This January I'm headed out to scenic Denver, Colorado to co-teach two of three sessions of an Intro to Drupal 6.x class with Growing Venture Solutions. The course is targeted towards people who are new to Drupal and covers several levels of site administration as well as using essential Drupal modules such as Views and CCK (Content Construction Kit), image handling with Imagecache, and creating sophisticated landing pages using Panels. Then we'll cover theming/templating and finally module development, performance and security best practices.
The course happens over three Saturdays, so students can go home (or back to work), tinker around and return brimming with questions and enthusiasm about turning their Drupal sites up to eleven.
If you're thinking of attending, it's best to secure a spot at the pre-2009 discounted rate.
You can read more about the course on the GVS website.

Hope to see you there!
(photo credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/jamuraa/1162062936)

After a great ~ two years, I am no longer with the the Drupal firm pingVision. I'm delighted to say that I've joined the Growing Venture Solutions team. Stay tuned for more.

[this post was moved from the static "About" page.]

Ultra Light Startups, a New York-based tech entrepreneur's group, is
hosting a panel discussion on Open Source content management systems on Thursday, December 4.

I'll be speaking about Drupal along with experts from Joomla (Donna
Vincent) and WordPress (Steve Bruner). People often ask for comparisons between these projects but it's uncommon to find people who have a depth of familiarity in all three systems together in one place, so this promises to be a unique discussion. The panel will be videotaped and made available online.

In order to facilitate a valuable discussion, I've started a list of suggested discussion questions. I'd like to ask you, fellow Drupalers (and any non-Drupalers), to suggest questions that you think will help highlight the differences between these systems and add value to the discussion. Below is my list of suggested questions, starting with ones that seek introductory information to the platforms:

• What kinds of websites/web applications have been built on your platform?
• How large is your development community? Approximatley how many installations are there? How many modules/plugins and themes are available?
• What license covers the code in your project?

   I tend to be skeptical when I see food that's advertised with phrases such as  "100% natural" or "exactly the way nature intended." That's because the word "natural" is often abused and overextended to include methods of producing (and distributing) food that are anything but natural.  Examples that come to mind include produce that is grown with industrial fertilizer and products from animals who live in inhumane conditions at factory farms where they are mutilated (their tails and beaks removed) and forced to eat foods that cause them digestive problems while they live literally in their own waste -- which becomes a major pollutant instead of being used as a natural fertilizer.

  When I think about an “ultimate standard” for natural agriculture, I usually think of Polyface Farms. Polyface was discussed extensively in Michael Pollan's The Omnivore's Dilemma,  a book that inspired major changes in the way I think about food. 

The sections of this tutorial are as follows:

• Brief background on ApacheBench and performance of Drupal Anonymous vs Authenticated Users
• Accessing the cookie containing the Drupal session ID
• Passing the session cookie to ApacheBench
• Verifying that the Drupal installation being benchmarked recognizes the cookie and is serving authenticated Pages

    ApacheBench, also known as 'ab', is a command line program bundled with the Apache Web Server that measures the performance of web servers by making HTTP requests to a user-specified URL. ApacheBench displays statistical information, such as the number of requests served per second and the amount of time taken to serve those requests, that is useful for evaluating (benchmarking) and tuning the performance of a webserver. ApacheBench does a decent job of simulating different types and levels of load on a sever.

It came to my attention recently that my tag cloud was more of a tag pile, since individual tags were not shown at different sizes based on the frequency of their use on this site. Since I fixed the tag cloud I see that "worthwhile websites" is the most frequently used tag. In the several months after I became more seriously interested in web development, I wrote brief blurbs about different websites I found worthwhile and tagged them as such. I don't write a blurb for every website that I think is worthwhile, and despite the fact that that tag for these blurbs is so prominently featured, they are not really intended to be a main feature of this site. Just throwing that out there...

It's over. I am breaking up with coffee.
[Queue idiomatic Country music breakup song backing.]