What I learned at BlogHer is simple: blog. Blog because it is going to change the world. Blog because you can make wonderful new blogger friends. Blog because people will know who you really are by reading your innermost thoughts, and right now, that’s a good thing. Blog because, even if you don’t think so, you really do have things to share with others. Blog, because I’m not kidding about this, it really is going to change the world.

We are communicating like never before: we’re sharing information that used to be withheld; we’re holding politicians accountable in ways unimaginable 10 years ago; we’re aggregating important stuff that would have gone unnoticed. It’s a seismic communication shift and we all need to participate because we are taking back the media.

I got out of bed to write this because I couldn’t sleep with all these blog thoughts rolling around in my head. Taking back the media seems like such a big job, but I figure if I plug away at it a little bit at a time, and stop beating myself up over my writing skills, I can overcome my fear of blogging.

So there, I did it. Wish me luck.

The Plan

We start with an idea from a client, then work to develop that idea into a plan. Once we have a plan, we  begin building the set (design & structure) and writing the script (content).  As we build the set we tweak, and fine tune each piece until it is just right.

Tech & Dress Rehearsals

A few weeks before releasing a website we start having tech rehearsals.  The tech rehearsal is where we pull together all the components of a website, including design, content, and programming. After the tech rehearsal, we then start the dress rehearsals. This is the part where we review the site to insure that the integrity of the design is maintained and the content is accurate.  At this stage, last minute finish touches are applied to formatting and styling.

Previews (Beta)

We then have previews of the site for the stakeholders in the project. The previews are a chance for the stakeholders and Quiddities to review the site again, to insure that we have maintained the integrity of the site and final tweaks and adjustments are applied.

Go Live

After final review, we determine that we are ready to go on with the show. In geek terms we call this the “Go Live” or “Launch” period. The excitement builds as we enter the final hours before we go live with a website. Will the audience like the website? Do we tell the story that was intended? Then after many weeks, and sometimes months of preparation and development we raise the curtain and launch the site. As with any new Broadway show, the first 24 hours can sometimes be a little bumpy as we work out any kinks that may come up. In the end, we recognize the collaboration and hard work have paid off to successfully launch the site.

And The Winner Is…

It is with great pleasure that I’m happy to announce two new “productions” that we have recently launched using the Drupal Framework.

UC Berkeley Printing Services

UC Berkeley Parking & Transportation

Coming soon…

Over the next few weeks we will be launching several more UC Berkeley websites. I want to thank all of those involved at Quiddities and UC Berkeley for their hard work and dedication to preparing these sites to go live.

We have several other websites on the horizon that will be launched in the next couple of weeks, and I look forward to announcing those as well.

I shared the stage with Sir Tim Berners-Lee and other fellow grantees as we accepted our grant awards from the Knight Foundation. I have shaped my craft, my company, and my career on the very invention that is credited to Berners-Lee. It is an awesome event in the life of a geek to stand in this moment. We are humbled and inspired to be selected among such an amazing spectrum of projects.

I was fortunate to share dinner conversation with Berners-Lee’s colleague, Dr. Martin Moore and other grant winners as we pondered the past and future of web standards. Our table also included grantee Brein McNamara who is a deaf technologist and blogger. Through translators, we were able to learn about the experience of the deaf web. This had a particular twist as our grant is focused on radio which is one of the mediums that can be inaccessible to the deaf.

While we at Quiddities have long adhered to web standards that allow the visually impaired to navigate our websites, we have never considered the impact of the multimedia web on the deaf. They are unable to experience or engage in a site like YouTube. Imagine missing this cultural phenomenon. Brein’s project and his participation in the Knight community will bring a wider awareness to issues that could lead to web standards for the deaf.

Yesterday was just the beginning of a conversation. As grant recipients, we will have the opportunity over the course of the grant to explore avenues of digital innovation with other award winners. We will be gathering at MIT and in Chicago this summer to continue our conversation. We are humbled.

Yesterday, Margaret and the Quiddities team were in Las Vegas accepting a grant awarded by the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation to fund innovative digital media projects. As one of the 16 project winners out of over 3000 entries, we were awarded $327,000 for our project RadioEngage which will be powered by Drupal. RadioEngage will be available as an open source, comprehensive solution for public radio stations nationwide to promote local discourse, engage with their community, and use the Internet to increase participation.

We will be working with our local Public Radio Station KUSP as our test market. Last fall, KUSP approached us about working with them to make their website more relevant to the community. Local news in the Central Coast region has been on the decline and we saw the Knight Foundation grant as an opportunity to use emerging technologies to reinvigorate local media.

We plan to make it easy for volunteers at the radio station to merge local radio news with blogs, podcasts and other rich content on the web. We will create tools that allow community members to take a more active role in what gets reported by their local radio station.

The website will be built entirely on the Drupal open source platform. In the future, other public radio stations will be able to replicate the tools we’re creating for KUSP.

We are thrilled to be working on this project with KUSP and our community. We will be inviting you to join us in the conversation.

On Wednesday, I travelled to Minneapolis from Santa Cruz to attend Drupal training by Lullabot. I travelled via feet, car, 2 planes, tram, light rail, and feet again. Who knew that one could use so many different forms of transportation to get somewhere.

What is Drupal

Drupal is a content management system (CMS). It is an extensible framework that performs the basic CMS functions and allows us to customize code. It is setup so that you can apply customizations without “hacking” the core. By not “hacking” the core, updates and security releases can be applied without losing any previous customizations.

How is Drupal Different?

There are hundreds of CMS systems available to you. Joomla and WordPress are two options available to you. If you just want a blog, then WordPress if for you. Joomla is a great CMS out of the box, but leaves little room for customizations. An alternate is to have someone develop a custom CMS for you. While a custom CMS may do exactly what you want it to do, there are several disadvantages.

• Creating and maintaining a custom CMS can be very expensive
• You or your developers are solely responsible for security patches and upgrades
• There is no development community to support your custom CMS.

One of the examples in my training compared a custom CMS to Drupal. The custom CMS is like a hand-carved wooden race car. It is very delicate, but in the end looks exactly as intended. Drupal on the other hand is like putting together a bunch of Lego pieces. Different parts do different things. The challenge of Drupal is getting all the right parts together to craft your car. All the pieces fit together to build your car, but it may not look exactly like the way you want. Sometimes in Drupal, developers struggle with making certain things perform a certain way. Unlike a custom CMS, you have to take considerations when developing a Drupal site. However, Drupal provides a solid foundation for you to build on.

Drupal Customization

Out of the box Drupal is a complete CMS that provides a content interface for editing and posting content, user authentication, and categorization. If all you need is a simple site to display content, then a basic Drupal install will work for you. You can pick a theme, download it, and install it in a couple of hours.

If you want your own design, then your site will need to be “themed”. Theming is just the process of converting your design documents to HTML and CSS. Drupal provides a powerful framework for theming that keeps the content separate from the presentation.

Now comes the fun part, customization. Drupal is extensible that you can pretty much make it do anything you want. However, customizing Drupal can be expensive if you aren’t willing to make some concessions. By taking advantage of the tools built in to the Drupal Framework and making some concessions, you can minimize the amount of development time required for your customizations.

Drupal Training

The training I attended was on API and Module development. It wasn’t exactly what I had expected but proved to validate my experience with Drupal. It also gave me an opportunity to network with other Drupal developers and learn about “giving back” to the Drupal community. I look forward to contributing more time to “giving back” to Drupal.

Leaving Minneapolis

As I leave Minneapolis, I look forward to continue building my expertise in Drupal, sharing that expertise, and giving back to the Drupal Community. Thank you Lullabot for providing the training.

The time is ripe for creating community and that’s what we’re doing in a big way in Santa Cruz. Coworking is an integral component of the tech community we want to promote in our town. There is a plethora of talent in Santa Cruz: geeks; entrepreneurs; marketers; artists; activists, visionaries; and they are often working in isolation or driving over the hill. By creating coworking opportunities we are building a support system for these folks to 1. Stay on this side of the hill (which is the sustainable, green thing to do) and 2. Get together and collaborate. It’s a simple yet brilliant idea, plus it’s really, really fun.

Coworking is an opportunity to come and engage in the conversation. Come join us on the first Friday of each month at Quiddities, or if you live in another community, start your own.

Well, as my life continues to show, the right person appears at the right time. People come into our lives in the days, in the moments they are meant to appear. We have had an amazing journey with Rob on our team, with Rob in our family. We learned about his quiddities and he learned ours. He shared in the birth of baby Roman and learned just how different an office environment can be when your boss brings the baby to work. So now he has helped build out websites for our many varied clients, he has evolved our work processes, he has become an even bigger advocate for open standards and open source.

He will not be going so far, Santa Cruz is but a small little town. He will journey up the hill to UC Santa Cruz to take on the formidable task of Senior Web Developer for the Public Information Office. It is a client that he knows from the inside, in more youthful days, and from the outside, in his days at Quiddities. I am delighted about his new venture because he is taking a chance on them. He is taking a chance that he will be able to affect change. He is taking a chance that he can spread the news about his passions and truths and convictions. He is taking a chance that he can help build the bridge between the University and City. He is taking a chance that he will be able to build a community.

Rob has been an integral part of evolving our culture as a web shop. He was instrumental in driving our adoption of Drupal. His voice, vision and community building has been a key element driving the geek dinners, the co-working explorations and open source evangelism. He leaves Quiddities well prepared to make something amazing happen. I can’t wait to see what he can do. We love you dude.

Tomorrow (that is Friday, April 4, 2008) we will have a co-working day in the office (aka Jelly) in his honor … and a bonfire to cap the evening. Geek culture is alive and well in Santa Cruz. Thanks to you dude. And this concludes my #GPD08 post.

p.s. can I get blog comments now?

So that’s why we’re hosting the first of what we hope are a long line of many coworking events under the (getting some good press) Jelly brand. Jellys are popping up all over, world-wide even, and they’re getting great coverage in Wired and NPR’s Morning Edition. It’s a movement who’s time is long overdue.

Before I worked at Quiddities I worked for years as a designer out of my home office. Isolated and hungry for human interaction I’d often wander down to my local coffee brewer, looking for more than just a caffeine jolt. While I loved the freedom to make my own hours (late) and listen to whatever radio I wanted (community or KPIG) I missed the comaraderie of co-workers. I love to talk shop. I love the energy you get from a group think, where the brain dump of many can create a big idea. I love getting advice on projects I’m working on, or maybe the chance to commiserate. I love it when I’m stuck and someone nudges me out of my limited way of thinking. How I would have loved Jelly.

Creating community in these crazy times of worldwide isolation, working together not as competitors, but as collaborators, I believe there is plenty to go around and if you work to your strengths and passion that abundance will make itself present. Come together in community and see what happens. Come join us at Quiddities and let’s start talking.

The first Jelly is on Friday, April 4, 9-5 at Quiddites, 43-203 Potrero in the Sash Mill. Bring your laptop, lunch and social skills. We’ll provide the coffee and good conversation.

Collaboration is where it’s at. Open source in everything we do.

There is something to be said in support of a balanced life. When my kids were little I used to say “a happy mom is a happy family” I think that concept can apply here- happy, rested workers can go on to create magic.

So I’m wishing you all a holiday season full of rest and relaxation. The new year will be here soon enough and we will all be back to our super-productive selves. I’m going to enjoy every last minute of my holiday hibernation, I hope you do too.

This Saturday and Sunday, Tracy and I will be neck deep in Drupal at the first ever Bay Area Drupal Camp at UC Berkeley.

I’ll be leading a session on using jQuery to enhance your Drupal themes at 10:15am Saturday morning. JQuery is the Javascript library that is behind the fancy effects here on the Quiddities website. Since jQuery is included with Drupal, it is dead simple to use on your Drupal site. I’m going to walk through the process I use to responsibly implement jQuery effects in a Drupal theme.

This will be my second Drupal Camp, the first being DrupalCampLA in September. I cannot recommend Barcamp-style events like these enough. Not only are they usually free, they are gathering points for creative collaboration and knowledge sharing. The Drupal community is really blooming and I’m excited to jump in and share in that.

If you’re going to be there, look for Tracy or myself and say hi, we’re kind of shy when we aren’t talking about Drupal or Leopard.

I feel the same way about websites. I love it when I find a site that celebrates its’ white space. As humans, we have a tendency to want to fill up the space, even though it’s not the best thing for us. We busy ourselves with stuff management, yet when you find the courage to embrace space it lets us feel expansive and clear. Just because you have a certain amount of inches or pixels at your disposal doesn’t mean you need to use them. People will miss important information if you bury it in too much design.

And white space doesn’t have to be literally white. It’s a state of mind. Simplify the visual clutter and see how easy it is to get your message across.

So Margaret made me go to the She’s Geeky (un)conference Monday and Tuesday in Mountain View. I must admit she dragged me there kicking and screaming. “I have too much to do to go to a two day conference right now!!” I said “I have the attention span of a gnat!!!” But I went and damn if I didn’t have a terrific time. What an inspiration. There were so many talented and accomplished women, both young and not as young. We talked, we networked, we strategized, we learned. As someone who has always felt that even though I’m very technically adept with my graphics applications I don’t think of myself as “geeky“ I found these women to be kindred spirits.

I spent one session getting reacquainted with my Sharpie pen, doing blind contour (only look at your subject, not the paper) drawings of fellow geeks. I told you I have a short attention span. Getting back in touch with my doodling self made me realize that when I occupy my antsy hands I actually can listen and focus better. I know it doesn’t make any sense, and I was certainly chastised by all of the Sister Patrick Marys in catholic grade school, but maybe this is what makes me a geek. I realized I approach the world as a visual person who has learned to translate those quirky visions to websites. I think I might actually hear in pictures. People ask me what I learned and I can’t regurgitate details, but I can definitely tell you what it looked like. So, I’m not a coder, but I am a newly self-identified geek.

Meanwhile, our geeky boys will be at the helm in the office. It’s sure to be library hours for the next 48 hours … not a word spoken, just the click, click of the keyboard and mouse … if you don’t count the music streaming unplugged at full volume.

She’s Geeky is certain to bring forth new collaborations for lotsa folks. We’ll report back here with what we (un)cover.