tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-271249062011-12-12T10:40:31.646-05:00Alan Dixonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13519115579238560201noreply@blogger.comBlogger361100tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-27124906.post-22756970421444420432011-10-30T09:16:00.001-04:002011-10-30T09:19:11.542-04:00

Yes, it's that time of the year again and in classic form, Drupal Camp Toronto has come together at the relatively last minute. It probably wouldn't have happenned at all except for the support of My Planet, a new Drupal shop in Toronto with big ambitions, and Ramy Nassar to whom I owe a cheque since I'm at least helping out with sponsorship. And to complete the required promotional elements of

Alan Dixonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13519115579238560201noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-27124906.post-87104178139967211592011-09-26T14:13:00.001-04:002011-09-26T14:19:41.293-04:00

I've been trying to extract a domain from Namespro, a registrar. After (I hope) springing it from them, I gave them a little honest feedback. I'll provide their answer here verbatim, enough said. Okay, almost enough: I want note that, considering the spelling mistakes, the support person who wrote this probably believed it. And for reference: my favourite registrar (hover.com) provides users the

Alan Dixonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13519115579238560201noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-27124906.post-69872414986583613602011-09-26T13:21:00.001-04:002011-09-26T13:25:13.398-04:00

Today we've launched the 2012 French for the Future National Essay Contest. The full site is someone else's, but the contest submission pages are built using CiviCRM. The essay submission pages are actually implemented as event registration pages of CiviEvent, which isn't exactly what CiviEvent is built for, but was close enough and provides some nice functionality that other alternatives (e.g.

Alan Dixonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13519115579238560201noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-27124906.post-80676018225482393882011-09-08T13:02:00.000-04:002011-09-08T13:02:03.391-04:00

Drupal 7 came out in January of this year, but I've only been dipping my toes before now. I ordered the new version of Pro Drupal Development and scanned for the interesting bits, and have created four new relatively simple D7 sites so far, even including some quick themeing. But as of yesterday, I've finally started to climb the D7 learning curve, with a long delayed project to upgrade The Big

Alan Dixonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13519115579238560201noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-27124906.post-78721241465265165132010-11-02T14:50:00.000-04:002010-11-02T14:50:20.922-04:00

I've just finished "Three Day Road" by Joseph Boyden, an appropriate novel for this time of year when death is in the air, in a "circle of life" kind of way. It's also just over 5 years since I started out working on my own, and a year since I started working again with a couple of old friends. One of those (Reema) has just found herself a real job so she'll be leaving us and I wish her well.

Alan Dixonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13519115579238560201noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-27124906.post-7322098763402903722010-10-25T11:27:00.000-04:002010-10-25T11:27:47.155-04:00

It started off with a 5 minute presentation at a DUG-TO monthly meetup about OpenAtrium and the new Center for Social Innovation Community Site.Then Kahlid asked me to come do a real presentation at their Waterloo group. That presentation is now up here: After my presentation, Khalid said he was hoping for more details about the Features module, so when I was thinking about what I could offer

Alan Dixonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13519115579238560201noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-27124906.post-51700963843933616522010-08-30T15:45:00.001-04:002010-08-30T15:46:17.028-04:00

I had an account with Bell Canada for more than 10 years, both phone and internet. I endured some pretty steep prices, un-requested changes of service with price hikes, and endlessly irritating calls to their automated machines. I'm currently on hold trying to unravel their latest, truly, incredibly, bad business practice. It started earlier this year, when I tried to combine my bills that had

Alan Dixonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13519115579238560201noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-27124906.post-62794364436734945262010-08-08T13:09:00.002-04:002010-08-08T15:19:14.075-04:00

I'm back from vacation, excitedly but also reluctantly returning to my web development projects. But before I forget it all, I just wanted to share my thanks and awe at the beautiful piece of the world I was visiting. So, big thanks to the Surmans who shared their cottage rental up north of Parry Sound with us and threw in the free photos as a bonus (left, and lots more on Flickr). And also

Alan Dixonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13519115579238560201noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-27124906.post-22332572264887253932010-07-24T17:52:00.004-04:002010-08-08T12:45:07.761-04:00

I'm about to go on vacation without my computer, so this is a bit of a catch-up kind of post. In the last 2 weeks, I helped launch four sites. You might think this would be the culmination of a lot of work for me, but in fact none of these sites were a lot of work for me - my role was more of the fixer, but not the prime mover. They were: 1. Toronto  Workforce Innovation Group This was a

Alan Dixonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13519115579238560201noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-27124906.post-29287066691888736582010-05-31T10:47:00.003-04:002010-10-04T13:37:26.696-04:00

Okay, I haven't been involved in organizing Drupal Camp TO since 2008, and last year it didn't even happen, but I'm delighted to report that it appears that a new crop of organizers are really, really making it happen this year. So, pencil it in for October 15 - 16, 2010. Once there's a site up, it should be accessible here: http://2010.drupalcamptoronto.org (but meanwhile it's still showing our

Alan Dixonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13519115579238560201noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-27124906.post-35403260763871402642010-05-20T10:49:00.003-04:002010-05-20T13:08:55.545-04:00

Most website permissions work like this: you've got the anonymous public, who can see everything you've published, and a webmaster or two who can see and edit everything. But once you add the complexity of users publishing their own content, or adding an 'intranet' where only some people are able to see private content, it gets tricky. Unlike Wordpress and Joomla that are very focussed on the

Alan Dixonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13519115579238560201noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-27124906.post-65887031644507688592010-05-13T10:30:00.001-04:002010-05-31T10:49:59.819-04:00

If you're using my IATS CiviCRM plugin, then please see this post on the civicrm forum: http://forum.civicrm.org/index.php/topic,13758.0.html Short version: thanks Matthew Clarke for fixing a bunch of problems that were primarily affecting the recurring payment option.

Alan Dixonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13519115579238560201noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-27124906.post-70217774254724912282010-04-22T09:33:00.006-04:002010-04-23T10:45:12.312-04:00

I'm on a plane back from San Francisco this morning, after 3 days of DrupalCon, the annual gathering of Drupal people in North America (there's another one in Europe each year as well). At the first day's plenary -- the traditional State of the Drupal address by Drupal's founder Dries -- we saw pictures from ten years ago of Dries in his university dorm where he first created Drupal, and then

Alan Dixonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13519115579238560201noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-27124906.post-25763155007937210262010-02-09T10:24:00.002-05:002010-02-09T10:32:50.613-05:00

I'm happy to report that our new Drupal and CiviCRM website development shop is now available to take on new projects. You can read my official welcome here. If you're wondering what's happening to my existing work - not to worry, I'm still providing the same service to my current clients. Like all change, there may be some hiccups, but my goal is to be able to provide a better service by

Alan Dixonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13519115579238560201noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-27124906.post-13935987435356263722010-02-04T10:00:00.005-05:002010-02-04T10:14:40.892-05:00

I've been meaning to write up some notes about "the environment" and me. I'm on the tree-hugging side of the fence politically, and have some of the old-fashioned skin-flint variety of environmentalist in my personal choices [keep the house cool, hang up my laundry to dry, walk/bike/TTC most of the time, own an old used Prius, caulk and insulate my old house obsessively, pay attention to my gas/

Alan Dixonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13519115579238560201noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-27124906.post-85848306996914568642009-10-16T07:35:00.009-04:002010-05-31T10:50:26.692-04:00

I'm almost finished a big new CiviCRM import/installation that I've been working on for longer that I'd planned. That's pretty normal, and of course there were a number of things that should have been warnings: it's a huge mass of data from an established non-profit: more than 5000 constituents, more than 50,000 contributions, from more than 10 years. it's being imported from Raiser's Edge, the

Alan Dixonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13519115579238560201noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-27124906.post-62271501047026548102009-10-15T09:42:00.003-04:002009-10-15T09:51:35.284-04:00

On Monday October 26th, I'll be at the "Open Source Showcase for Non-Profits" at the Centre for Social Innovation here in Toronto. The showcase is a low-cost event where members of the non-profit sector can learn about open source projects relevant to their work. I'm helping organize and will do some presentations as well. The idea came from Julian Egelstaff about a month ago, and he, Jane Zhang,

Alan Dixonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13519115579238560201noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-27124906.post-22931347844896665982009-09-15T11:13:00.004-04:002010-05-31T10:50:53.483-04:00

For the Mozilla Service Week, I'll be at the Centre for Social Innovation on Wednesday morning, to provide 1-1 coaching for anyone interested in using CiviCRM. Yes, that's now tomorrow, Wednesday September 16, 2009, starting at 10 am, I hope you can come. You're supposed to sign up, as early as 9:30 for 15 minute sessions, but if you want to just drop by, you can join whoever's there. Details

Alan Dixonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13519115579238560201noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-27124906.post-88291695970466913032009-07-17T13:55:00.003-04:002010-05-31T10:48:22.855-04:00

I'm sad to say that Toronto's Drupal Camp [which I helped organize for it's first 3 years] is happening while I'm out of town. It's kind of a good thing, since I had decided to take a little sabbatical from the organizing anyway. But in case you're breathlessly wondering, check out the 2009 toronto drupal camp site. It's not ready yet, but hopefully will be by the time you read this. The dates

Alan Dixonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13519115579238560201noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-27124906.post-54179974189098448212009-07-03T11:53:00.012-04:002009-07-03T13:37:56.954-04:00

The Tyee is a site I've been involved with since 2006 when I wrote the first, 4.7 version of a Drupal module to integrate Drupal content into a static site that was being generated from bricolage. About a year ago, I met with Dawn Buie and Phillip Smith and we mapped out a number of ways to improve the Drupal integration on the site, including upgrading the Drupal to version 5 from 4.7. Various

Alan Dixonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13519115579238560201noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-27124906.post-7605745868856071752009-01-26T06:50:00.005-05:002010-05-31T10:51:11.062-04:00

With the new year, a new resolution to upgrade some sites to the new CiviCRM 2.1. CiviCRM 2.1 is particularly special because it requires Drupal 6 and it's the first version that supports Drupal 6. So upgrades of existing Drupal 5 sites are difficult, particularly if any custom modules or themes involved. As it turned out, my procrastination was justified. I asked my friend Rob Ellis to help with

Alan Dixonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13519115579238560201noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-27124906.post-83393313948465152992008-11-06T10:45:00.003-05:002008-11-06T12:04:22.270-05:00

I was carrying home a bag of dog food recently for my dogs when the neighbour made jokes about eating dog food and the coming recession. I think recessions are like winter - you know it'll come eventually, but it's hard to imagine in the depths of summer. But my point is really about dog food, and eating it. The woman who sells me Nutromax claims the salespeople eat it to prove it's good. As a

Alan Dixonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13519115579238560201noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-27124906.post-36206633239709194132008-07-04T17:32:00.007-04:002008-07-04T18:17:52.335-04:00

I've been running my own server for a year and a half now, and have been surprised at how trouble free it's been. I attribute this to: luck good planning a decent upstream provider the maturity of linux distribution maintenance tools (e.g. yum) In this case, good planning means: keeping it as simple as possible doing things one at a time i'm the only one mucking about on it And so this

Alan Dixonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13519115579238560201noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-27124906.post-69552679976994222122008-05-14T12:11:00.003-04:002010-05-31T10:48:58.278-04:00

I thought I'd have some time for some house renovations before Drupal Camp this year, but planning Drupal projects is always harder than you'd think. In any case, I'm also helping plan Drupal Camp, and I've even got a couple of session proposals that have to do with planning Drupal websites. So come find out what all the fuss is about.

Alan Dixonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13519115579238560201noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-27124906.post-19943437853138991002008-04-18T12:24:00.005-04:002010-05-31T10:51:33.166-04:00

These are my notes from a CiviCRM data import for Fair Vote Canada I did on April 16/17, 2008. Fair Vote Canada is a small NGO, has been around for about 7 years, and is a public interest lobby group for proportional representation-type voting systems in Canada. If you care about democracy, then they're worth supporting. One thing I find particularly interesting and important is that they're

Alan Dixonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13519115579238560201noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-27124906.post-77632320393323968262008-02-26T15:56:00.002-05:002008-02-26T16:10:00.261-05:00

I've been working through various optimization issues today and thought i'd share them with my future self and anyone else who reads this. mod_deflate I'd heard that getting apache to gzip your non-compressed data was a good idea and thought I was probably already doing that with my default apache2 setup on CentOS 4.4. What I learned was that: For apache2, the relevant module is mod_deflate (

Alan Dixonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13519115579238560201noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-27124906.post-64162890759585114432007-12-06T16:00:00.007-05:002010-05-31T10:51:54.220-04:00

Update, Nov 2009: I've just discovered and fixed a bug I introduced in the 2.2 branch for the IATS plugin. The bug was introduced when i updated the API files from IATS and failed to notice that the legacy method for C$ one-time donations was no longer supported. If you're using a version greater than or equal to 2.2.7, and are using IATS for C$, non-recurring donations, then you're affected.

Alan Dixonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13519115579238560201noreply@blogger.com11tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-27124906.post-62602046723623141282007-09-26T16:01:00.000-04:002007-09-26T17:09:00.865-04:00

I'm hosting the Ontario Green Party's site, and am also the Drupal developer for it. There's currently an Ontario election campaign taking place, so I'm keeping busy. Someone sent me a dead link on the Ontario NDP site, so I started looking at the other party's sites. It reminded me of a discussion we had at the Toronto Penguin day a couple of years ago about the relationship between open source

Alan Dixonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13519115579238560201noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-27124906.post-13662544403297074792007-04-20T09:24:00.000-04:002007-04-20T11:20:06.896-04:00

I lived, worked and studied in Costa Rica from 1984 to 1989. Ostensibly, I was there to study Mathematics at the University, and indeed I graduated with an MSc. in Mathematics supervised by Ricardo Estrada (check that page, he even advertises me as one of his past students). And yes, I do have a nine page thesis that I wrote and defended in Spanish somewhere in my files, on a proof and extension

Alan Dixonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13519115579238560201noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-27124906.post-37499416132855746072007-04-14T14:40:00.000-04:002007-04-14T14:48:09.032-04:00

For about 8 years, I worked with Peace Brigades International. You can still find some of my writings from those days by doing a google search (actually, there are 4 pages of links there and I think they're all me). I was recently approached by PBI in Canada to help with their website which had been hacked some time ago, so I've just done that and you can see the nice results here. Does this seem

Alan Dixonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13519115579238560201noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-27124906.post-81583372636361901302007-04-09T11:08:00.001-04:002010-05-31T10:49:18.982-04:00

Looks like there will be another Drupal camp again this year in Toronto - visit the drupalcamptoronto site for details. While I'm at it, here's a short update on a few of my projects: I finished the intranet portion of SHARE's website, which included a neat custom module that mashes up the signup module with CiviCRM and organic groups. I'm almost finished with The Tyee, an excellent

Alan Dixonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13519115579238560201noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-27124906.post-1156973856273483952006-08-30T17:00:00.000-04:002006-08-30T17:37:36.280-04:00

  I've been rebuilding my old garage for the past two weeks. When we bought our house a year ago, it was described as a "tear-down", and after a year of living here I finally understood why. I kind of liked the falling down look, and it didn't seem to interfere with it's functionality (i.e., keep the car safe, store lots of junk). But then I noticed it was leaning a lot, and it turned out it had

Alan Dixonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13519115579238560201noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-27124906.post-1152583385990835842006-07-10T22:01:00.000-04:002006-07-10T22:08:29.493-04:00

Funnily enough, I live within an hour and a half of one of the 7 wonders of the world and I haven't visited since I was 10. Not wanting to deprive our son of the experience, Kelly and I decided to visit on the day of the world cup final. This photo was taken by Kelly, but Aidan's pretty good with the camera and you can see a whole album of photos that he took, including a visit to the butterfly

Alan Dixonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13519115579238560201noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-27124906.post-1152034109863849292006-07-04T13:27:00.000-04:002006-07-04T13:28:29.866-04:00

  It's true, I don't work on weekends. 

Alan Dixonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13519115579238560201noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-27124906.post-1146152385020694232006-04-27T11:16:00.000-04:002006-04-27T11:46:40.563-04:00

You can learn more about Drupal, my favourite CMS (content management system) by coming to Toronto's Drupal Day. So what is Drupal? It's bunch of computer code written in a language called PHP, that lives on a web server (a computer that serves web pages) and delivers websites that are interactive, complex, interesting and/or just plain geeky. For example the federal NDP website uses Drupal, as

Alan Dixonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13519115579238560201noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-27124906.post-1146149672192278752006-04-27T10:48:00.000-04:002006-04-27T11:07:09.263-04:00

Here's the de rigeur definition of Kernel: The smallest, most basic piece of an object I work from a home office, and lack the usual opportunities to gab around the water cooler and post on internal lists, so this is my soapbox. I'm a Drupal developer, so a lot of this will be about projects I'm involved in, but it'll also be about the rest of the world that's pretty interesting as well.

Alan Dixonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13519115579238560201noreply@blogger.com0