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Denver/Boulder New Tech Meetup - August 2008

Greg — Wed, 06 Aug 2008 15:51:26 +0000

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.

The cost is $4 per attendee. Personally, I would simply build the conference registration site with a richer application that already includes features like this or where it is easy to add features like this. However, their integration to 3rd party social networks is truly valuable (at least until we get things like OpenSocial out into the wild).

Ignighter - "group to group" dating.

Firefox on Mac with some sort of demo/reply software that was typing things in for them. Blog WordPress. YSlow: "F" (37 - and it shows - painfully slow!)

They feel that Match, eHarmony, etc. are a bit more targetted at "old" people. Group dating is safer, less awkward, more fun. Provided a relatively funny (though sexist) presentation.

Business Plan:
1. Get users dating
2. ?
3. Profit!

Serious revenue streams: Advertising, premiums memberships, venues. They started as a Facebook application, thinking of integration with other systems. Will soon provide a "Post your plans" feature. Since this is not an official "date" this feature will help reduce the pressure and awkwardness.

Occipital - Automated Photo Tagging/Organizing with Immersive Gallery Visualization

Powerpoint and IE on Vista. Blog: Wordpress. YSlow score (for blog): F (53).

This was the evening's only non-web presentation. They started with a history of photos culminating in the point that modern photographers take hundreds of photos and spend too much time organizing them. Occipital organizes photos for you using your vast computing resources.

The software starts by churning through your photos for a long time looking at the pixels in the photos for patterns. The real fun, though, is in an immersive photo gallery experience where you can alter your views of your photos. You can cluster photos by time - which is a great first step. Then, if your camera can geo-tag at least some of the photos, it can show them by geo-tag & time to plot the photos on the path where they were taken (this would be awesome for a hiking trip, skiing, or walking tour of a city).

Finds similar items between photos and automatically groups those photos together. So, every photo where you wore that one favorite shirt could get grouped together, or perhaps every photo of your mom. Based on geo-data and partial pixel matches on the edges of the photos it can also creates automatic panoramas of photos.

Frankly the demo was totally unbelievable. I loved this software and can't wait for it to be widely available.

To participate the pilot program send them an email @occipital.com

What about Photosynth? Photosynth takes thousands of photos of a public place and merges them. Occipital brings this and more to you individually.

PeoplsSoftwareCompany / WhozAround - Local to local, non dating.

PowerPoint / Firefox on Vista. Blog: Wordpress. YSlow: D (62).

Started with a 4 box matrix showing availability information (calendar) and awareness(?) (twitter, IM). Guess what? They're in the top right! It is not YASN (yet another social network). Instead they integrate with your existing social network/twitter to help match you up with people who are or will be near you and help you invite them to meet up and manage their invitations to you. Provides an iCal, e-mail, rss feed of your appointments or an integrated web page with a stream of potential invites.

It is local to local, but not dating specific meetings. Wanted to thank Techstars and Boulder who helped a Silicon Valley/Boston women get together and start a company. Also, their presentation included lolcats. Well done.

Foodzie Yet Another e-commerce Platform! (for artisan food producers)

Presented with Safari and Keynote on Mac. Blog: Wordpress. YSlow: C (72).

Bring food from artisan food producers -> you.
Not just e-commerce. Producer/Consumer community and filtering. Filters will provide for "foods within X miles" or "organic" etc. to help you find exactly what you need.

Gyminee Exercise/Nutrition tracking + social network

Keynote and Safari on Mac. Blog: WordPress. YSlow: B (84).

When I heard "Fitness Tracking + Social Networking" I initially thought that this was going to be bad. The recent trend of "anything" + social networking is a little too much to stomach. However...this was one of the more polished business ideas and more successful implementations of the night. Their site provides valuable exercise routines, goal monitoring, fitness tracking and advice, and the social networking is well integrated: you can create group challenges like your own private "Biggest Loser."

Currently have 35K registered users and 100K monthly visitors. Their revenue model is currently based on a direct to consumers "pro" subscription for enhanced features, but also weighing options for gym partnerships and ads.

No device integration for things like Nike running monitor, pedometers, gps monitors, but are considering it.

The Dao of the Drupal Community

Greg — Sat, 26 Jul 2008 19:07:25 +0000

Greg Knaddison

Growing Venture Solutions

July 2008
DrupalCamp Colorado

What confuses you?
What upsets you?
What don't you understand?

It's not just the code...

How do you pronounce Drupal?

DROO - puhll.

How do you pronounce Buytaert?

BUY - tart.

Diverse Communinity.
"Volunteers" (paid or hope to be paid)

Why are releases so fast/slow?

It's ready when it's ready.
(and you can help)

Do-ocracy
Why does chx decide so many things in Drupal?

Because chx decides so many things in Drupal.

Where do I find the roadmap?

There isn't one.
But, there are predictions (6.x and 7.x)
And personal battle plans (2007 and 2008)

Why are there major changes in every release that break the API?

The drop is always moving.

Why isn't feature X in core?

Core is small with APIs.

Where is the "Personals" module?

There is no personals module.

So Drupal is weak if it can't do that...

Well, views+cck+buddylist+privatemessage+
...
= Personals module

Think "features" not "type"

Be thankful.

Use a module? Thank a developer.
Submit a bug (nicely).
Test a patch.

Karma is our currency - can be bought.
Don't demand things (unless you have enough...).
Toot your own horn a little when you do help.

I found this bug. Why doesn't anyone care?

What to do when you find a bug
Getting a bug fixed sooner
How to write a good issue report

How can I get help with my problem?

http://drupal.org/support
Search first, ask smart questions.
Paid support

What are the new developments?

issues.
Mailing lists, Planet, forums, groups.drupal.org, IRC.

How come there's so many modules that do the same thing?

Do-ocracy + different goals = multiple modules
Desire for credit...
Incompatabilities at one point go away...

Code is gold.

DrupalCamp Colorado - Welcome!

Greg — Sat, 26 Jul 2008 06:52:26 +0000

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)

+ words = presentation!

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

Quick Introduction to Views 2

Greg — Thu, 24 Jul 2008 22:16:01 +0000

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!

Goodbye DrupalCamp Colorado 2008

Greg — Thu, 24 Jul 2008 21:15:33 +0000

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.

Token Module: How I Learned To Use the Token API and Stop Re-Implementing Dynamic String Replacement

Greg — Thu, 24 Jul 2008 17:47:43 +0000

Greg Knaddison

Growing Venture Solutions

July 2008
DrupalCamp Colorado

What are Tokens?
Little bits of text that get replaced with other bits of text.

Have you used:
ecommerce like ec_mail Custom Breadcrumbs Organic Groups - og Automatic Nodetitles (aka auto_nodetitle) Pathauto Upload Path PressFlow Placement Ubercart Invite Tokenize Audio Workflow-ng CCK Taxonomy CCK Full Name CCK Taxonomy SSU (Super Select Ultra) Fieldset Menus Node Relativity Backup and Migrate User stats Simplefeed Page title Token Node Tokens (TNT) Temporary Invitation Activity Type-local nids FileField Actions Token Email for 5.x
Me too.

If you haven't...here's a quick demo.

Token for Developers:
// Consuming tokens
// [user-name] - The name of the currently logged in user.
$original = 'Hello [user-name]';
drupal_set_message(token_replace($original, $type = 'global', $object = NULL,
$leading = '[', $trailing = ']')
// Prints "Hello greggles"

Providing Your Own Tokens
hook_token_list()
hook_token_values()

Questions? Ideas For Improvement? Bugs?

Web Application Security in Denver

Greg — Mon, 21 Jul 2008 20:00:32 +0000

Web Application Security is a growing interest for me. Some activities I attended last week seem to show that it's a growing interest in general. Last Wednesday night the OWASP Denver chapter hosted a meeting about about 50 people at Raytheon Polar Services in Southeast Denver. After the free pizza and administrivia, the meat of the presentation was from the two major developers of Grendel Scan.

The Open Web Application Security Project - Denver

As chapter organizer David Campbell said, OWASP could also stand for Owning Web Applications while Sipping Pints. All I can say is that if you're a developer you should go to at least one OWASP meeting. You'll learn enough that you'll be scared - which is the right place to start. Then you can harness that fear and learn enough to be empowered to protect your code. If you're a manager, you need to give your employees time off so they'll go to this.

Then, you shold look for tools that can help your developers and QA folks in their work.

Vulnerability Assessments With Grendel Scan

Grendel Scan is a vulnerability assessment tool written by David Byrne and Eric Duprey, employees of TrustWave and Echostar respectively. It is a surprisingly powerful tool given that they've only been working on it for about a year. The 1.0 version will be released at the upcoming DefCon and I think it will instantly become pretty popular. In my initial testing it found weaknesses while providing relatively few false positives. Unfortunately, the version currently

But, as the authors of Grendel stressed several times, scanning tools are just a start. What you really need is a complete end-to-end consciousness of security issues.

HP / SpiDynamics - Live Hacking Workshop

Given that this session was run by a big company, hosted for free in a hotel conference room and included a free breakfast I was quite happily surprised that it was not a sales pitch. David Nester has my respect for that.

The session gave really useful information: first about taking a prioritized "risk management" approach to security and second about some of the basics of security vulnerabilities. He covered SQL Injection, Authentication Weakness, Application Logic weaknesses, Cross Site Scripting, AJAX Weaknesses, Attacking the Host (OS/Network), and User Training.

The presentation was quite practical - nobody can follow the "perfect" path to security. Instead they promote a risk weighted approach so that your effortss are matched to the size of your exposure.

You can view the presentation slides online. They also offer a free SQL Injection scanner - Scrawler.

DrupalCamp Colorado - Great Sessions, Sponsors, Prizes

Greg — Tue, 08 Jul 2008 16:40:00 +0000

We're just under 3 weeks away from DrupalCamp Colorado 2008 which will be held July 26th and 27th. We're accepting more presentations and already have several great sessions to vote on.

I want to highlight a few notable things about this DrupalCamp.

Remote Presenters Welcome

Thanks to the work of Kevin Reynen we are welcoming remote presenters to the camp. If you can't make it to Colorado but want to share your message, this is your opportunity.

Great Sponsors and Prizes

We've already filled several sponsor positions (though there are more available). Perhaps the most exciting one to me is that ActiveState has donated a t-shirt and free copy of KomodoIDE for us to give away. So, that $10 entry fee now just became entry in a raffle for a $300 piece of software.

We're Going to Sell Out 100 Seats

Ok, this may not be all that noteworthy since it seems to happen at most Drupal events, but the registration capability has been open for a little over a week now, we've got 3 weeks left, and we've got 40% of the spaces reserved. We're reserving the spaces necessary for the top tier sponsorships and beyond that it's first come-first served system, so please register and reserve your space.

We've got Two Awesome Drupal Logos

When our logo contest left us with a tie we decided to just use both! The first one is the nice Druplicon all decked out with a hat to keep it warm while snowboarding at the top of this post. The second one is this Drupal-modified license plate which will be on our t-shirts. The t-shirts are still in production, but I can simply say that we've decided to get some stylish shirts instead of "just another white conference shirt" so we hope that you'll like them.

Our thanks to Jacob Redding and Nedjo Rodgers of the Drupal Association who put together a really useful Drupal Camp Organizing Guide.

This is the first "big" DrupalCamp that we've run in Colorado. 1 year ago we had about 20 people at an event in Boulder. A few months ago a "patch review" camp brought several folks together at a local university. The past events have been more focused on technical topics and not the larger, two day, unconference style events that most DrupalCamp folks are used to where all topics are on-topic. This is yet another milemarker on a path towards creating a Drupal nirvana here in the Rocky Mountains.

Why You Should Use Pathauto (or at least Path Aliases for Many Pages)

Greg — Thu, 03 Jul 2008 20:29:29 +0000

I recently saw a comment about Pathauto and started writing a really long reply that seemed more valuable to share here.

Basically one of the questions people have is "Why should I use Pathauto? If I don't care about SEO is there any other reason?"

This is a valid question to me. There is some indication that users don't look at the URL bar. During the Usability testing at UMN we never noticed people looking at the URL bar in the eye-tracking data. But some people certainly do look at the URL bar - people who like "hackable urls" do

Hackable URLs

I use it extensively to create "hackable URLs" that are valuable to a user. A "hackable url" or "index alias" is the feature on a site where you have a post and then users can remove the title down to the previous URL element and get the other posts from that month, one more layer for the year, and one more for that user since forever. See - fun! I even made a movie about it:

Site Credibility Prior to the Click

I frequently get URLs sent to me via email and IM. Compare these two URLs:

http://drupalcampcolorado.org/node/38

vs.

http://drupalcampcolorado.org/content/our-sponsors

Which one are you more likely to click on? Which one helps you understand what content you are going to get before you even get there?

Easy to Remember URLs

Let's face it, unless you are a really passionate individual you just aren't going to spend your day memorizing node numbers on your site. But, there is a good chance that you can remember the words in the title that become part of the URL. It's much easier to know that http://example.com/about is the page and not http://example.com/node/312

Reliable Module - Easy to Use

For almost 1 year and 11 months now I've been working on Pathauto as the maintainer. A few months ago Freso started helping out a ton in the issue queue. There are several other people (notably steamedpenguin and the module's original author mikeryan) helping out in the issue queue. So, the "bus factor" and the "mean time to issue response" on the module are both very good.

The hot new releases of Pathauto for Drupal 6.x and 5.x are very stable. Very, very stable. The 6.x branch even has some basic testing via the SimpleTest module.

You can argue that it's not easy enough to use. Well, there are several issues in the issue queue related to that which will be addressed in the 6.x-2.x release of Pathauto. If you'd like to help with ideas on how to improve the UI please jump in!

Entrepreneurial Standards Benchmark Survey

Greg — Thu, 26 Jun 2008 16:48:33 +0000

I recently took the Benchmark Survey from the Entrepreneurial Standards Forum. I have to say, I was surprised by the ease of the survey and the value of the analysis provided inside of the interface.

About the Entrepreneurial Standards Forum

The Entrepreneurial Standards Forum is a non-profit that aims to help entrepreneurs get their businesses started. So often businesses will focus on the wrong things, but they don't know that they were focusing on the wrong things until it is too late and they are already out of business. The Benchmark Survey has the data to be able to say which factors are important to success.

One great value in the survey is that it is meant to be taken at multiple points (or at the same time with different viewpoints). So, I took it from the perspective of this business 2 years ago. The survey itself was fairly painless - just a few simple background questions and a few business questions that tickled my brain a little. The results are very valuable and easy to understand.

This screenshot has some information removed from it, but you can still understand what it's getting across: your answers compared to the answers of previously successful entrepreneurs. Very powerful stuff. If you are interested in how your business compares, register and take the survey.