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Pushing a Geek Agenda with Trending Topics

I’ve seen my share of bitching and moaning about how lame the trending topics on Twitter have become. Well with the mainstream comes the TMZ crowd so unfortunately it’s a sign of the times. Remember when geeks ran Twitter? Remember Color Wars? Hopefully in the future we’ll be able to have trending topics created based on our social graph. But until that day comes, I had a goofy idea thinking it might be fun to have a weekly organized way to promote geekdom across the trendingsphere. That idea came in the way of trying to create a geek meme on a weekly basis.

see more Funny Graphs

My idea would be to throw up a site where people could come up with ideas for a topic that is voted on a weekly basis and then executed on a given day. Perhaps it could be known as #trendingtuesday.  The website would also provide an archive of #trendingtuesday’s past. I could probably throw up the site fairly easily using a CMS platform like Pligg or cobble one together with Drupal to get things started. It would also be cool to have a real-time feed of the topic on the site during the day it runs. Perhaps this is just my brain acting up since I may be over caffeinated but I thought it might be fun to do.

I’ll start it off today with the idea that got me thinking about this in the first place. I thought it would be fun to reveal things that we may be embarrassed to admit in the form of #geekconfessions. (Note: Guess I’m not the innovator here. I just searched Twitter and it appears that @direflail came up with this idea as well).  So I plan on shooting out a few tweets today using the hashtag and see where it goes.

So if this doesn’t take off, how about using a similar plan to create a trending topic calling out the actions of #douchebags? Now that sounds like a very necessary public service.

Highlights from DrupalCamp LA 2008

So I’ve been an active Drupal user now for about a year and a half. It all started when I managed the migration of the X PRIZE Foundation websites to Drupal. Very early on in that process I knew that I had come across a very special software platform and I continue to be amazed by it all the time.

In February of this year I discovered the LA Drupal User Group. It’s true what they say, Drupal is all about its community which I’ve now directly experienced the benefits of having attended several meetings and becoming friends with some great people. In my attempt to contribute I did a case study presentation describing the detailed Drupal work I’ve done for X PRIZE.

This great Drupal community in LA provided me with exciteful anticipation to attend my first DrupalCamp LA. Also knowing it was being managed by Chris Charlton and Crystal Williams from the LA User Group only re-assured in my mind that it would be great.

This second year saw nice growth. There were over 430 registered users for the event. I was only able to attend for Day 1 but I can definitely say that in just the time I was there, the information I learned, and people I met was fantastic. I also got to have discussions with several Drupalers throughout the day. Below are some of the highlights for me and other details from the event.

Keynote

Opening session included presentations from Jonathan Lambert of Workhabit and Kieran Lal of Acquia. They discussed the current state of Drupal and plans for growth into the future while evangelizing and showing their passion for this great open source platform we love. You can see a few notes taken from Viktor Kane here.

Kieran also discussed the Drupal.org redesign project and urged users to visit the Flickr group to submit their design ideas. He also mentioned Leisa Reichelt’s involvement.

Building APIs for Modules

I was able to catch some of this presentation where Adam Kalsey of Workhabit walked us through how he created the Activity Stream module. I didn’t know Adam had written this and was a bit floored as I’ve become pretty passionate about Lifestreaming and have dedicated a site to it at the Lifestream Blog. Adam’s module adds Lifestreaming functionality to Drupal by pulling data via API calls from several web services like Twitter, Delicious, and Last.fm

This was actually the second time I had seen Adam give a presentation as he provided a Scaling Drupal presentation at the LA Drupal User Group a few months prior to this. He’s a top notch speaker who exudes knowledge and enthusiasm and I’m already greatful having learned plenty from him. I highly recommend you catch him speak if you get a chance.

Slideshow for the session is available here.

Using Open Source tools for Open Source Development

This session was run by Mike Stewart whom I often see at the LA Drupal User Group. He provided demos of several open source tools he uses for Drupal development. This included using Ubuntu for his OS, and several other tools including Geany and Scribes. But the coolest thing for me was that he had wrapped all of these into an image using the open source virtualization package VirtualBox. I have used VMWare but wasn’t familiar with VirtualBox and was very happy to learn about it.

Mike was planning on providing a Virtualbox Ubuntu image that included all the tools he showed but I haven’t seen it yet. I will add a link if I do come across it.

Tuning for Scale and Performance

The presentation so good the first time I saw it I figured I’d watch it again and see if I absorb anything more. This was led by Adam Kalsey but also on the panel was Jonathan Lambert and Aaron Stewart of Workhabit. For the most part I had paid attention the first time but got some additional recommendations such as:

• Using XCache for Opcode caching
• Jmeter for load testing
• Xdebug for testing code performance
• Using the Boost & Block Cache Modules

Scaling Drupal: Drupal on the Cloud

Also hosted by Adam Kalsey (ok starting to feel like I’m a groupie) where he discussed Cloud computing and how to host Drupal in the cloud. Coming into this I had very little knowledge in this area and was just vaguely familiar with Amazon Web Services but once again Adam provided a good intro whiched helped me get a better understanding of how it works. I was pretty intrigued by the setup and how it works but I’m not so sure most IT departments are ready to start adopting it on a large scale. I do see it as the future and it’s just a matter of time before more companies start moving to this model instead of investing in large hardware deployments and the management that goes with them. I’m hoping I can learn more about Cloud computing and dip my toe in soon.

Here’s the slideshow presentation from this session. Workhabit also has a good post on Drupal running on Amazon’s EC2 here. In that post Workhabit provides us with a test image we can play with Drupal on in EC2 as well.

Along with VirtualBox and Amazon’s EC2, virtualization was definitely a theme I see making big strides in the years to come.

Other Sessions

I didn’t go to any of the Designer/Theming sessions but I heard great things about those presentations. There were also many new and curious users that came which were treated to some good intro sessions which showed them the power and flexibility of the system for several niche sites. I’m also bummed I didn’t see Ethan Kaplan’s case study on the Metallica site.

Other Related Stuff from DrupalCamp LA

• Amazon AWS & Drupal at DrupalCampLA Video Presentation
• Post from Blake Lucchesi of BoldSource about his presentations
• I wish I could have seen the Designing social networking sites with Drupal session
  
• The Stand Up to Cancer site was built in Drupal and they had a representative
• Slideshows from many of the sessions
  
• Twitter chatter from the event
• Photos of event on Flickr

Well that’s it folks. I really look forward to next year! In the meantime you can catch me often hanging out on IRC at #drupal-la on irc.freenode.net or just go to Drupalchat.net

My Web Travels for January 22nd 2008

• Genfavicon. Free Online Favicon Generator. Icon Generator. – Nice web service if you are in need of this
• The Best Companion Tools for YouTube and other Web Videos – A list of some useful video sites
• The Escapist : Zero Punctuation: Crysis – If you’ve never seen a Zero Punctuation review. Here’s a great one to accolomate ya. Very Very funny stuff and spot on in many ways.
• The 2007 Darwin Award Winners – Ahhh…always fun to see what the pinheads of the world are up to
• Get Feeds for Sites Without RSS with Dapper – Lifehackers take on a useful tool to add content that doesn’t offer an RSS feed to your Lifestream
• Example: How to Embed Two Views on the Same Page | drupal.org – This is useful in Drupal to create a pretty complex custom homepage
• Bill Gates last day at Microsoft (video) – istartedsomething – This video proves that Bill Gates is waaaay cooler than Steve Jobs
• WeGame.com – Show Your Game – Site provides in-game videos for many PC games. Also provides the tools to create the videos
• 100 Excellent Free WordPress Themes | Developer’s Toolbox | Smashing Magazine – Another nice collection of Wordpress themes