Video: Parachuting into Drupal Crazy

This week I spoke at the DBUG Drupal meetup in Denver about an unglamorous but very important thing that comes up for any technologist: turning around applications that have, for one reason or another, left their users unhappy.

I also had no idea that DBUG meets in a TV studio and is broadcast live on public access TV and the web. Thankfully, my doctor has me on some really good blood pressure meds.

My talk covers some of the strategic, technical, and personal things that people can do to fall back in love with their Drupal applications again. (The non-technical aspects are really applicable to any software.)

[archiveorg dom-7942-1-march-2015-drupal-meetup-group width=640 height=480 frameborder=0 webkitallowfullscreen=true mozallowfullscreen=true]

(I start my talk at the 19 minute mark.)

I want to thank DBUG for inviting me, and Aten Design Group and Denver Open Media for their sponsorship and work to make this event happen.

Slides are at http://zeke.ws/DrupalParachuting .

Keep life priorities in balance: Check.

In my personal life, I’ve always been one to prefer spontaneity over structure; relaxation over regulation. For a long time, I’ve clung to that at home as a way to compensate for all the organization that’s crucial in my work. But this summer, I’ve been trying something more deliberate to keep a balanced daily life. Every day after work, I make sure to do a few things: Continue reading Keep life priorities in balance: Check.

My Resolution for 2013 That Worked: Carrying a Real Camera Everywhere

2013 was the first year I made a New Year’s resolution: to carry a real camera around everywhere. It went great!

Photography has been a strictly casual hobby throughout my life. It’s always been something that lets me capture enjoyable things that happen in my life, but never something that itself became a focus of my life. So why make a New Year’s Resolution for it? Aren’t those things usually done with the intent of bettering our lives?

The answer lies in how most of us have changed our photography habits: anyone with a smartphone is carrying a camera with them everywhere. Before smartphones, I was carrying along more traditional cameras to events where I thought I’d want them: vacations, concerts, and the like. But smartphones were the ultimate popularization of the old photographer’s adage: “The best camera is the one you have with you.”

Now, blame my twentysomething lifestyle, but many of the best moments in my life happen in the shadows – exactly where tiny cell phone sensors struggle to perform. Concerts, restaurants, twilight walks, and the like. I started finding myself out with something great going on, taking out my camera, and getting results that made me feel like I wasted my time even bothering to take a picture. That was it, really – I guessed that I’d capture more good moments if I carried a “real camera” to it all. Continue reading My Resolution for 2013 That Worked: Carrying a Real Camera Everywhere

Millennials, Begone!

This year, all the uninspired rants against my generation got a bit too much to handle:

https://twitter.com/kissane/status/247309639597838336

I just cooked up a Chrome extension called “Millennials, Begone!” to make every invocation of “millennials” say what it really means:

Pesky Whipper-Snappers.

You can go install it from the Chrome Web Store, or grab the source at GitHub.

On Standards and Switching from Gmail to FastMail.FM

This summer, I finally followed through on a couple of experiments I’ve had nagging at the back of my head for a while:

  1. Seeing if I can tolerably get by on standard IMAP email hosting after 9 years on Gmail, just to know if it’s a viable alternative in some kind of hypothetical doomsday scenario
  2. Moving my blog – the one place where I’m not a CMS/blog developer, but a writer – from a traditional server to one of the more modern “app-as-a-hosted-service” platforms.  ZekeWeeks.com is now hosted on WordPress.com Business – I’m just at the start of this experiment after a few years of “not good enough” attempts on various managed WordPress services, and will write about it later if anything interesting comes up. 🙂

Even though I was interested in seeing the current state of email outside a proprietary host, I approached that experiment with skepticism and low expectations. And I certainly didn’t expect it to turn out like it did! 
Continue reading On Standards and Switching from Gmail to FastMail.FM

My #WP10 Story

WordPress is 10 years old today.

I started making websites a few years earlier, but WordPress did something for me that all the HTML framesets, <table>-based layouts, and animated GIFs of the 1990s didn’t: it helped me find my voice.

I encountered blogging in high school. This was when LiveJournal and Xanga were hot, and many of my classmates read each other’s long form posts and left regular comments which sometimes ended up essay-length themselves. (I must admit feeling like an old codger when I reminisce about the rich engagement we had in “my day” compared to the signal-to-noise ratio in today’s knee-jerk status updates.)

I had been a tech geek long before I started blogging, and WordPress wasn’t my first blogging software. But WordPress did give me a completely new perspective on my passion for technology. At its core, it was software that removed the technical complexities from the writing process, providing me with an environment to explore my thoughts and share them with people who were important to me. And that led me to my own passion for technology: tools which aren’t just interesting for their own sake, but tools which enable all kinds of people to speak their voice in a more effective manner than was possible before.

I’m staggered to think of my life since those early days of exploring my own voice with this personal blog. Somehow along the way, I started helping other people and nonprofits use WordPress as well. I got a tech-related degree in college, but since graduating, I’ve paid my bills with open-source publishing software like WordPress and Drupal, and discovered a life where each exciting challenge creates opportunity for everyone involved. What started as a hobby in school has turned into a real pursuit of passion.

The best technologies are the ones which are powered by, and in turn serve to empower, great people.

Photos: Mickey Hart Band, Winter 2013

I must admit having low expectations initially, but in the last year, I’ve now been to five Mickey Hart Band shows. Live music has been a big part of my life forever, but it’s rare that a current band excites me this much.

This week, I went to two MHB shows at the Fox Theatre in Boulder and the Oriental Theater in Denver. They were excellent as always; it was also the first time to a show with my new camera, a Sony NEX-6. Concerts are some of the only events for which I take lots of photos, and I have a long history of struggling to get the right settings to capture good photos in a terrible lighting situation. I used these shows as an opportunity to acquaint myself with the new camera, and see how much quality I get compared to my old point-and-shoot cameras. The results are decent, but perhaps the biggest thing this shoot taught me was that I need to get a lens with a much wider aperture so I can shoot at higher speeds.