The kernel of my home office

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 focussing on what I do best, and getting help with the things that I don't do as well.

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/electricty bills, etc.]. But for the purposes of this post, I want to point out that my website development business is also "environmental", even though I don't flaunt it very much. Here's why: I work from home [no extra office to heat, no commuting]. I host my sites on a "green" server at rackforce.ca By focusing on only Drupal, I can set up my server to be optimized for Drupal hosting, which is more efficient [both at a machine/energy level, as well as my time]. I host quite a few environmental organizations. So if you're looking fo...

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 cadillac of desktop fundraising software. the clients are very attached to the detailed minutae they have accumulated about their constituents, all of which were faithfully entered into Raiser's Edge. After a round of a sample import and looking at what the data might look like in CiviCRM, we were able to whittle it down a little bit, but the last month I've been working on the big final import and have developed some techniques that I expect would be generally useful with big CiviCRM imports. Two Scripting Techniques For my first test import, I pulle...

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, Joe Murray, Reema Tarzi, and I met just a couple of weeks ago and have put it all together with remarkably little work. That's a tribute to the viability of the idea, the excellent organizing tools that are now available for such events, and the quality of the organizing committee. My own contribution was to set up a CiviCRM install with CiviEvents to do registration, which was impressively easier that I expected - part of my motivation was that I'd never set up a CiviEvents page, and now I'm not afraid of it anymore. So, visit the information page and registe...

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 about where and more details about what are here.

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 are set for the weekend of Aug 15.

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 parts of that grand plan have been slowly incorporated into the site, but as of next week, there'll be a big leap forward that coincides with a new design [implemented in Bricolage by David Wheeler who wrote and maintains Bricolage] as well as a new Drupal release of the Bricolage integration module . Plans Application integration is tricky, and my first time round had quite a few issues. Here's a list of the improvements in the latest version: File space separation. Before, Drupal was installed in the apache document root, which is where bricolage was publishing it's co...