development

We recently had an issue where status messages would 'pile up' and fail to clear until you logged out and back in again. We found different possible causes listed but couldn't work out the root of it until we saw this:

https://drupal.org/node/623028

which led to this:

https://drupal.org/node/635042

Turning off the Admin Menu module wasn't really an option right now, so I ventured onto our Media Temple DV via SSH, did a bit more googling for locations and found this:

my.cnf is located in '/etc'

Use VI to edit my.cnf

Just launched a new site for a series of Providence Drupal Meetups that I've been putting together with Chris Murray. I decided that we should use this as an opportunity to show where things are going, so I built it in Drupal 7 alpha 4.

When I woke up Wednesday morning I was looking forward to an always-fun and interesting meeting day on the newschoolyard.com project, for which I'm the platform architect. We're working on a platform targeted at independent schools to maintain their own web sites, parent and alumni communities, and the whole project is really satisfying. Great challenge, great way to help bring innovation (and huge cost savings) to schools.

My good friend Mitch Goldstein (or @mgoldst as you may know him) has asked if I'd give a talk to his graphic design students in a class he's teaching at Rhode Island College. I sat in those very halls a few too many years ago than I care to remember - but since that's where I got my start (designing and developing the College's first web site), it seemed like a great opportunity.

Carsonified is putting on what looks like a great event: an online conference on HTML 5 with some of the smartest guys in the business: Jeremy Keith, Bruce Lawson, Peter Lubbers and Remy Sharp. It's almost here as a standard, and I know I still have a lot to learn about it.

I know, I know. If you listen to the Boagworld podcast or follow his incessant tweeting and audioboo-ing you'll doubtless be saying something like 'good heavens, don't give him any more reasons to inflate his overblown sense of self-worth' - but I think that he's struck upon a really important topic, and one that has an enormous impact on the future of our industry.

Well - had to be done. I needed to get my site updated from Drupal 5 to 6 in order to implement some better features and in general keep up with what I do for clients. It was also useful to go through the upgrade process on an existing site to get used to the pitfalls.

Overall it wasn't all that bad, but I did have to reimagine how I wanted to deal with some views, and recreate some of them from scratch. I haven't had time to really dig into the design, but this had to come first and setting a deadline helped move things forward faster.

I've traded a few tweets over the past day or two on the subject of good books for web professionals. I use that term to avoid 'designer' - as that seemed limiting or possibly a bit arbitrary. I think that information architecture, understanding business requirements and translating them into web site features and functionality, usability/user exerience, interaction design and visual design are all distinct enough that they can be a specialization unto themselves.

I've been working full-time at (add)ventures since late 2007, but thought it would be worth it to share my thoughts on the process of interactive projects. When I was interviewing at (add)ventures I was asked the question 'how do I tackle interactive projects,' and this got me thinking about not just the steps, but the philosophy behind them. While I think this might have been more than was anticipated, I thoroughly enjoyed the process!

Marketing? Corporate Communications? Or is it IT?

It's been a common discussion lately on some of the web design boards and podcasts I listen to. Unfortunately I think there are some significant limitations to all of those choices: Marketing has a primary function of communicating to consumers/end users; Corporate Communications is generally focused on communicating to the media and investors, and IT simply wants to get something done that fills a need but doesn't cause problems with the 'real' concerns of their department.