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Halloween Decorations at Chelsea Market

Wed, 10/26/2011 - 11:34am — decibel.places

Chelsea Market in New York City goes all out for Halloween!

The concourse is foodie paradise with gourmet shops and eateries. Upstairs is techie paradise with the offices of MLB Baseball, Oxygen/iVillage, Treehouse Agency and more.

I posted a gallery of 12 photos of the Halloween decorations - they're a bit grainy because I shot them with my phone - maybe that makes them spookier?

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Farewell Oxygen Media, I'm Flitting to My Next Beautiful Flower

Mon, 10/24/2011 - 11:30pm — decibel.places

Oxygen Media kitchen and Oxygen Live set When I walked into Oxygen Media 7 months ago, I saw a giant lipstick and a giant lips couch, and giant women to go with it. The World According to Paris had not yet imploded, The Glee Project was a "project" not a show, and the Bad Girls Club was far from New Orleans. I was greeted every morning by "OMG SO GLAD UR HERE XO OXYGEN" at the elevator.

I built the first Drupal homepage for Oxygen.com (coming soon) which was previously served by IIS via a static page of Drupal-generated content; I added 4 custom content types and a few views, significantly improving the site's architecture.

I restored creative control over content to the hands of editors, without the need to send the developers spreadsheets to get things published.

I had the great privilege of working with Director of Technology Marvin Mitchell, who explained to a team member when I left that I am like a "butterfly" and it's time for me to fly to my next "beautiful flower." Marvin flattered me at the beginning, saying that I am like a "Mario Andretti" of Drupal Developers, and he would not give me a tricycle; in the end, I was able to upgrade the Big Wheels to a Vespa, with the potential for more improvements.

Along the way, I was knighted "Sir Drupal, of Drupingtown, protector of all things Drupal-ly" by a non-believer, who began asking me about the "Drupal-ly" way to do things.

I'll miss Oxygen and my team members Kevin Kemper, Sudha Kota and Amin Nelson - but I am glad that I have been able to make a Drupal-ly difference!

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Jazz and Thai in Union City, NJ

Sat, 10/15/2011 - 6:42pm — decibel.places

My friend Gershom Pesach has a yen for Thai food. He has been bothering me to create a flyer for a Thai restaurant that has jazz on Thursday, Friday, Saturday, 8PM - midnight, under the premise that we will eat for free.

5 Stars Thai Cuisine, 324 29th Street, Union City, NJ

However, I did NOT create the website!

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Mayor Bloomberg Plans Eviction for Occupy Wall Street

Thu, 10/13/2011 - 3:18pm — decibel.places

I just found out that the Occupy Wall Street protesters are being evicted from Zuccotti Park at 7am tomorrow morning.

Mayor Bloomberg is sending in the police to clear the park so it can be "cleaned" and is imposing new rules that won't allow protesters to continue to occupy the park.

I have been to Zuccotti Park and talked to people. It's a public space, they are being responsible and moreover NONVIOLENT. They have been marginalized in our society, and the budget cuts and strictures being proposed will effectively punish them for the benefit of the "1%" or the "better off" or whatever you want to call the elites. They are not asking for handouts or bailouts, they are only asking for society to give them a chance and a future. Their radical protest signs include "Make the rich pay their share of taxes" and "NYPD PROTECTS AND SERVES THE RICH" and "Jobs not Cuts"

When I was in college, we "occupied" the administration building in a nonviolent protest to ask the university to divest their apartheid-propping South African krugerands, which they did. It doesn't matter if the young African-American woman sitting next to me at last year's commencement responded "Huh?" when I told her the story - we did something right, and produced change.

These protesters have been standing up for all of us against corporate greed on Wall Street and the corporate takeover of our democracy. It's time we stand with them.

Please join me in urgently signing a MoveOn petition to Mayor Bloomberg to keep him from evicting the protesters. Just use the link below.

http://civic.moveon.org/defend_ows/

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The Definitive Guide to Drupal 7 Book Release Party on 10/11 and DrupalNYC Meetup 10/5 Roundup

Thu, 10/06/2011 - 11:08am — decibel.places

The Definitive Guide to Drupal 7 book relase party

Written by over 30 Drupalers

Tuesday October 11, 2011 7PM

At Lucky Jack's downstairs

(private room)

129 Orchard Street (between Rivington & Delancey, LES)

NY, NY 10002

Buy the book, bring it for signing

Last night’s DrupalNYC Meetup presentations:

Drush console, part of https://github.com/zroger/drush-toolbox

Drush console uses phpsh and some extra magic to give you a REPL environment much closer to Scala, Ruby or Python with Drupal.

Lots of great tools, autocomplete syntaxes etc, for people who live on the command line

Feather http://drupal.org/project/feather

(also part of zroger's drush-toolbox)

Feather is a Drush script for managing and running an Apache http server in a development environment with minimal configuration. Feather maintains an isolated set of Apache configuration files, optimized to run a minimal httpd server. These configuration files are completely managed by Feather, so gone are the days of manually setting up virtual hosts for every new development site.

Compass and SCSS http://drupal.org/project/compass

All the benefits of LESS and much more: CSS Libraries and compiled SCSS

I strongly advise using Compass + SCSS, it is the future of CSS

Drawbacks - there is no "converter" to turn existing CSS stylesheets intop SCSS - you have to start from scratch

Also the Omega theme is SCSS aware and “responsive” meaning it scales for various viewports down to mobile screen size

Zemanta http://drupal.org/project/zemanta

Zemanta is a content creation dashboard on steroids and recommends related material from your site and selected external resources to add (images, blog posts etc)

Workbench workflow dashboard http://drupal.org/project/workbench

All the features I created for The Writers Network workflow last year – using Views, Workflow, Panels modules, and lots of custom code, in Drupal 6 - Workbench is for Drupal 7

Drawbacks – Workbench DOES NOT leverage these common modules, and therefore has no export settings (or Features) support – every installation must be configured from the web admin

DrupalNYC Meetups are also video archived at http://vimeo.com/channels/drupalnyc

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‘Sir Drupal of Drupingtown, protector of all things Drupal-ly’

Mon, 09/26/2011 - 5:04pm — decibel.places

A team member - who will go unnamed - offered to knight me ‘Sir Drupal of Drupingtown, protector of all thing [sic] Drupal-ly’ if I demonstrated a stable homepage built with panels.

What led up to that offer:

I wrote, "When I came back from being out sick, I discovered – nobody told me – that you ditched the panels homepage entirely and replaced it with a node template. I am here to bring our site into line with best practices for Drupal. I do not care if “that is how we have always done it” if there is a better “Drupal-ly” way."

Here are his replies:

9/23/2011 12:47 PM	Repost your work and if it renders properly – Kudos. If not, you are making yourself look bad. Push your files to dev and test. If everything works correctly, then I stand corrected and will go on record as Randall Goya being knighted ‘Sir Drupal of Drupingtown, protector of all thing [sic] Drupal-ly’. I have stated my position. I have work to do. Good day, sir. I say Good Day.
9/21/2011 3:17 PM	I am more than ready to endorse a stable version of the homepage. Stable being the word, not ‘Drupal-ly’. There are many different varieties of Kool-Aid not just the blue dot version. I am sure that everyone at the Drupal meeting drink [sic] from the Drupal teat.
9/21/2011 1:53 PM	I vote for simple, stable, clean. Panels adds instability, code bloat and complexity with the code being distributed between panels, blocks, views, modules, etc…