science.

A trick to merge folders on Mac I figured out a couple of years ago (when I was first introduced to SVN workflows) is this: ftp from your computer to your computer, using your favorite ftp application.

That's right, rather than copy or drag files from folder to folder using Finder, you drag files from folder to folder using ftp. (I use Transmit, but this will work with any ftp app that can merge folders. A free one I can recommend is Cyberduck.)

To enable this approach, all you need to do is turn on ftp access in OS X.

You do this in Preferences -> Sharing.

Click the checkbox to enable "file sharing".

Then, with the file sharing option highlighted, as pictured, click on the Options button down in the lower right-hand area of the window.

This reveals the kinds of file sharing you want to enable, and one of them is ftp. Enable that.

Underneath you will now see a message that provides the IP address where your computer can be reached. You just enter that IP address into your ftp app as the remote server. You may need to enter your username and password for your Mac.

That's it. Now just drag folders over from your desktop into the appropriate area on your ftp app and the merge will happen.

Note: Depending upon the ftp app, you may need to set appropriate preferences to merge folders. Here are the settings I use in Transmit:

This way you can maintain your website in a dev environment on your Mac desktop or laptop, and manage updating tasks easily without having to do SVN gymnastics or work in Terminal.

I welcome your comments.

Last month we were commissioned to develop rather quickly a community website where potential applicants to the Knight News Challenge could workshop their applications, get feedback from mentors and peers, and – hopefully – improve their chances of winning some of the $5 million being granted this year by the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation.
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We designed and developed the site in 2 weeks, from wireframes to beta deployment. The Garage is running Drupal 5, with some customized implementation of the Organic Groups modules. We love working on rapid timetables; it's something we do quite a bit of.

Anyway, here is the video announcement by Kristen Taylor, Online Community Manager for the Knight Foundation – video courtesy of DotSub:

If you are multilingual, you can help get the word out. On the Knight blog, Kristen writes:

We've used a video-sharing service called DotSub above so that the video can be subtitled in many different languages–the News Challenge is an international contest and open to everyone.

You can help us get the word out by going to this video on the DotSub site here and subtitling it in another language (thanks in advance for your help).

There's money to be had here. Seriously, if you have an idea for a project that might fit the mission of the Challenge, go to the News Challenge Garage and start workshopping your application!

While pingVision as a company is one of the many sponsors of DrupalCamp Colorado 2008, several pingVision people are doing presentations and panels.

Here's a quick run-down:

...is doing a BOF on Project Workflow Management and Client Expectations.

Waterfall, Agile, Scrum, UML, Process Diagrams, Wireframes, Design Comps ... how does it all fit together into a clearly defined purpose?

...has a presentation on Advanced AHAH and Modifying Forms, which gets into that lovely UI goodness of dynamic forms generation, drag-and-drop, etc. He's also doing a presentation on Using SimpleTest to Prove Your Code. Very useful to any coder.

...has a presentation on Drupal Benchmarking and Performance, covering:

- Factors that affect performance
- Measuring performance
- Different types of hosting (Shared, VPS, "Grid", Mosso)
- Techniques used to make enterprise websites scalable (ie Facebook, LiveJournal)
- Basics of Performance-friendly Drupal Module development

...is presenting on RESTful services and Drupal, and will be showcasing his brand spanking new REST provider module which provides something of a REST API.

...is presenting on Contributing to Drupal, which is about how anyone can participate in the Drupal community. He is also presenting Drupal Lightning Demos:

Rapid-fire demonstrations of modules, themes, Drupal-powered sites, fancy Drupal code snippets and anything else Drupal related that can be demoed in 5-10 minutes. These are quick, 5-10 minutes including time for questions, demos of something you've built on or with Drupal. Unless we have very few demos there probably won't be time to go looking at code so just show how it works or what it looks like.

He's also doing a session on the Drupal Community:

I'd like to talk about the Drupal community, the ways in which we are open and sponsor participation and the ways we've push people away. Because we have pushed people away. What do we do that is right and what are we doing wrong?

There is also going to be a BOF about Making DrupalCamp Colorado better, led by Kevin Bridges and (hopefully) many other interested folks. Maybe we can pull together a DrupalCon proposal?

I was going to be joining Greg Knaddison in a session where we, as permanent members of the Drupal Association General Assembly, were going to give a little update on what's been happening and attempt to answer questions that may arise, but that proposal was rated lower than the others, so it's not going to happen. No, this is a weekend to get your geek on! See you there!

Today is the last Friday of July, making it SysAdminDay, when we show appreciation for all the hardworking, oft-under-appreciated sysadmins who make our new economy hum along like a well-tuned machine.

Here at pingVision we have several people who serve in the sysadmin role. Our heavy lifter is Andy Lasda, who has scripted our deployments and been involved in most all of our hosting environment setups and performance tuning.

Andy Kirkham is another expert sysadmin in our ranks. Between the two Andys, there's no solvable problem they cannot solve. Yes, you can say "rubbish" and dismiss it as mere enthusiasm, but in this case I think I'm right.

;)

Kevin Bridges also does a fair bit of our sysadmin work and configurations. And of course Ezra Barnett Gildesgame, who is in fact doing a DrupalCamp Colorado presentation this weekend on performance tuning techniques for Drupal.

Thank you, Andy, Andy, Kevin and Ezra! And thank you to the Rackspace Fanatical Support sysadmins who've kept our servers running optimally.

In case you've somehow missed the news, DrupalCamp Colorado is happening this weekend.

greggles posted a nice rundown of things to do for DrupalCamp. Registration is easy. The price is an affordable $10 ... or $25 at the door (if there's room -- the cap is at 100 people).

Hey, and we can haz stickers! Maybe your laptop wants one, too?

DrupalCamp Colorado 2008, happening in Denver, is less than two weeks away, but it's still not too late to submit your session proposal.

It's also not too late to register.

As one of many sponsors of DrupalCamp Colorado*, we hope to see a full house of both the new Drupalers out there as well as the experienced veterans. There are going to host a mix of sessions and BOF's geared towards all areas of interest ... or at least your interests, if you get your session proposal in! (No pressure.)

See you there!

* We developed and host the website. The website design is TBD. Maybe that's worth a session at the 'Camp? What do you think?

We're coming up on the second Tuesday Wednesday of the month again, which means that the Drupal Denver/Boulder User Group is meeting here tomorrow night.

6:30pm - Gathering, pizza, soft drinks
7:00pm - Discussion and presentations

As yet, the agenda is wide open. Possible topics include:

• DrupalCamp Colorado, which is happening on July 26th and 27th in Denver;
• A mini-tour of the pingVision website, newly redeveloped in Drupal 6;
• [Your project or questions]

See you here! [Google map]

Whew! This was a long time coming, and just a tad more than a CSS reboot. We rearchitected the pingVision website from the ground up. Since the initial site had started with Drupal 4.5, there was a lot of legacy cruft in the database, left behind by modules no longer in use and, I have to admit, experiments I tried that didn't quite work out. The old site was launched in January 2005, back when Drupal was still pretty new to me. I've learned some things since then.

So we started over, and simply imported the published content, existing users and taxonomy structures. It was a lot easier than tracking down tables, variables and indexes left behind by modules of yore.

You may have noticed that we now have a video section. As I write this we have nothing completed yet, but we'll have some videos up very soon. We're very excited to get this part of the pingVision creative work back into gear. It's been too long.

This new site, powered by Drupal 6, is the result of weeks of back-burner development and almost a year of architecture and design tweaks, thrashings and polishes. We've leveraged some of our own contributions to the Drupal community, including Nodecarousel and Simplelist, along with some of the wonderful Drupal module staples, such as CCK, Nodequeue, Pathauto and Imagecache.

What do you think? Leave us a comment. We're also giving Mollom a try for comment spam/abuse management, so be nice, or at least polite. ;) And if you find a bug, please spare the comment and just tell us directly.

Tomorrow is the second Wednesday of the month, and that means the Boulder edition of DBUG is happening at 6:30. As usual, we'll have pizza and (soft) drinks.

We encourage people to bring their questions and anything they want to show or present. We will be prepared otherwise to keep things simple:

1. A discussion of SimpleTest techniques, including automating common node tests that we've come up with, that we'd like to share for feedback.
2. An overview of SimpleList, the lightweight page- and blocks-view query builder we developed for Drupal 6, with some discussion as to how to use it, and how it differs from the community mainstay module Views.

Hope to see you here!

While the search continues for location of this July's planned DrupalCamp Colorado, submissions are now open for proposed logos at http://drupalcampcolorado.org.

Designers, work your GIMP out, sharpen your Illustrator, spark your Fireworks or uncap your Photoshop (whew!) and work up a submission that represent Colorado Drupallers to the world!

Submission guidelines are here: http://drupalcampcolorado.org/content/lo...

The existing submissions are here: http://drupalcampcolorado.org/logos

Some discussion and tips can be found in the thread here: http://groups.drupal.org/node/11449

Don't dally. Submissions close on June 1st.

It's rather plain and needs some love (and content). But DrupalCampColorado.org is live and ready to play its role as an online home for the planning, organization, etc. for DrupalCamp Colorado, which has a new session coming in July.

One of the first orders of business is to decide on a logo. We already have some logo submissions on the site now, but we hope there will be many more, so fire up GIMP, Illustrator or your design app of choice and get creative! DrupalCamp logo submissions are open until 5pm on June 1. Voting will start on June 2.

(Then we can maybe have a web design submission round.)

pingVision is pleased to sponsor the initial development, hosting and maintenance of the site, but the ultimate design and all the content is up to DrupalCamp Colorado participants, in true Drupal do-ocracy community fashion.

So come on over, register on the site and join in the effort to make DrupalCamp happen.

In the run-up to the planned DrupalCamp in July, we've reactivated the listserv for discussion about all things Drupal in the greater Boulder/Denver area. If you're interested, please sign up at http://pingv.com/mailman/listinfo/drupal and join the conversation!

Expert in Drupal? Totally new to it? Wanting to really dig into Drupal for a day or two?

A DrupalCamp is being planned. One, maybe two days of code, design, chat, sharing, testing, patching, learning, maybe showing off a little, laughing.

Have a thought on what it should look like? When it should happen? What we might do? Edit the wiki!

See you there! (Where ever that might be.)

For the second year now we've won multiple Horizon Interactive Awards for websites we've developed.

Among the winning sites are Popular Science (Gold in the Magazine & News category), RedBlueAmerica (Silver in the Blog category and Bronze in the Magazine & News category), and Spectrum Magazine (Bronze in the Public Service category).

Of course, we developed all of these sites using Drupal, which itself just won repeat honors in the CNET Webware 100 Awards for best publishing platform.

(Last year, we won a Horizon Interactive Gold Award for our development of the initial BlogHer website and a Bronze for the Stanford Center for Internet and Society.)

The Horizon Interactive Awards Fact Sheet (pdf) provides some background:

The 2007 competition saw nearly 1000 entries from all over the world including nearly all 50 States and many other countries including: Australia, Canada, Chech Republic, Columbia, Croatia, Germany, Egypt, Spain, France, Great Britain, Hong Kong, Hungary, Indonesia, Israel, Italy, Malaysia, New Zealand, Singapore, South Africa, Syria, Thailand, Turkey, and Taiwan.

The Horizon Interactive Awards is a prestigious international competition recognizing outstanding achievement
among interactive media producers from all over the world.

HOW YOUR ENTRIES WERE JUDGED

Entries were judged by an international, volunteer panel of industry professionals with diverse backgrounds and various roles within the interactive media industry. Entries were also evaluated by a panel of end-users making the 2007 results a product of one of the most comprehensive and well-rounded processes of any interactive media competition. The 2007 Judges hailed from the United States, South Africa, Canada, Great Britain, and Turkey.

From the official press release, we also learn:

"The 2008 competition was the most competitive to date. The work in this year’s competition is at such a high level that the judges really had their work cut out for them," said Mike Sauce, founder of the Horizon Interactive Awards. "All of the winning entries displayed a high level of sophistication, aesthetic creativity, technical excellence and clear purpose."

It's always a great honor to win recognition for one's work. The great pleasure was in developing those sites for those clients. It's their success that remains our primary goal. The awards are gravy. We thank the Horizon Interactive Awards for this recognition.