Nate Angellraised by wolves, accidental open-source evangelist

After 5 years as Portland State's Director for Web Communications, I've moved on to work for The rSmart Group, a commercial provider of open source technologies working mostly in the education sector with Sakai, OSP and Kuali.

UC-Davis just published results from a well-designed survey on university web content management system usage.

Over 60% of respondents were using a web CMS and homegrown/open source systems were more common than proprietary systems.  Plone/Zope combined was the most common, followed closely by Homegrown, and then Drupal.

The other day, my wife and I went to hear this writer, Jonathan Lethem, speak at the Portland Arts & Lectures series.

Mr Lethem gave a very interesting—and funny—talk about a variety of things. I think I'll read some of his books. But what really happened was his talk made me start a new website: insteadness.com.

I just attended the first meeting of a parent/teacher/student group at my daughter's public, science/math/technology magnet school—Winterhaven. The group was formed to deal with a mandate from Portland Public Schools to grow the school's student body, and then necessarily move, or renovate, because the school's current building can only serve about 360 students.

People have been asking what the deal is with the images in my site header.

I've been experimenting with loading random background images from my collection using Drupal's integrated jQuery tools.

My new favorite beer is made by Ninkasi, in Eugene, Oregon.

They make an IPA that is simultaneously deliciously bitter and has all kinds of floral flavors that make each sip a trip to the Sumerian equivalent of Nirvana (An?).

Thanks to quick work by my host Liquidweb (thanks Siena!), this site is now delivered by the three fives: Drupal 5, PHP 5 and MySQL 5. Still waiting for Linux 5 and Apache 5 ;)

Recently returned from the Open Source Content Management Systems (OSCMS 2007) gathering held at the Yahoo! campus in Sunnyvale, CA.

I'm now keeping a recipe cataloging the technologies and configuration that drive this xolotl.org site.

Continue to check the recipe as the site evolves.

Once the site reaches a certain maturity, I'm thinking to build a Drupal install profile to make it easier for others to duplicate this installation.

LAMP Platform

• Ubuntu
• Apache
• MySQL
• PHP

Drupal Content Management System

• Drupal