I chose a CMS

So after checking out all the rest, I think I chose the best: Drupal! While I made this decision a couple months back, it´s just now that I´ve gotten the sandbox & time to actually start playing in it- after testing distros & configuring LAMP stacks.

I can´t wait either, as I´ve got roughly 8 sites to work on by the end of the year. Drupal + teaching myself PHP = fun times ahead.

I should note that my old work buddy & good friend, Marco hooked me up with his old Professional PHP Programming book...good lookin´ out! :)

It´s about to get real busy

Well after the wonderful SCALE 6X conference, there were a few things born out of that. My conversation w/Zak started as a question re: whether he´d seen something on the internet that I´d thought about for like 3 years (but I hadn´t seen anything after repeated google searches). Even though I´ve never done anything like this"before, Zak encouraged me to basically just start it. He´s totally right, so my 1st project is starting a tech-based non-profit. It´ll be a web-based tool & since I´m going to have to teach myself a few things to create the cool features I want to provide the community, it´s going to take a while...stay tuned.

The 2nd thing I´m now working on is the IndaMixx project. I also met Ron @ SCALE & we had some real good conversations.

I´m really looking forward to the creation of a service for the community-based, grass roots organizations through technology as well as being a part of a revolutionary musical endeavor.
200GR8!!!

SCALE 6X- Rockin' OSS Conference

Wow! What a great event! I can´t believe it took me this long to finally attend one. Boy have I missed out. The speakers were great, the topics terrific & there were lots of friendly people around.

Friday
I spent the majority of my time hopping back & forth between the Open Source Software in Education (OSSIE) & the Women in Open Source (WIOS) tracks. Both had interesting presentations & informative dialogue between presenters & audience. My favorite was Angela Byron´s talk on Drupal. I heard about Drupal a year ago but have just recently been evaluating CMS solutions & Drupal was my clear winner so it was a nice coincidence to hear Angela´s talk. I also attended some really cool Birds of a Feather (BoF), especially the WINE one as I´m looking forward to contributing a bit more than just using the product. ;)

Saturday
The OSSIE & WIOS tracks were no more but there was still lots of great presentations being given. My favorite was the talk by Zak Greant. I was so blown away by how progressive-minded his talk was that I approached him & we talked at length about how open source can be used as a tool to effect positive societal change. More on what that spawned later. The Haiku presentation by Bruno was also great. Another great project I´d love to contribute to (if time permits). The reception was nice & many folks won really nice gifts. Grats. :)

Sunday
The final day started with a great keynote by Stormy Peters. I´d seen her presentation on Friday so I knew it would be well worth it. The first 2 presentations I visited were about legalities in open source. Karen Sandler and Robert Scott did a really nice job explaining what are, usually, very convoluted issues. I really wanted to visit the Creative Commons presentation but I´ve known about CC for a long time & am currently charting the ways that I´m going to release my music projects using this tool (again, a topic for another day). I chose the sysadmin presentation over my friend´s Distributed MySQL presentation (I know he forgives me, hehe).

A wonderful conference that was worth every penny. I´m booking early again next year! :)