Starbow Consulting

BADCamp 2009 was a complete success! Wow! Almost 300 people walked through the door, to find out what this Drupal thing is all about, to answer questions, to share knowledge, to contribute to the Drupal project, to build community, and to much some vegan donuts.

Thanks to all the speakers, volunteers, sponsors, and everyone that showed up!

Slides and presentation are available at: http://badcamp.net/badcamp-2009-wrapup

Here the slides from my Welcome to BADCamp kickoff:

I just gave a presentation at this month's Berkeley Drupal Users Group on Drupal and the plague that is Blog Spam (http://groups.drupal.org/node/26730). My slides are embedded below:

Registration is now open for BADCamp 2009 - http://badcamp.net/register

This is the third annual Bay Area Drupal Camp held at UC Berkeley. Each year has been a huge success, and a little bigger than the year before. We'll see how many people show up this time. The San Francisco Bay Area is an super-exciting place to be working on Drupal right now. When I started the Berkeley users group, it was the only regular Drupal group in the area. Now there are active groups in San Francisco, Santa Cruz, Silicon Valley and Sacramento, and DrupalCon is coming to SF in 2010! The buzz is palpable.

One of the great things about Drupal is how quickly you can crank one out for a special purpose, like an upcoming event. However, you are then faced with the dilemma of what to do with that site after the event has passed. Often you want to keep the site up for historical reasons, but if it stays a Drupal site, you really should keep up with security updates, which means eventually you'll need to update to the next version of Drupal. Or you can save yourself the bother by converting your site into a static archive.

In a classic case of the cobblers’ kids having no shoes, until yesterday starbowconsulting.com was still running on Drupal 5. With the Drupal 7 code freeze just days away, I figured it was time. Some of my hesitation stemmed from bitter memories. My website has been around since the Drupal 4.6 days, and the upgrades to 4.7 and 5 were unpleasant. Turns out I should have done it months ago. Upgrading 5 to 6 has easily been the most straightforward upgrade yet. It has taken me a fair bit of time, but that is mostly playing with all the new capabilities and having fun retweaking my workflow.

Here is a stream-of-consciousness report of the process.

Just a short note to heap praise on ronan and the Backup and Migrate module. For those of you who have not already discovered this aptly popular module, it allows you to easily backup your Drupal database, from inside of your Drupal site itself. Now, you might be thinking “so what, I already use the phpMyAdmin export”, but IMHO there are two big advantages of B&M.

• Out of the box, B&M is configured to exclude the data from the caches, watchdog, and other huge but non-critical tables.

I love the functionallity of stacking popups in the the Popups API 2.x alphas, but there are a couple of problems with my current approach, which keeps the entire stack in the DOM.

• JavaScript is being executed on the entire DOM. I check, and only execute new js files, but, unlike CSS files, there is no way to unload the js after it has been added to the DOM. I haven’t run into an actual problem from this yet, but it seems inevitable.

Just got done attending the Voices That Matter: Web Design Conference. I had a really good time, very inspiring to see how much the profession has grown up. I might do a more formal write up, but in the mean time, here is my cleaned up twitter stream. I tend to unfollow anyone that does line-by-line reporting of presentations, so I keep it to one or two per session.

• Tue, 2009-04-28 09:09: Attending voicesthatmatter, taking notes for #dcsf2010 proposal.
• Tue, 2009-04-28 10:44: Joel Postman doesn't seem that interested in what he is saying. #vtm
  

Here is a screencast showing off two modules that I have built on top of the Popups API module. They are Popups: Add & Reference, which allows the Node Reference widget to create new nodes, and Popups: Subedit, which allows semi-in-place editing of just parts of a node.

This demo starts with a fresh Drupal 6 install, with the Popups modules, CCK, Node Reference and Admin Menu enabled.

View it full size. You might need to turn up your volume, the sound is a little low.

I am looking for my job next opportunity. In particular I am looking for

• a full-time, or near full-time, position with benefits.
• a collaborative working environment in the San Francisco East Bay Area or accessible by BART.
• an opportunity to do innovative work, especially in the area where Drupal and Ajax intersect.

I have been working with Drupal since 2005, starting in the 4.6 days. I have been creating web applications for a solid decade now, and have been programming professionally for over 15 years.
Personal Highlights

• Authoring over a dozen useful Drupal modules, including Popups API, Popups: Add & Reference, Private Uploads, Find URL Alias, and the Flexinode to CCK Converter (see the whole list at http://drupal.org/user/33290).
• Actively participating in the Drupal community by testing and submitting patches to core and other modules.
• Helping get the #ahah form element (and other improvements) into Drupal 6.
• Founding and organizing the Bay Area Drupal Camp (BADCamp) 2007 and 2008.
• Founding and running the Berkeley Drupal Users Group for the last two years.
• Presenting at OSCMS 2007 (aka DrupalCon Sunnyvale).
• Building the Popups API and seeing other authors build interesting modules on top of it.

If you have something that fits the bill, drop me a line.