Joe's blog

Speak out for the free and open internet!

Take action to keep the internet free and open. Google and Wikipedia among many others who pride themselves on providing free and open content are against the SOPA and PIPA legislation in their present form. Did you catch Wikipedia and Google blacked out?

See more details on SOPA at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:SOPA_initiative/Learn_more (which is not blacked out) and on PIPA at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PROTECT_IP_Act. See the inside conversation in the Drupal world at http://drupal.org/search/apachesolr_multisitesearch/sopa. We urge you to contact your representatives and make your opposition to this legislation known. Making your view known to Patrick Leahy might be helpful as he's one of the lead sponsors of PIPA.

I spoke to one of Leahy's staffers today and he told me that he didn't know why Google and Wikipedia were blacked out. He said PIPA would only effect overseas companies. After looking at the PIPA bill more closely and research on Wikipeida it appears he's wrong:

Search engines—such as Google—would be ordered to "(i) remove or disable access to the Internet site associated with the domain name set forth in the [court] order; or (ii) not serve a hypertext link to such Internet site."

See the detail in the bill at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PROTECT_IP_Act#cite_note-13, etc. Think of how much work it would be for Google or any hosting service (GoDaddy, HotDrupal, 1and1, your_host_here) to pore through all their content and remove links to "rogue sites."

Also see http://www.savetheinternet.com/pipa-whiplist for PIPA supporters and the lowdown from the Huffington Post.

Just put in place a server with a Linux Debian base system with a Koha library system installed for the Pringle Herbarium at UVM. This work is part of the Tryon Library at the herbarium.

On the right, see the Tryon's in this great shot from the 1950s with their cat Boriwog at the Missouri Botanical Gardens.

I was happy to work with Dr. Michael Sundue on this project. He will be maintaining and configuring the library system and populating the library with all the great unique publications that the herbarium has to offer.

This is a great example of Open Source in action:

• Solid Debian Linux base system
• Robust Koha Integrated Library System
• Cooperation between Academia and Unix/Linux
• Sharing Academic resources through the Tryon Library

This solution gives the Library a solid base to build on and expand and it keeps their costs low. It allows them to handle things themselves and they can always call for support if they need it. Libraries are some of the oldest Open Source institutions out there and we're happy to be a small part of this project. Go Pteridophytes!

You can lead a horse to water ...

With Google Analytics, you can see if the horse got to the water. You can't see if they drank ;-) I recently was looking over an Analytics report for a client who runs a farm with a CSA (community supported agriculture program). They're trying to get people to sign up for their CSA for this season. I helped them with a few formatting details as they fine tuned the page describing their CSA offering for this season. They've been busy this winter updating their website with all the cool and unique things they're doing at their farm.

Check out their traffic spike day after the Farmer's Market:

The details will remain confidential, but the relative spike is clear. What does this mean? It means they got a big jump in visitors on the Sunday after the Farmer's Market. They were handing out flyers with their website URL at the market. Analytics also shows they got lots of traffic to the page describing their CSA offering. This is the horse coming to the water.

The website can't sell a CSA share, but it can definitely give potential customers more information and tell them what differentiates you from the other guy. In Face to Face Burlington, it's the Farmer that will sell the share (or not).

The website can help the horse appreciate how cool and refreshing the water is, but it can't make him drink.

I'm at DrupalCon Chicago with about 3000 other Drupaleros. Had to drive through the big storm on Monday to get to Albany first! It was quite an adventure. The Chicago architecture is awesome: cutting edge design from the 1920s that still is stunning.

Great party last night at the Field Museum. Check out the Drupal crowd hanging out with Sue the Trex.

Drupal is alive and well. More DrupalCon attendees, more sponsors, more exhibitors, more growth. There's lots of excitement about Drupal in mobile devices, HTML 5, Drupal 7 and much more.

I saw my old friend Ryan, who is now helping run Commerce Guys: http://www.commerceguys.com/. I remeber meeting Ryan some years ago when he was building an ecommerce system part time for his boss, a refridgerator salesman. This system went on to become http://ubercart.org. He's come a long way since then. He now jets back and forth to Paris to meet with investors! You gotta love the power of Drupal and Ryan's hard work and big smile.

I got a great walk up Mount Royal in early this morning. Saw the sun rise over Montreal as jogger sand bikers jogged and rode by. It was a good way to start the day with some fresh air before a lot of hacking and sitting and listening to presentations.

Great keynote by Walkah on the open web. There are about 300 people in attendance.

Drupal is alive and well and the community is strong. See all the details on Montreal DrupalCamp at http://www.drupalcampmontreal.com/.

The Economist is now using Drupal 6 to serve the vast majority of content pages to its flagship web site, economist.com. The homepage is Drupal powered, along with all articles, channels, comments, and more. The Economist evaluated several open source CMS and proprietary solutions aimed at media publishers. In the end, The Economist chose Drupal for its vibrant community, and the ecosystem of modules that it produces.

"The crypto wars are back in full force, and it's time for everyone who cares about privacy to stand up and defend it: no back doors and no bans on the tools that protect our communications."

Check out the Electronic Freedom Foundation's post on the recent New York Times front page story on the US Government wanting to insert back doors in all the cryptography systems: http://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2010/09/government-seeks.

We're happy to announce our latest site launch for Blackwing X. Check out http://blackwingx.org for hard hitting anti-war poetry and some new perspective. When I first read Blackwing X's work, I thought he had been on the ground in Iraq and Afghanistan because the descriptions were so detailed.

Blackwing X is passionate about his poetry and wanted a site that communicated clearly without glitz or glitter. With poems like his, no embellishments are needed. I applaud his passion and commitment and hope his poems speak clearly to his readers.

I was sorting through a list of cards while cleaning out my wallet and came across Nicko's card. Nicko runs East Hill Tree Farm in Plainfield. Check out http://easthilltreefarm.com/ for a great simple site with some super design elements.

The logo and graphics in the block print style fit perfectly with Nicko's focus: "to reestablish the garden of Eden." The site communicates clearly. It has directions to the nursery prominently featured on all pages. The main navigation elements are simple and uncluttered.

We've recently written a spider for a client that walks their whole site and lists all connections between pages. This produces a brute listing of 29,000+ connections. We're doing this in preparation for a Drupal 7 (that's right d7!) transition. All links in the site content need to go to the correct new locations in the new site. For this to happen we need to correlate the new locations with the old locations so we can correctly rewire the new links.