We had our annual Independence Day Cook Out in Lincoln Park near Addison. The weather was perfect and we didn’t leave till 7pm — to see the fireworks downtown.

Web Designer extraordinaire, Jeffery Zeldman (half-seriously) reveals the secret of successful project management:

The trick to great projects, I have found, is (a.) landing clients with whom you are sympatico, and who understand language, time, and money the same way you do, and (b.) assembling teams you don’t have to lead, because everyone instinctively knows what to do.

One can only wonder what prompted the comment.

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I looked up the event listing for our Drupal4Lib BoF at ALA Chicago (Sun. 7/11, 3:30p-5p) and was happy to see we have more than a dozen sign-ups!

That’s a good sign.

I put up the Google Friend Connect widget on the far right column. It kind of duplicates what the MyBlogLog widget does though in a more dynamic way.

In any case, sign up today!

I have no idea what role Twitter is playing in Iran. On the one hand, Clay Shirky and the U.S. State Department apparently think it’s having a huge role.

On the other hand, a reader quoted by Nico Pitney of the HuffingtonPost says it’s 1979 all over again:

“Also - what is happening now with regards to spreading information to the people. They are going back to 79 strategies. basically they are printing papers having people distribute them all over the country. twitter/net etc is not effective right now - they are going back to old-fashioned style. [Sun., 6/21/2009: 12:57 PM ET]“

Then there’s this exchange between On the Media host Bob Garfield and a Professor from UC San Diego currently residing in Teheran:

Bob Garfield [3:55]: “Twitter has been at the center of the conversation [sic]. It’s unclear how much of a role Twitter has played. But we have seen a lot of press reports of Iranians using Twitter to give a kind of blow-by-blow description — but more especially those in the Diaspora keeping others apprised of events.”

Professor: “Twitter is a recent thing in Iranian society especially among the youngsters. My hunch is that, the Diaspora community has kind of exaggerated the effect of Twitter. Definitely there are some Iranians using Twitter in order to connect with other Iranians outside of Iran. But at this moment, I could assure you, Twitter is not the main kind of new form of communication … which Iranians are using.”

The professor seemed to think that satellite tv with its feeds from the BBC and CNN was having a greater effect.

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I’m just coming to grips with the recent upgrade to “Version 7″ of the Voyager Book Catalog at DePaul.

I love the use of facets to limit search results but I really wonder if they’re going to stick with the status “Not Charged” for books available and on the shelf. It’s probably not what most people think when they’re headed to the stacks.

You too can have your own ‘dream’ funeral parlor, no doubt exquisitely furnished, within easy reach of the Loyola Redline Stop and the Lake.

Mick Jacobsen organized an informative and very well attended meeting on Drupal for Librarians at the Oak Park Public Library today. I was happy to see a few familiar faces from our Drupal BoF at DePaul earlier in the year.

Jenny Levine led off with a discussion of ALA Connect and what impressed me wasn’t simply what they’ve been able to put together but their future plans for incorporating functionality.

Next Mick Jacobsen and Michael Buhmann from Skokie Public discussed Skokie Business Portal which at the time unfortunately was suffering from CSS indigestion.

Afterwards, Mick spent some time discussing Panels and we even managed to squeeze in a bit of time discussing Drupal in small groups.

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I’m so sick of hearing about Twitter. On the Media Hype Index™, it’s reaching Krispy Kreme proportions*.

____
*(then, now)

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The FCC has been charged by Congress to come up with a plan to provide high-speed Internet access to all Americans. A group of Internet luminaries, including everyone from Vint Cerf to Larry Lessig, has come together to remind the FCC that what counts ultimately isn’t the speed of the connection but what it connects to.

They’ve set up a site, appropriately named, ‘ItsTheInternetStupid.com‘ where you can read what they’ve submitted and even add your endorsement.

Chicago Blues great Koko Taylor has passed away.

That’s really sad. I remember seeing her at a club (probably on Lincoln Ave.) back in the day. I told her I was moving to Paris the next week. She hugged me and told me to take care of myself.

It was the best send-off a guy from Chicago, new to foreign countries, could have gotten.

RIP.

I see from Jenny Levine’s comment here, that ALA Connect was afflicted (at least momentarily) with comment spam. It’s a common affliction.

On most of the sites I support, I now pretty much have to moderate all comments. Even on sites where users have to set up accounts like LibSite.org, I still get spam.

While most of the sites are personal, it’s the community or institutional sites where things get interesting/scary.

I’m currently working on a project, for example, where four different units of an large academic department are going to run their own blogs. This is precisely the kind of environment where comment spam can be a huge problem — especially because the people running the thing from day to day are average (albeit web-savvy) staff members.

I’m just working on this at the moment, but my solution(s) is something along the lines of karenS’ Comment Manager. Basically, it’s to give a list of all the unpublished comments for the posts that the current logged-in user has written. From there, using Views Bulk Operations, they can either publish or delete the comments.

At the moment I’m trying to figure out whether I need Comment Manager at all, or whether I could get away with just putting the thing together using Views.

I don’t really think this is a solution for ALA Connect but it’s something I’m working on at the moment.

Update: I’m also looking at Show unpublished comments.

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U of I Global Campus (2009):

[University of Illinois] trustees meeting in Chicago voted to follow a faculty task force plan to scrap much of the current version of Global Campus.

NYUonline (2001):

New York University is closing down its for-profit electronic learning operation, NYUonline, and moving some of its curriculum and staff into its School of Continuing and Professional Studies.

U of I Global Campus (2009):

The $10 million program had only attracted about 360 students as of last month.

NYUonline (2002):

In two and a half years of operation, NYUonline received nearly $25 million from the university, but enrollment remained anemic at best: just 500 students at its peak.

U of I Global Campus (2009):

…[Prof. Nick Burbules] said, a global recession has changed conditions under which the older initiative was established.

NYUOnline (2001):

The university blames last month’s closure of the distance-learning company, called NYUonline, on the economy.

U of I Global Campus (2009):

Burbules said the 2.0 model draws from the UI’s experience with the initiative. “I think what is driving this process is the belief that the mission of expanding the online offerings is important,” he said. “I give [U of I President White] full credit for inspiring this work, and I personally believe it is the future of higher education.”

NYUonline (2001):

“I believe that the value of our work — some of which will continue to be carried on by the university, and some non-academic portions of which may be acquired by third parties — will become even clearer with time,” [NYUonline CEO Gordon] Macomber said in the release.

Note, there were significant differences between the programs, though stated goals tended to shift over time. Nevertheless, what the two shared was an inability by the people in charge to truly understand what the technology was capable of and what it wasn’t. Decision-makers themselves had no strong background in online content development for higher education. This lack of background made it hard to evaluate alternative strategies. Instead of identifying successful initiatives already in place and extending those, they chose to concoct their schemes out of whole cloth.

The outcome should come as no surprise.

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Is nothing sacred? Kiddieland, the amusement park for Chicago’s toddlers, is set to close after this season. It’s the end of the world.

Al’s Beef had a “Customer Appreciation Day” today. Its signature Italian Beef costs just a buck. Needless the say, the line was going out the door and down the length of the place’s parking lot. About 3/4 quarters of an hour wait, I’d say.

Oh my…

WolframAlpha … is like a roomful of idiot savants. Each knows a scary amount about a topic. And, unlike a such a roomful, WA also knows how to recombine and compute what each of the savants knows. But if the room doesn’t have the savant you’re looking for, you get back nothing but a “Huh?”

Quite a chunk of open-source software, including Drupal, is dependent on MySQL for its database back-end. So it’s kind of unsettling, to say the least, when the ownership of this free software passes into the hands of its main commercial competitor, Oracle.

As Ryan Paul over at Ars Technica explains:

Oracle’s recent move to acquire Sun has placed the responsibility for advancing MySQL development into the hands of the project’s most prominent competitor. The move is of deep concern to MySQL stakeholders and has created some uncertainty about the future of the popular open source database system.

The article goes on to discuss an interesting alliance of MySQL developers whose purpose is to “insulate MySQL from Oracle’s competitive interests by giving the collective MySQL community enough leverage to control the project’s destiny.”

More here…

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“I want to do a business plan and I need your help.”

Google continues to embellish its interface. This week they introduced something called ‘Rich Snippets‘ which basically are additional search results based on metadata embedded in web pages. For the moment, they’re just starting with “reviews and people”.

This looks like an interesting development and you better believe I’ll be looking at strategies to incorporate this in my work. That said, my first thought was how will they deal with pages that try to game the system? We have the example — back in the day — of keyword tags.

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So my next project is to do a blog and notification system for four different departments or sections at MPOW.

Each section will have its own team of ‘authors’ and ‘editors’. The authors will create the content and the editors will approve it for final publication. In addition to the approval process, I need to build into the system a calendering option so that time-sensitive posts can be published by date. The whole thing will be pushed out to our static HTML pages through some form of RSS-to-HTML-thru-Javascript doohickey.

Anyway, I’m finding Chapter 6 “Managing Publishing Workflow” from Using Drupal particularly helpful.

I’ve already got Actions and Triggers installed, Workflow too. Since the workflow depends on Content Types and Roles, I’m also looking into Rules.

It’s funny, I’m usually so focused on CCK and Views as the ’signature’ Drupal modules. I’m coming to see that Actions and Triggers have a prominent role to play as well.

UPDATE: Matt Petrowsky has a very useful video on Actions/Triggers v. Rules over at the GotDrupal.com site. His bottom line: Forget Triggers/Actions — Rules rules!

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