On Twitter, users began to find that they wanted the ability to tag tweets to help in finding and categorizing information. Similar to how “d @username” started the idea of direct messages, some enterprising folks settled on the syntax of “#tagname” syntax as a means of categorizing tweets. The hashtag was born.

On Twitter.com or in your favorite Twitter client, you can search for hashtags just like keywords. Say you wanted to know about the information from the Relevant 2011 conference that just recently took place. a search for #relevant11 would list all tweets where the author included that hashtag.

This can become quite powerful for following topical discussions. Below is my list of the Top 10 hashtags for missional technology:

1. #nptech – Non-profit technology
2. #sm4np – Social Media for Non-profits
3. #4change – Technologies used for social good
4. #churchtech – Church technology
5. #citrt
6. #iccm – International Conference on Computing and Mission
7. #nten – Come on – Gotta have NTEN in the list.
8. #charity – general charity info
9. #missions – generic missions info
10. #nonprofit – generic non-profit info

• The peak time for social sharing is 9:30am EST daily.
• Wednesday is the peak day of the week for sharing.
• 75% of sharing clicks happen on the first day of the share.
• Most users click within 2 minutes of the share. (Wow!)
• Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, StumbleUpon and Tumblr are on the rise
• iGoogle, AOL Lifestream, MySpace, Delicious and Digg are on the way out [my words]
• 10x more sharing occurs via URL copy-n-paste than from sharing tools

Visit http://www.jamtour.com for more informat

Nope, This is not a technology piece. Instead, let’s hear from all your music freaks! The organization I’m with during the day is helping to sponsor the 2012 Winter Jam tour. This tour is split with one line-up for the Western and another for the Eastern U.S. Here is a list of some of the talent that will be on stage (as of this writing)

Check out the tour dates, grab some friends and make your plans to attend! While your at it, YOU can help Bible Poverty. Check it out at http://endbiblepoverty.org

I know, I know. I despise Internet Explorer as well however, it is still a reality for most of us needing to make sure the things we build on the web work with the defacto-standard operating system browser. *sigh*

Microsoft has recently (8.19.2011) released a series of Virtual PC VHD (virtual machines) that are preconfigured with the various operating systems and Internet Explorer versions. Now, let me first warn you that these things are monstrously large in order to simply test IE versions on various operating systems. They total around 11.5GB in total. However if this detailed testing and QA is important, these might be the trick.

Another downside,

Microsoft gives us a big caveat:

*Note: You may be required to activate the OS as the product key has been deactivated. This is the expected behavior. The VHDs will not pass genuine validation. Immediately after you start the Windows 7 or Windows Vista images they will request to be activated. You can cancel the request and it will login to the

desktop. You can activate up to two “rearms” (type slmgr –rearm at the command prompt) which will extend the trial for another 30 days each time OR simply shutdown the VPC image and discard the changes you’ve made from undo disks to reset the image back to its initial state. By doing either of these methods, you can technically have a base image which never expires although you will never be able to permanently save any changes on these images for longer than 90 days

So, it may seem like more trouble than it’s worth but atleast there is an attempt here from Microsoft, but it does fall short.

The folks at Kiva provide an interesting service that I first became aware of in 2007. I tend to be a visual person so when I found that Kiva had created a video visualization of the movement of funds between investors and borrowers over time, I had to watch it. What do you think?

Intercontinental Ballistic Microfinance from Kiva on Vimeo.

Photo by The Library of Congress

[video of presentation]

Contextual Admin module – http://drupal.org/project/context_admin
Provide plastic, plugin driven, context aware administration tool
Wrapped in flexibilty of page manager
Exportable, Reusable, features compatible

Start with View inside a panel
VBO to administer other nodes of the same context
Customer: If I want to do something in a section, I just go to it.

This can allow users of a role the ability to add others users of a certain role. Drupal can’t….context admin can

Have an article, with now an add image tab, add a new image node, save it returnng to the article. Node reference automatically added as well.

In context admin settings.
Access = who can see the link
Selection = what they can see when they get here

Excellent presentation~! Lots of potential here for much more user friendly way of managing content but got to think ahead.

Strategies for Design and Drupal
John Zavocki
http://Johnvsc.com

• Agile or crippled?
  • If you have a project deadline you are not running agile project.
    • Estimates
      • “Just” = complicated. “Just do this….”
      • Iterations vs. hours – Quantify the challenge in it
      • Real Time vs. Ideal Time:
        • Football game == 60 minutes. Reallity is 3 hours.
    • Practical estimates based on functional facts.
      • Even if you use contrib, almost guarantee the client won’t want it exactly the way it does it.
      • XP Strategies
        • short definable sprints
        • pair programming
        • intense communications
        • achievable results
        • flexibility
        • Waterfall
          • Only communicate when there is a problem
          • Re-routing
          • Project life cycle

• Project Life cycle
  • Traditional
    • proposal/requirements
    • wireframes (maybe)
    • Design
    • Production
    • QA
• Intelligent process
  • Proposal/Requirements (Macro and micro. Iterative)
  • Wireframes (essential)
  • QA #1
  • Production
  • QA #2
  • Design
  • QA #3

• Design Patterns
  • What in the word are these. No pictures!
  • In dev world…very powerful to know how to build things
  • Ratios, rule of thirds…. – that’s a different world. Can use it day to day.
    • Simpleton
      • Small, concise out of the box
      • Not too many configurations
      • Plug and play solutions

• Framework
  • Solution by technology (e.g. CSS)
  • Creator
    • Build solution form scratch
    • Most time consuming
    • Needs to account to trial and error.
  • Fabrication
    • Fake it until you make it
    • Make believe functionality
  • New Order
    • Configuration (e.g. Views)
  • Assembly
    • Assembles recipes
    • Personal cook book
  • Face lift
    • Slightly change or re-arrange. (e.g. By line, taxonomy, etc)
  • Hooker
    • Devlierable from a developer
  • Bookworm
    • Use a library (e.g. JQuery) to achieve functionality
  • Active
    • Event driven (js…)

• Image treatments
  • …..

• These are a vocabulary. This is a starting place only.

• Strategies
  • Types of strategies
    • Site Configuration
    • Design Implementation
    • Information REsurrection
      • Ninja theming
      • DB/Data —> Spit it out to front end
• Choosing strategies
  • Look at wireframes
  • DDP Identification (DDP – Design Design Patterns – see above)
  • Iteration value against a DDP
  • Give and take

• Closing thoughts
  • We over compensated but are rarely compensated
  • As soon as humanily possible become a part of the developent process.
  • 1+1=3
    • Two people working in tandem with experiences and knowledge gives you more options and solutions
• Estimating
  • Interations vs hours
  • personal history
  • Attach iteration to design pattern (estimating)

Interactive Marketing = Banner Ads
Track: Click-throughs + Email Addresses
Banner-nomics (Belo Broadcasting)

Facebook Marketing

• 700 billion minutes a month on Facebook
• Start ads as CPC with very specific targeting. Anything that break .2 Clickthrough, change then to CPM.

More info….http://fanreach.net

Edge rank = Affinity + Weight + Decay

Recommendations

• Post more videos, images…. increases weight
• Ask Questions
• Get fans to visit your facebook page

Drupal for Facebook (http://drupalforfacebook.org)
Facebook Auth (Facebook Connect)
Makes it easy for new users to log into your site
It allows you to now pullsome of their fb data
Extended permissions – Lots of data

Canvas pages = Load external page into facebook fan page. (Application)
OpenGraph Meta module

OpenPublish – Drupal 6.x
Tattler is on it’s way out. No business model for it.
OpenPublic – Drupal 7
Open Atrium – Acquired from Developmneet Seed
Managing News – Acquired from Development Seed

Companies that only do dev work are at risk.
Can only make as much money as code you can develop, hours you can charge.
Move from a VAR into also being an ISV.

Phase 2 Technology is the maintainer of the features module

Features Module
Kit Compliance module – Basic set of standards to ensure distributions, apps from cause problems with eachother when used together

Slides:
Designing_Enterprise_Drupal.pdf

Need a good (great) network

• Capacity
• Scalability
• Reliability

Pressflow is the only way to go on Drupal 6 for enterpise

• It is a drop-in replacement for Drupal 6.x
• Supports database replication and reverse proxy caching. (read vs write to different db instances)
• Optimized for MySQL and PHP 5

Varnish on the front end

• http://lb.cm/ZyR – Good Drupal/PressFlow varnish config (vcl)
• Varnish needs lots of file handles. Be sure to up the limit in file limit.

Apache

• Total RAM available to apache/40 = MaxClients (since 40 is the average. Not one size fits all)

File Synchronization

• NFS server – Neospire uses a very custom NFS config to reduce overhead and increase performance.

CDN

• Establish a relationship with a provider now even without a contract. Have there number if you get slashdotted.

SysLog

• Multi-server….do it. One line config

MySql

• They typically do circular replication. There are dangers.
• Uses heartbeat with 2 IPs
• IP#1 for Master
• IP#2 for slave
• Heartbeat fails IP’s over to other server as needed

NFS and SOLR HA

• DRDB – Raid over ethernet
• Also use heartbeat with multiple IP’s as well for failover.

Monitoring

• Panopta, Zabbix, Nagios for monitoring and alerting. Munin for graph only.