Nate Angellraised by wolves, accidental open-source evangelist

Interested in user experience and online pedagogy? Learn how you can benefit from and contribute to two new efforts to share best practices across open source projects: The Fluid Project's Open Source Design Pattern Library and OpenedPractices.org, a community of practice for teaching and learning with open/community-source tools.
With co-presenter, Allison Bloodworth.

Something odd happened to me today. I ran into a complete stranger on the Internet.

I signed into chat, and almost immediately had the conversation below with someone I didn't know, going by the handle "toweringcoho". I was at a largish gathering and had bonjour turned on as usual, so assumed it was someone in the room—even though I didn't bother to look to see what chat connection toweringcoho was using.

A quick Google search suggested that "toweringcoho" is the name of one of a series of IM bots that randomly connect to otherwise unconnected chat users.

And that's how I met Sunil Khiatani from Hong Kong. It took a while for both of us to figure out that we were NOT talking to robots, and a bit longer to introduce ourselves. In the end, we had a worthy conversation, got to know each other a bit, and went on our ways.

I'm not sure if these IM bots are supposed to be malicious, but I liked what happened. It was like going on a kind of unintentional dérive in text only.

I admit I've been lurking in a very slackernly manner in all the discussions in the Sakai community about content authoring, 3akai, UX, K2, Sakai NG and other unpronounceables, so I'm sorry if all this is a day late and a dollar short. Feel free to ignore me if you're part of Sakai and are way too far gone for any more input. After all, these are just thought experiments ;) If you're not part of Sakai, you might learn something about Drupal at least, so it may well be worth your time.

When I first started this blog, I used Drupal's built in jQuery library to randomly show a picture in my header from a stockpile I put on my webserver. It worked great, but it was a manual process: selecting the pictures, sizing & cropping them, uploading them, etc. In the end, I rarely added any new pictures because it was a hassle.

I had long wanted to try something more automated and show a wider variety of more current pictures on my blog. The goal: automatically show selected pictures from my flickr stream with no extra steps other than posting to flickr and maybe adding a special tag.

Finally, the images you see in my header are randomly shown from a set provided automatically from my flickr stream and are automatically cropped and sized. All I have to do to add a new image to my site header rotation is add one extra tag to a picture when I upload it to flickr.

Here's the Drupal technology I used to make this possible. FYI: everything is done with stock Drupal core and contributed modules...absolutely no coding required!

Our second episode features Nate Angell or @xolotl, a name that's hard to remember completely, but one that we will always remember. There's development talk later as he demonstrates the shiny, new iPhone app called iToony.

"Open Source Success," Campus Technology, 7/23/2006, http://www.campustechnology.com/article.aspx?aid=41086

Top-10 Countdown

Open Source Success

7/23/2006

How to ensure a winning implementation on your campus.

For the second year running, Drupal placed in the Webware 100 awards in the Publishing & Photography category.

Just noting that I updated my Drupal 6 test site to 6.1 following the security release. The update was painless.

Thanks to Drupal 6's new update functionality, the site itself checks to see if any updates to core or modules are necessary and let's you know.

Kudos to walkah et al for their work on the Drupal OpenID module and getting OpenID into core for Drupal 6!

By default, OpenID in Drupal 5 and 6 defaults to present regular Drupal authentication first, giving the user the option to toggle to authenticate via OpenID.

With today's release of Drupal 6.0, I've upgraded my test site from RC4, which was again as easy as pie.

http://test.mediapede.org/

You can read my earlier post on what's exciting in Drupal 6.