walkah: toronto

My last several weeks (months?) have been pretty darn hectic preparing for Do It With Drupal. Well, we've done it with Drupal - and it was awesome! It was really fun bringing the whole Lullabot team to make it happen. The speakers were awesome, the venue was great and the people rocked.

For those of you who missed it, the event was pretty well documented via the twitter backchannel and flickr photos. Thanks everyone!

I'm back home now... oh - and I moved! I'm now living in a beautiful house at St. Clair and Dufferin.

So it's time to settle in for the holiday season, finish getting unpacked and settled and enjoy a little breathing room. To kick it off, I'm heading to #hohoto tonight. Looking forward to partying with my local Toronto people!

I'm excited to announce that members of the Toronto Drupal User Group have put together an exciting one day, free workshop on Drupal theming.

I will be there to present in the afternoon. Please come out and say "hi". Also, Lullabot will be sponsoring lunch (thanks guys!).

It seems like Toronto has gone Drupal crazy lately. I am loving all the local events!

The event takes place starting at 10am on November 22nd, 2008 at the Centre for Social Innovation. Be sure to check the website for full details. See you there!

October is a busy speaking month - but I'm excited to say I've been asked back to present another (free) PHUG Workshop on Drupal.

Back in April, I did an Intro Workshop. This time, I'll be showing off theming in Drupal 6:

In this workshop, we will show the process of taking an HTML & CSS design and converting it into a fully working Drupal theme. Along the way, we’ll look at the 3 main aspects of Drupal theming, some best practices and a few tricks. Drupal 6 makes the whole process easier than ever, so get started making your Drupal site look not like a Drupal site!

The workshop is Tuesday Oct 28 2008 @ 630pm at Seneca @ York Campus in room 2112. See the workshop announcement for full details.

One of my favorite annual free software conferences is back again! The 7th annual Free Software and Open Source Symposium is happening next week, October 23rd & 24th. I've spoken at this event 3 years in a row - it's a great event and local in Toronto!

I'll be running 2 sessions again this year:

• Drupal and Views 2: Powerful Websites in Zero Lines of Code: This workshop will cover some of the power available to Drupal site builders thanks to the awesome new Views 2 module. 2 hours, 1 site, 0 lines of code. Rock!
• Using Drupal: Community Powered Code to Run Your Site: This year's presentation will focus on the secret weapon of Drupal: the community. Drupal's success comes down to the power of the people behind it!

Check out the full schedule and register now!. Hope to see you there!

My favorite web browser slash social movement, Firefox, released version 3.0 yesterday. To generate some buzz around the new release, the folks at Mozilla are trying to set a Guinness World Record for software downloads in 24 hours. They're initial target was 5 million downloads. As of this writing, they're at 6.5 million downloads and counting - with 6 hours to go!

I also spent a few hours last night at the Mozilla Toronto launch party. Mozilla is full of great people doing great work... it was nice to help celebrate their latest milestone.

If you haven't yet, go now. Get Firefox 3.

I'm looking forward to hanging out at Mesh 2008 the next couple days. I've had to miss it for various reasons the first two years, so I can't wait to see what all the buzz is about! Watching the talk on twitter today about MeshU has gone well and things are off to a great start.

As usual, I'll be the one decked out in Lullabot gear talking about Drupal. Hope to see you there :)

The third annual Drupal Camp Toronto event is coming soon. On Friday May 23rd and Saturday May 24th join the Toronto Drupal Users Group in celebrating two days of Drupal at the University of Toronto!

We're putting together an exciting event this year. We have John Resig coming to talk about jQuery and ActiveState will be giving away prize packages. Plus we'll have two full days of information - tips, tricks, case studies and howtos. Make sure to register soon! We already have over 100 people signed up!

Also, we are actively seeking both speakers and sponsors. Propose a session or contact us if you're interested in sponsoring or have other questions.

Hope to see you there!

I know it's late notice, but I'll be hosting a free workshop tomorrow night, April 2nd at 7pm as part of the PHUG + RMI free workshops.

For those of you here in Toronto that are unaware, PHUG is the new local PHP User Group. They have a lot of momentum and are an exciting group - I look forward to more collaboration in the future betweeh PHUG and DUG-TO.

The workshop will be Drupal Basics - a crash course in everyone's favourite CMS. We'll look at the core Drupal concepts, how building sites in Drupal works, and some basic theming tricks.

It's a free event, but space is limited so please register. Looking forward to meeting some new faces!

UPDATE: P.S. this isn't an April Fool's joke ;)

Dear Canada, you're doing it all wrong!

OK, so I love my adopted nation. I do. But, what's a guy (or gal) got to do to get affordable, unmolested bandwidth in this country?!?

I've written before about the abysmal mobile data situation in this country. Canada has one GSM network - and we pay the price for it.

But, until recently, my internets were safe at home. See, I'm a very happy subscriber of TekSavvy residential DSL: clean, clear, reliable, affordable bandwidth. Well, that's until Canada's copper monopoly decided to start throttling my bandwidth.

People have been talking and blogging about the events. You can follow the events at Free Our Bandwidth and, if you haven't before, read more about net neutrality. It's time for some real change. CRTC, where are you???

Canada, I'm fed up. Oh, and ketchup chips suck too.

I need to do a quick shout out to some of the cool stuff happening in our local Toronto Drupal User Group:

• As previously mentioned, Khalid was elected to the Drupal Association.
• Dan Kurtz - who was instrumental in the organization of last year's DrupalCampToronto - recently released a really neat looking module called Teleport which aims to be the Quicksilver of Drupal. Sweet!
• Inspired by our last meetup, Jason Swaby went ahead and ported a template to a Drupal 6 theme.

Way to go, guys! It's so awesome to see the local gang rockin' out in the global community!