diasporan.net

In October, I proposed an event called Practical Drupal for Small NGOs because I know some small NGOs that need a website, but they don't have enough budget to build one. These people usually have very interesting projects and do really good jobs. I thought it would be fun and practical to set up a regular Drupal event to help small NGOs build their websites.

Note we are not building websites *for* them. It's because I know a number of individuals and organisations who built websites for NGOs free of charge, but they worn out and completely abandoned those websites and stopped supporting. I didn't want to see that happen so I decided to ask NGOs to build and look after their sites by themselves, but we would do as much as we can to help them.

Following our presentation at Drupalcon Paris, Philipp and I have received almost an overwhelming number of compliments and positive feedbacks. Thank you for those who attended the presentation and I am very glad many of you have found the presentation useful :)

A number of people have also asked me to:

• a) make the slide available online
• b) share the names of books I recommend

I attended the Drupalcamp UK which took place over this weekend (13th & 14th of June, 2009) at BBC office in Manchester. I was only able to be there for the first day, but I enjoyed it so much!
Since Tim Millwood has provided an overview of this event in his blog post, I'll just omit that and write about some of the sessions, including my own.

The Japanese community is representing Drupal at OpenSource World, which takes place in Tokyo in July.

This is exciting news especally for Japanese Drupallers, as there has previously been no active offline communities in Japan that could represent Drupal at such events.

At Code Positive, it is a standard practice to login to client's server via ssh and check out the code from Code+ server if their site is not hosted by Code+. Instead of uploading hundreds of damn files, it is a smart and efficient way of copying all the latest files to client's server.

Since I now have my own server and clients, I've been trying to set up this process myself. Here's my note (largely for myself) on how to do it.

Prerequisite:

• You have your own *nix server / ability to add new users
• You have access to your server via ssh
• Your client has a *nix server and is accessible via ssh
• Your client's web server has svn client installed

I really wished this was some kind of joke, but apparently it's not. Fintan Darragh passed away on 6th of May, 2009 at the age of 21.

I worked with Fintan Darragh for about three months during the summer in 2008. The company I worked for as a contractor was based in Bristol. Fintan was also working for the company during summer holiday.

Many of us have probably witnessed functionality-driven approach failing (or not being hugely successful) because it often overlooks the actual user needs or their workflow. However, I also witnessed projects that employed a user-centred approach failing because developers failed to assess technical risks or overlooking discrepancies in user requirements.
(Also it is equally important to take corporate needs and politics into account, but I will only discuss about the user-centred approach here.)

Recent researches on human brain suggest that the way our brains works is fundamentally different from the way computer works. Difference? Computer receives an input, processes it based on yes/no (1/0) and comes to a conclusion.

On the other hand, when brain receives stimuli, it recalls similar patterns from the memory and try to predict the consequences. So based on our experience, patterns and expectations build up among us. [1] '. . . we're always trying to fit what we're sensing to what we know'[2]

Needless to say, the reason for setting up AMP is to run Drupal on it. And setting up a virtual host is really useful.

Virtual host?

A virtual host (also referred to as vhost) allows you to access a resource (i.e. a website in this case) in arbitrary names. For example, if you have a Drupal site set up (let's call it 'site1') without a virtual host, they are most likely accessible from a web browser by the URL 'http://localhost/site1'. By setting up a virtual host, you can make the site accessible with pretty much any URL you like, for example 'http://site1.dev'.

Overview of the process:

1. Edit apache's config file
2. Create and edit a new virtual host config file
3. Create a directory and settings.php for the site for Drupal
4. Edit hosts file
5. Reboot apache

My Dell XPS1330 with lovely Ubuntu decided to stop working. I hate Windows Vista and I needed a good wireframing and graphic tool so I had no choice but to buy a Mac. Since OSX is based on FreeBSD, I thought setting up AMP was a piece of cake. But I quickly found out it wasn't the case...
I tried setting up vitrual hosts with apache that comes with OSX, but I keep getting 'access denied' and can't set it up. Also the directory structure is quite different from the one I'm used to. I was going 'where is "sites-available" and "sites-enabled"?' and stuff.

I was advised by my friend Chris to try out MacPorts, and it is also James Walker's choice of package management tool. While James' observation is correct and MacPorts seems to be better at keeping packages up-to-date, I ended up in settling it up with Fink because I'm more accustomed to Debian/Ubuntu.
Overview of the process:

1. Disable OSX's apachectl
2. Download, install and configure fink
3. Install AMP
4. Various tweaks to make the system work