Mike Ryan

This may be slightly out of order, since I've still got a ways to go in blogging my notes on the specific sessions I attended at Drupalcon, but I want to get my overall thoughts and impressions out as quickly as possible.

First, expanding on my comment on Drupal.org - I'm re-entering the Drupal community after some time away, and it feels so right... There are some acknowledgements I need to make:

First and foremost, my significant other SIGNIFICANT Other, Sarah Richards, has been supportive above-and-beyond of the time I've spent Drupaling on top of my day job (and of the constant whining over how little time I have left to do all the other things I want to do). I hope her patience continues, because I have a lot of catching up to do in the Drupal world. And I hope some non-profit working on progressive change out there can use an anthropologist with project management experience (contact me if you can...).

Popular Science - Case Study

pingVision presented a case study of the migration of the Popular Science site to Drupal. Since I'm joining Moshe Weitzman in Cyrve, specializing in content migration, this was of particular interest to me.

I made a stab at live blogging with the usability session, but I think it will work better for me just to jot down the random points that particularly strike me at the time, and fill in more thoughts later. Hopefully most if not all sessions will be on video, so there's no need to be a scribe...

I'm pleased to announce that I am joining Moshe Weitzman in Cyrve. Our specialty is content migration and transformation - the grunge work of fitting old information into new holes.

Past projects of mine
 

XML -> Mobile-compliant XHTML

I produced a mobile-compatible website for delivering 2008 U.S. Presidential election results to hand-held devices. This involved modifying the Drupal FeedAPI module (at that time still in beta) to read custom fields in addition to standard RSS fields (patch submitted).

As a follow-up project, in two days I created a system to take XML feeds of raw election data and produce mobile-compatible XHTML pages to present the results, for live updates on Super Tuesday. This system included a templating system so the client could easily style it to their own needs (they reported it took half an hour with my delivered system to complete the theming and customization), and has remained in operation through subsequent primary elections.

Excellent meetup last night. The stuff I actually thought to jot down:

My Lightning Talk was on my collaborative knowledge base project at the day job. The Node Auto Term (NAT) module was pointed out as an potential substitute for the book module.