GigaOM Structure 2010 Panels

I was lucky enough to be invited to participate in the recent Structure 2010 conference by the GigaOM folks. It was actually a great event, extremely well organized, with a bunch of industry luminaries touching on some of the key issues facing the Cloud computing industry today. The signal to noise ratio was extremely high!

For my part I was originally asked to be on the BigData panel, which given my background makes sense! The panel was actually not too bad, but (as with many of the panels) there was a heavy vendor line up and although I think everyone did a good job in trying not to purely “sell” their company, the discussion inevitably drifted that way sometimes.

More exciting was the Guru panel which was made up of a bunch of folks running some of the biggest and most complex websites in the world. No vendors meant we could get to the crux of some of the meatiest problems out there. This one was a lot of fun!

Ajax Login module for Drupal

One of the design features for the new Developer Exchange site I’m working on was to allow the users to be able to login from anywhere on the site and not be forced to click through a number of pages to return to where they were previously. This would seem a simple enough proposition and easy to achieve with Ajax.

However, amazingly enough, despite the plethora of extension modules for Drupal there was nothing that simply turned the login process into a modal popup and performed the login via Ajax. Indeed, scanning the search results at the Drupal site showed that I was not the only person who was after this functionality and that it was in quite high demand.

Not to worry though! Drupal is amazingly extensible and very easy to work with, so I set about writing my own module to turn the login process into an Ajax modal dialog. Using the excellent jQuery Thickbox plugin and a smattering of Drupal hooks I was able to quickly put together what I needed. The results is the AjaxLogin module, which can be simply dropped into your Drupal installation and enabled via the Admin interface. When a user clicks on the login link, a modal popup is displayed as show in the picture below.

If you are interested in using the module, then you can download it from here until I am able to get a Drupal CVS account and contribute it to the project.

Warning

Using both the standalone Ajax Module and AjaxLogin at the same time will cause an infinite loop in the browser. Disable the login support in the Ajax module.

A new year, a new wordpress version

I figured it was about time I updated my Wordpress software. 2.7 has been out for a while but I didn’t feel the need to upgrade since 2.6 was working very well for me. I recently had to set up a new blog for a new site I’m working on, so obviously I downloaded and installed 2.7. All I can say is WOW! The admin UI for 2.7 is stunning in its design and incredibly easy to use.

Perhaps it’ll spur me to blog more

One of things that I absolutely love is the new plugin installer. Now there’s really no need to go outside of the admin UI to do pretty much everything I need to keep my site up to date. It does that mean that good ol’ Cyberduck might start to gather dust though!

iPhone Battery life

I’ve been traveling a lot lately, and one thing that I have noticed is that the battery on my iPhone is really starting to suck. I still have my age old iPhone, bought on day one they were available, so I guess it’s to be expected. But still! I would like it to last a little longer than say 14 hours. I find it especially poor when I’m traveling and therefore using it more than if I was at home base or in the office.

Now, most of the time you would think it’s not a problem and you can just charge it at any outlet. But have you seen how busy these outlets are at commuter airports!?? Good luck in find one to use. So, to the rescue comes a new gadget from IOGear, the pocket sized charger.

All I do is charge this baby up, and when my phone (or any other device for that matter) is running down I have a ready to go charger in my bag. I find this incredibly useful for charging my phone while on a plane so that it’s ready to go when I land. I get 4-5 charges out of it before it needs refilling. Very neat!

The VirginEye visualizer

I’m currently attending the Fuel Conference in London. I just saw Alex Hunter from Virgin talk about the online marketing campaign they ran to launch Virgin America. The really interesting thing showed us was a fantastic new 3D visualizer called the Virgin Eye (click through to view) which captures articles from over 5000 news channels and displays them as a sort of star systems. Much like the Digg Labs visualizer, but still very cool!

Here’s a static view:

Technorati Tags: Virgin Eye, Virgin America

Zero Inbox Widget

I’ve recently made the push to get to Inbox Zero. It’s a productivity technique popularized by Merlin Mann for dealing with the ever increasing deluge of email. It feels great when you get there, but as with every productivity methodology you have to stick at it and continually do it. Sometimes I need a little reminder on things like this, so I created a very simple Dashboard widget to help. I have this running constantly and it acts as a visual reminder every time I flick to my Dashboard of what I need to do to maintain my Inbox Zero.

If you are interested, you can download the widget here. I hope it helps with your quest to get to and maintain your empty inbox.

Technorati Tags: Inbox Zero, Widgets

Continuous Integration presentation

I recently created a new presentation on Continuous Integration. It’s pretty nifty if I do say so myself! I was trying to simplify the message from my previous presentations and also provide some good actionable steps people can follow to implement CI.

Update

My presentation was recently one of the Featured presentations on Slideshare. Dunno if that really means anything, but it’s nice anyway. Apparently a few people added it to their favorites so it can’t be all bad!

Technorati Tags: continuous integration, agile, slideshare

Mac terminal tips

I still love the power of the terminal and command shell. By default however, the Mac Terminal leaves a little to be desired. Luckily, you can use Terminal to er… fix Terminal. Here are a few handy tips.

Make your terminal window show you your current directory:

    export HOSTNAME
    export PROMPT_COMMAND='echo -ne "\033]0;${USER}@${HOSTNAME}:${PWD}\007"'

Add some color to your prompt:

    export PS1="\033[0;36m\][\u@\h: \w] [\033[0;36m\]\$\[\033[0m\] "

Make your ls commands show directories as color:

    alias ls="ls -G"
    alias ll="ls -lG"

Just add this into e.g. your $HOME/.bashrc file.

Technorati Tags: osx, mac, terminal

Quite possibly the best stop-mo surfing movie ever

As you know, I like to surf. So this movie stop motion movie really appeals to me! ‘Nuff said.

Technorati Tags: stop motion, surfing, play mobile

Mint Site Statistics Review

For a while now (well, several years) I’ve been using the venerable analog and Report Magic to generate the statistics for my hosted sites. Unfortunately, they have become a little dated in appearance and currency. Nightly reports were fine five years ago, but we live in faster times now!

Enter Mint. A relatively new entrant to the statistics gathering scene, released by the ever present Shaun Inman. Ok, it’s not that new, I’ve been wanting to try it for a while. Version two seemed a good enough excuse. Rather than trawl through your logs after the fact, Mint takes the approach of logging statistics about your site as live as people browse it. That’s pretty common nowadays I guess, pioneered by Google Analytics, with clones like Piwik (an open source competitor) using the same mechanism.

The Good

• The UI is excellent! Orders of magnitude better than the Report Magic reports
• Installation was a breeze, and pretty much driven through the web interface. I had only had to make changes to a single php file before uploading
• Even better, there’s a compatibility suite that will figure out whether your hosting environment is suitable for Mint
• Mint is extremely extensible, something I’m a big fan of, and there is already a thriving community of extensions
• I love the Junior Mint dashboard Widget, which saves me hitting Refresh all the time

The Bad

• The collection mechanism depends on you inserting a custom script link into the HEAD of your pages. This is fine for well structure PHP apps like Wordpress of zenphoto, but more tricky if you have a bunch of static pages
• I find myself wanting to drag and re-order the Pepper containers around all the time, a la “pick your favorite portal”. The mouse icon even turns into a hand, making me think something will happen. Piwik does support this.
• I’d like to be able to “roll up” (think minimize) some of the Pepper containers
• I have session problems from time and time and find myself having to log in again.

Overall, my impression with Mint has been excellent. The UI is great, installation was a breeze, and it’s easily customizable and extensible. What more could you ask for? I do love my Minty fresh stats. And you can’t argue about the beauty of the logo design!

Technorati Tags: mint, inman