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About eighteen months ago I compiled a series of reviews of Ruby on Rails plugins concerned with geography. I put together a comparison chart and posted it on this blog. It subsequently found a new home on a wiki, but lately that wiki has rarely been accessible so I decided it was time to move it all back into this site. You can now find the comparison chart at: /process/resources/rails-geo-plugins/ A few updates have been lost along the way as they were solely made on the wiki, but hopefully it’s still of use. Since I published the original reviews and chart my attention has wandered a little from the geo plugin scene, so please do flag up any new plugins, changes in features or fixes that I may have missed. I’m going to be trying to check through all the existing listings to update them but that may take a while, so comments here may well encourage me to focus more quickly. ...

Over at Netsquared.org Amy Sample Ward has posted another of their regular ThinkTank questions. This time around it’s: What are the key questions nonprofit orgs should ask to help them determine how to prioritize social media training and experimentation as they do their technology and organization-strengthening planning? I’m coming in a bit late. There are some good responses appearing, such as those from Ashley Messick and Beth Kanter which offer a number of key questions to consider when developing a strategy for your organisation. The responses to date are summarised on the netsquared site. ...

A couple of years ago I wrote and released a Ruby on Rails plugin called loads_from_amazon. It made it relatively simple to populate a model with data based on an amazon search, and was very helpful in the project I was then working on. That project ended and I’ve not had time to maintain the plugin since. It was based on a clunky amazon ECS library and I kept meaning to rewrite it to sit on something more up to date, like amazon-ecs, but the time never materialised. ...

At dConstruct in Brighton last month Steven Johnson talked at length about his startup, outside.in, that collects together place-blogs to display aggregates commentary and information on a block, neighbourhood and city level. The site is US-only at the moment, which made it a curious presentation for a largely non-US audience. Their toolset for extracting geographical information from blog entries is impressive, but a number of us were talking afterwards about what the real value of such aggregation is for those who might already live in an information-rich or tightly knit neighbourhood. ...

In the midst of the ongoing financial crisis it’s been satisfying to turn to a project I announced here a few months back for commentary and interpretation. As Ann Pettifor has been called upon for commentary by numerous conventional media outlets her blog, Debtonation, has really come into its own. ...

Being a little more removed from the US presidential elections this time around has been a bit of a relief. I’m still horrified that there’s even a question over which of the two candidates will win (Obama’s too right-wing for me, but that’s US politics for you), but at least we’re outside the myopic gaze of what passes for the media on that side of the pond. Slacktivist is, of course, right on the money about the travesty that is Sarah Palin’s candidacy, and it was that which came to mind as I watched video of Doris Kearns Goodwin talk at TED about Abraham Lincoln’s thirst for knowledge and quest to educate himself. Her talk is well worth a listen, but be warned it may leave any watcher of contemporary presidential politics dispirited. ...

It’s taken a month, but I’ve finally sifted through my Greenbelt photos, picked out a few passable shots, and uploaded them to flickr. It was far more satisfying last year when there was time for me to do some editing and uploading as the festival unfolded, get around and capture more, and be a little more responsive to how the photos were working out. But there are still a few shots I’m pleased with, and editing them is a nice reminder that I did make it to a little of the festival. ...

Last autumn’s release of Pro Drupal Development was a significant moment in the history of the popular CMS, providing for the first time a relatively comprehensive guide for those wanting to do more than simply manage and skin a drupal site. A number of books have followed it but few have delved as deeply or been such a definitive guide. Like most of the more recent books, Learning Drupal 6 Module Development focusses on a quite specific area of drupal development, but its a key one for any serious developer and touches every other area of the system. Experienced PHP developers may find that this book (in conjunction with some time for experimentation) will serve as a solid introduction to how they might build applications on top of drupal. ...

Yesterday, responding to a post Steve wrote on our Social Media efforts at Greenbelt I noted that it’s important to remember that this wasn’t the first year we’d worked with social media at the festival. Flickr has been our most prominent outlet, with the festival’s tags being some of the most visible in the week following the festival for several years now. But as I’ve written about here in the past (from a fairly techie perspective), we’ve made efforts to aggregate content from multiple blogs, social bookmarking services, and the like a few times previously. So what was different this year? ...

This year’s Greenbelt programme contained a piece by Maggi Dawn, who sadly wasn’t able to be at the festival. Reading the programme on the tube back from a post-festival get-together, I really connected with Maggi commenting: Whether Glastonbury or Global Gathering, at their heart, all festivals are actually less about gazing at bands from the back of a field, and far more about the day-to-day encounters we have around the site. We have a fundamental need for these real-life meetings, because without them, we cannot create or sustain community. Yet, strangely, that’s one of the paradoxes of this idea of festival: we immerse ourselves in order to be able to leave it. Showing up is what makes the festival work, but Greenbelt is also all about not being at Greenbelt, about taking the infection away and breeding it in the day to day communities that sustain us. ...