This year marked my first exposure to the TLT Symposium, but from what I witnessed it was truly an impressive experience and awesome success. How could you not be impressed by keynote speaker, Lawrence Lessig's, presentation. I really need to watch it again. It was so simple, so logical, and actually quite emotional and entertaining. I was pretty busy running around as (unofficial) Team Paparazzi, twittering, and blogging. It was great meeting so many people who I only knew by reputation or through twitter and especially witnessing the power of hashtags. It was also so overwhelmingly amazing to see the tags in action, especially the periodic table of tags and the tag-cupcake mashup! It really embodied an active culture of technology and community, learning and sharing. I am very eager to see what next year's effort will bring.
On March 12-13, I attended the Plone Symposium East 2008, held at the Nittany Lion Inn. The event featured an educational seminar by noted Plone trainer Joel Burton, thirty great presentations by some of the more experienced members of the Plone community and several programming sprint. As expected, Joel Burton was a fantastic presenter. He could offer training for just about anything and I would take it, really. Overall, I thought it was pretty great and would definitely recommend attending if you are interested in working with Plone.
Here are some things I took away from the event...
plone4artists got my attention in that it is a suite of products for building a community multimedia website (think youtube). It handles audio, video, calendar, podcasting, uploading, ratings and
tagging. see plone.tv
Probably one of the most impressive demonstrations of product development was High Res Images - An in-progress Flash add-on software for Plone allows for zooming images and annotations. It uses Python to break high-res, large images into smaller tiles which are stored as jpgs on any server. Annotations are powered by Plone, creating an xml file.
FacultyStaffDirectory. From our own Weblion, this products is a no brainer. Great for staff directories, and configurable to include curriculum vitae, promotion notices, and v-card exports.
And the best advice was gleaned from these two sessions:
On a Budget
Principles of Simplicity
- don't make too many customizations at first
- when you customize, do it the Plone way
- Get enough training to know what that way is
- Make friends
(see learnplone.org and Plone4Universities)
Migrations and Migraines
1. Keeping Your Balance
- maintaining enthusiasm vs maintaining control
- allowing input vs pursuing a vision
- "i'll take that under consideration"
- encouraging excitement vs managing expectations
2. Institutional Inertia
- projects tend to fail because people expect them to
3. The Value of Brute Force
- doing it 'the right way' shouldn't prevent getting it done
4. Expect the Unprepared
- no matter what you do, some people will not do what they need to do to be ready
- they will blame you for this.
5. Have a Thick Skin (self-explanatory)
The Chicken Cosmo: a dining commons staple of Penn State residents over the past 26 years. The last time I had one was almost exactly ten years ago (sheesh). Today was the first time I'd had one since then and will be the last time I and anyone else will ever again.
We had a slight anxiety about eating in the commons with students ten years younger than us. But there were plenty of staffers and faculty. I only vaguely remembered that you had to go upstairs in Waring to get to the cafeteria. To add further to the overwhelming sense of nostalgia, we entered the stairwell at the exact moment that Guns and Roses' Sweet Child 'O Mine came on (granted wrong era, but still possesses strong nostalgic triggers). Once there, we paid in cash: $9.75 per person. There was a contest for a chicken cosmo t-shirt with a slogan something to the effect of "the sky is falling" -- despite my winning streak lately, I did not win. The only thing that really made us stick out was our unfamiliarity of the layout (they've remodeled) and wonder and awe at the sheer amount of food. While it is just like any all-you-can-eat establishment (which we rarely go to), everything at the dining commons is awesome. And I have NEVER witnessed the sheer genius of the CUPCAKE STATION!!!
Apparently, Google and Facebook are fighting hard to hire this years crop of computer science graduates, we’ve heard, and ground zero is Stanford. Salaries starting out at $92-95k, sign me up! I find the classes being offered such as Facebook Applications and Learning from YouTube very interesting, I wish I could sit in and wonder what PSU offers and where it sits in the spectrum. The article does ask the question, "If you are a CS student at Stanford or another top university, tell us what’s happening with recruiting."
Article, Techcrunch
OOo, I just got an email announcement from lynda.com that they now have an exclusive training seminar by one of my favorite illustrators, Simone Legno of tokidoki.it!
If you've been in my cubicle, you may have noticed that I collect some odd toys and wear strange purses, several by tokidoki specifically:
tokidoki: Creative Inspiration
with: Simone Legno and tokidoki
Duration: 1 hour
The Japanese-inspired lifestyle brand tokidoki, created by Italian artist and designer Simone Legno, started as a set of characters on a personal website and has since exploded into a wildly successful, and internationally recognized collection. tokidoki: Creative Inspiration explores Simone's techniques and methods for building some of his popular tokidoki characters using Adobe Illustrator. Take a peek into his sketchbook, and learn how he creates one of his popular skatedecks from start to finish.
I'm very excited that yesterday afternoon marked the kick-off meeting for the TLT Web Team to begin plans for the organization's website redesign.
I've been honing a redesign strategy mainly derived from Web ReDesign 2.0: Workflow that Works, which I highly recommend. (There is a training video available on Lynda.com that is a supplement to the book, but is a great intro to the process with updated tactics.) At this point, I've been focusing mostly on the first major step of the process which is defining the project. This step involves discovering who the audience is via creating user profiles and conducting user and stakeholder interviews. It involves planning via identifying who else should join or assist our team, what the resources are, plan for iterative usability testing, and set up a communication staging area where the team can all stay on the same page. And finally, it involves clarifying in a written document the high level goals and initiatives of this phase of the redesign (and goals for subsequent iterations) and balancing the users' expectations and needs with the stakeholders' strategic vision and goals, looking at the organization as a whole. It will outline how long something is going to take, why we're doing things the way we're doing them, and what elements are important. This document will serve to get buy in and get everyone on the same page and kick off the project.
Some things of note:
- The audience was identified as mainly faculty across the entire university as well as some student oriented services.
- Organize around the things that we do and not how we're structured.
- Another thing we can do immediately is make a note on the current TLT site's homepage that gives notice that a redesign is in the works and solicit volunteers for user interview and get general feedback and suggestions.
- In the next meeting we will also outline the process towards conducting user interviews and creating user personas.
A "Book" has been created on the TLT Staff Intranet Site to facilitate feedback and collaboration from all of TLT. You can get to the "Book" by navigating to Books > TLT Unit Website ReDesign or directly to this URL: https://staff.tlt.psu.edu/node/4105.
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On November 5th - 9th, 2007, my coworker Jason Heffner and I attended both the Drupal Intensive and the Drupal Theming workshops in Providence, RI hosted by Lullabot. We spent the week ultimately building and theming a flickr-clone website using Drupal called 
As a Drupal newbie, it was a lot to absorb, but definitely quite fun and provided me with a great start. The presenters were extremely knowledgible and charismatic and, lucky for us, are huge contributors to the Drupal community.
The first two days were spent being introduced to CCK, Content Types, Imagecache, Buddylist, and Views. Most of this was hands-on which I find helps quite a lot. There was a brief intro to setting up a website and configuring, clean urls, diff types of content, how nodes work, custom content types, CCK, uploading images, imagecache, buddylist, and generate users.
Of note:
Thinking about the different types of users in your organization and creating roles and permissions for them. Different content types such as the difference between a "page" and a "story". Workflow. And the ability to create new content types that you want to treat differently. A "node" is a generic way of saying "this is the content we are managing". A general guideline on how to decide what modules to download is to look at when it was "last updated" and determine if it is a well maintained module by its documentation. CCK is used to trick out your content and is comprised of 3 parts: widgets (tools), formatters (buckets of paint, bits that control when a user comes ot the site and looks at the content and there is a date or image, how is it presented), fields (raw materials of content types. e.g. text field).
The last three days were going over the ins and outs of theming.
Theming for Drupal:
1. html/php templates
2. css/javascipt
3. pretties (images)
Drupal template files have chunks of html with php sprinkled about. I have designed around php templates (e.g. Wordpress) in the past, but after this workshop, I really felt inspired to really dig in and learn it. It really helped that one of the main Lullabot themers herself admitted to fearing the PHP, but with the help of the community and immersing herself into it, it not only led her to becoming a PHP expert, but got her the job at Lullabot. Nice!
Specific to some of the theming tasks at ETS, we went over customizing the search box. Basically, there are fewer ways to customize in Drupal 5 whereas Drupal 6 will allow customizations to happen much easier.
Overall, I am pretty excited about the upcoming Drupal Version 6. It seems that with this version, theming will become much more intuitive and flexible. Awesome!
It's my second week at ETS, and one transitioning experience thus far has been actually getting used to the differences between an Apple 13" MacBook and a 15" MacBook Pro.
Naturally, the first thing I wanted to do was migrate all of my files and preferences from the older computer to the new one. But the new Pro was all set up with the office network settings and software. So I used Migration Assistant (an OS X utility, which I've used successfully many times in the past) to move only the Files (not Applications) over. Yeah, don't do that. Migration Assistant managed to still blow out the network settings as well as create some software compatibility issues (namely with Adobe CS3). Thanks to fantastic tech assistance, everything seems to be back in order. Sorry about that, now I know.
So, how do you migrate successfully? Well, it seems that manual migration is recommended, although that takes quite a bit of time and effort. Apple provides some guidance for backing up and restoring personal settings. But watch out for that Keychain, the most valuable and dangerous one of them all. Also, if you're moving from iLife '07 to '08, I had a very tricky time moving iPhoto over. I'm currently using iPhoto Library Manager to access my old iPhoto Library (after copying and renaming the folder into Pictures as a separate thing from the new iPhoto Library. Then I could load the library using the manager, but would have to purchase the shareware ($20) in order to completely merge the libraries together as one. Very annoying.
The next hangup is the sheer weight of the thing and the fact that it heats up to a million degrees. Since I now must walk 0.25 mi from the parking deck to my office, the weight has become quite an issue. So I'm in the market for a suitable laptop bag -- one that may also accomodate transportation via bicycle. Well, here's a list of features I'm looking for:
- very slim and compact
- padded shoulder strap
- messenger or backpack
- colorful (not black, preferably lime or orange)
- not dorky
- under $80
II found a couple that I didn't immediately hate. There is a BuildNYC one that looks nice and compact, but perhaps too much.
Here's a backpack sling that would be nice for traveling by bike and for freeing up arms for more important things like my huge handbag.
Belkin Laptop Sling in Chocolate/Tourmaline. Although I'd prefer the Dove/Tarragon they have for their messenger bag. Unfortunately, they don't seem to offer that color combo for the sling. What is with the color naming anyway... "tarragon"? That just makes me hungry. My reservations about this bag is that it might be too bulky, the brown will likely clash with my wardrobe (i'm a girl, i worry about these things), and how dorky is a backpack, even if it is a "sling". But it could be way more comfortable to carry considering the weight of the pro.
But I think I may go with the Brenthaven MetroLite (Green) instead. And as we all know, I have an affinity for green, particularly the limey/avacado shades. And I've had a Tucano Workout bag for my old macbook in orange, which I loved. It is nice and slim, cool color, and still fits the cables, a few cds, mouse, and notebook/folders quite well. But the weight of the pro worries me still.
Not quite sure what to do about heat, other than think about a laptop surface/pillow or some sort of elevated stand. How fun would this be?
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