When I first typed in my search to learn about Drupal, I spelled it “Droople.” Luckily “Droople Blog” on google returned the proper spelling. It took a few requests from Charlotte to get me there, but after realizing that I might be coming across like we were a WordPress only shop, I wanted to prove the strength of our team and prove our knowledge in many applications. Keeping the faith, after learning enough to sound smart (sort of), I asked Chris and Blake if they had heard of it before. They both looked at each other and paused. I knew we were in for a ride. They both admitted to have worked with Drupal in the past, but mentioned that it was slightly more complex.
Fast forward a couple of weeks and it is now very obvious to me why so many Drupal sites look very similar to each other. At lightning speed, our designers and developers completely reconstructed Chris Shipley’s Guidewire Connection.
Great work Chris, Blake, Brandon and Mike…not to mention the rest of the RD2 team who covered for us during those late nights of working through all aspects of the Drupal framework.
More to come on the details of what we all believe to be a great platform for business applications that want a content managment platform that supports social networking functions.
When I was at the conference in Sonoma, there were several comments that were so inspiring, I had to write them in my notebook. Phillip Rosedale (CEO of Linden Lab) made the comment, “Fear Is the Mind Killer.” He was so right. We are working on some things that are extremely cool. Applications that bring businesses a huge step closer to realizing the power of some of these emerging technologies. To make things more challenging, RD2 has always been all about taking it a step further. It’s not enough just to figure out how the technologies work…the job is never done until a compelling user experience is created. To push the envelope by allowing design to be all it can be within the realm of the new technologies we are working with. If we had never confronted the fear, we would not have been able to close the last few weeks without so much learning and hard-earned experience.
I know it was a simple statement, but without blowing past fear, we could never grow. More to come…
A couple of weeks ago, I went to the Guidewire Group Fall Leadership Forum in Sonoma, California. Since I have been back in Dallas, life has been a blur. I hope to catch up on writing about what turned out to be one of the most rewarding events I have ever been a part of. Chris Shipley was the moderator of some incredibly interesting discussions. Charlotte Ziems wrote about it here.
Griego introduced me to SuprGlu today. It’s a really cool site that lets you create your own personal mashup. Now my feeds from del.icio.us, flickr, twitter, rd2 blog (my posts) and my personal blog are all fed into my SuprGlu page. I love the idea of this because it takes all of the applications that I use every day and aggregates the content to one place. While i am not crazy about the templates it displays, it’s a really nice way to get everything in one place.
We started the RD2 Christmas music listening yesterday. The general feeling is that, cynics be damned, six days out (five now) is fair game for a little community Christmas spirit-bringing through music.
I, personally, quite enjoy some good holiday music. Notice the word choice: good holiday music. Sappy songs about saving up to buy your poor mother shoes need not apply.
Great Christmas albums I’ve been listening to this season:
Recommendations? I have no doubt there are strong opinions out there.
Former President of Texas A&M University, Dr. Robert M. Gates was sworn in as US Secretary of Defense this morning.
Bob Gates handed diplomas to Texas A&M grads (including my roommate Lauren) for the last time this weekend, and was sworn in as Secretary of Defense this morning. I’m starting a new job today, too. Granted, I spend very little of my time dealing with Peace in the Middle East (I’ll mostly answer the phone today until a project comes up), but it’s an exciting day nonetheless.
While at A&M, Dr. Gates had a golf cart that he used to navigate campus, complete with horns sawed off on the front and maroon A&M fuzzy dice hanging from the rear-view mirror. We had seen him eating in the basement of the MSC (the student union on campus) often, usually with a student or two. About a year ago, my friend Lisa and I left Dr. Gates a note on his golf cart asking if he would have lunch with us sometime. It was a semester later that Lisa got the call on her cell phone from his secretary, regretting that Dr. Gates would not have time to eat lunch, but asking us to come into his office for a “courtesy visit.” We rode the elevator up to Gates’ office - which takes up the entire 10th floor of Rudder Tower (the second tallest building on campus, the tallest A&M bonfire was only one foot shy of its 11 stories) - not knowing what to expect. We found Dr. Gates to be incredibly down to earth. The meeting was very relaxed, we just talked about things going on in our lives. At the time, I was amazed that the former director of the CIA was so interested in my study abroad in France or Lisa’s involvement in a program encouraging 8th graders in the Valley to consider college as an option. It was a great experience.
Good luck on your first day of work, Dr. Gates… mine is going very well.
The world lost a truly original talent yesterday. I thought it would be nice to remember him at his very best in Young Frankenstien.
May he rest in peace.
With the holiday spirit abound and many people planning winter vacations, the thought of getting the heck out of Dodge is almost palpable. Not bad timing for Southwest Airlines’ newest addition to the online community: a brand new video blog inviting all to post their versions of the popular “Wanna Get Away” ad campaign. The site was launched yesterday, and has had well over 1,000 unique visitors already.
The idea behind SouthwestWannaGetAway.com reflects one of the main components of web 2.0: allowing users to contribute content. Anyone from the general public is able to create their own “Wanna Get Away” moment, film it, upload it to YouTube, and submit it to Southwest. Winners receive tickets to any of Southwest’s 63 destinations, and one grand prize entry will be aired nationwide.
RD2 is of course excited. In a lot of ways, it was a unique achievement for us. We like to play the role of designer and builder, but this time, most of the design ideas were left up to GSD&M, Southwest’s ad agency since 1980. Collaborating with one of the biggest agencies in Texas and a member of the Omnicom Group (NYSE: OMC), a major player in global marketing, was definitely a big first for all involved in the project.
I have two brothers. They are both two of my biggest heroes. The three of us were born with this insane need to be obsessed with things…I mean really obsessed. Almost to the point of being unhealthy. In the case of one of my younger brother’s latest obsessions, a lack of health is definitely not the issue.
I believe that being “obsessed” with things is a pretty fun way to live life. I guess what I mean by obsessed is more on the side of being completely dedicated to a goal and going after it 100%, and less on the side of say…John Hinckley Jr. and Jodie Foster. My brothers are constantly teaching me how to really go for something all the way, and watching my younger brother run the White Rock Marathon this past Sunday was the latest example.
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I’m on a shuttle at just before 5:00 am. We are driving from the Sonoma Fairmont Mission to the San Francisco airport and it’s still dark, so we won’t be seeing much of the Golden Gate in daylight. As usual, I am checking my blackberry for messages that might have come through at night. I see an automated message from our blog, “awaiting moderation.”. It seems that our spam filter is learning and evolving on it’s own. It senses there might be something we don’t want to allow through, so our spam plugin in WordPress is kind enough to ask me to check this message out.
Just yesterday I found myself evangelizing the importance of taking handhelds into consideration when designing interfaces. This is something we talk about all the time. Having never actually looked at our blog console from my blackberry before, I had nothing better to do than follow the link. I admit that to my surprise, the handheld interface in WordPress is incredibly useful.
Very easily and very quickly I am able to follow the link from the WordPress notification email directly into the management console. Upon login, I am presented with all of the information I would normally see in my FireFox browser. Front and center, I am presented with items that WordPress suspects might be spam, and I easily navigate to the recent items and either verify whether spam or not. In noticing how easy and FAST this user experience is, I tried out most of the functionality on our blog console. Remember that it is 5am now and I am sitting on a bus driving through the rain. OK, I am a nerd….however, even this post was written from my blackberry. It’s easy to select or even create tags for my post. I can save and review later, edit my time stamp, add custom fields and I even have full access to the code shortcuts that allow me to insert HTML code snippets if I wish to use them.
This simple and fast user experience really validates for me the importance of developing web content with hand held consideration in mind. I rarely surf the web on my blackberry. Maybe because my expectations are low since so many sites have such horrible user experiences for “little screens.”. Maybe we would all be going to our blackberries or other hand held devices more often if our expectations were higher…and if we could count on very simple, direct and highly usable user experiences. Afterall, I would not want to just browse the web for hours on end with my blackberry, but there are so many areas that could be improved that could heighten our expectations for these simple things we need to do online.
Immediately after selecting “publish,” I’ll be adding my wordpress console to my blackberry shortcuts.