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Drupal Stuff (and more) at BarCampChaos

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I attended BarCampChaos at the Orlando's Marriott World resort on Monday evening, October 13, 2008. The BarCamp was piggy-backed on Create Chaos, a conference for creative professionals. Ryan Price gave a presentation on developing an online portfolio site using Drupal, and I gave a 20 minute presentation titled "Anatomy of a Drupal Theme".

My presentation was a thinly-veiled attempt to recruit local designers to learn Drupal theming. As a Drupal developer, I am constantly looking for talented local designers and themers to work with. While the title of the presentation was "Anatomy of a Drupal Theme", it might as well have been called "Anatomy of a Drupal Themer" as I spent a good amount of time talking about the difference between a designer and a "themer" and how at the intersection of the two, there is lots of money. Feel free to download my presentation.

There were a lot of great presentations - the thing that makes BarCamps unique (and so much fun) is the wide range of topics that are discussed back-to-back. Here's a sampling of what was presented last night:

  • Technology employment statistics for Florida and Orlando - the economy sucks, but technology jobs are a bit insulated and growing.
  • The decentralization of the desktop computer - applications on a stick. Somebody (I forgot to write down his name, if someone could enlighten me, I'd appreciate it) gave a presentation of using GIMPPortable running off a USB stick. Other portable apps available from PortableApps.com.
  • Life Hackery - Getting Things Done with Room for More - Eric Marden - First tip: use GTD (software that helps: Things (simpler) and OmniFocus (advanced)). The basics of GTD is breaking things up into Projects, Contexts, Items, and Actions. Second tip: firm believer in "Inbox Zero" - a vow not to spend more time on a given email than it deserves. With every new email, either Delete, Delegate, Reply, or Process immediately.
  • Jeremy from Whoiscarrus talked about creating artwork digitally using a combination of drawing and code. Nodebox is another application that does similar stuff. Wow - really, really cool stuff.
  • Seth talked about Facebook application development and his experiences while developing the "Running Expo" application. He talked about the limitations of the Facebook Markup Language (FBML) and Facebook JavaScript (FSJS) as well as the advantages of developing a Facebook application (viral marketing, installed user base).
  • Bensan George talked about some useful iPhone applications, including Things, Twitterrific, last.fm, and Aurora Feint.
  • Ryan Price talked about setting up a Drupal-based photo gallery web site using CCK, Embedded Media Field, and Views. In 20 minutes, Ryan used Drupal to set up a couple of new content types, showed how to use Embedded Media Field to pull content from Flickr and YouTube, tag content using taxonomy, then how to tie everything together using Views. Plus, he did this all while battling his apparently overworked, uncooperative laptop.
  • Gregg Pollack of Orlando Barcamp fame talked about the Technology of Sound. He basically taught the basics of sound (Hz, dB, sampling rate, compression, etc...) and how it relates to podcasting. I learned more about sound in his 20+ minute presentation than really should be possible.
  • Tim Rosenblatt talked about writing Firefox extensions using JavaScript. He covered everything from security issues to leveraging existing code to distribution.
  • The guys from Hydra showcased a site they've been working on all summer that is based on PHP's Zend Framework. They talked about what they felt were the advantages of developing custom content management systems.
  • Finally, Dan Kinchen gave a talk about making money on the internet. Dan's talk covered the multitude of ways he's levereaged the power of search keywords, AdSense, and Amazon's API to build low-maintenance sites that provide steady income.
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