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Reviewing The Definitive Guide To Django a few months ago I noted that the key place that book lacked was in examples. As befits the work of the creators of a framework, it did very well at explaining the underlying philosophies and working through all manner of implementation details, but it wasn’t the book for those who just want to dive in and build something. If that’s how you like to use technical books, then Learning Website Development With Django may be more what you’re looking for. ...

An update to David Mercer’s now two year old Drupal: Creating Blogs, Forums, Portals and Community Websites, this version has been revised for the CMS’ latest version and guides the user through from setting up a development environment and installing drupal through to building custom themes and deploying a fully built site. The book is designed to be read sequentially and assumes very little prior Drupal knowledge, though a little familiarity with the interface would be helpful, and a lot of willingness to explore and experiment are going to be necessary for complete newcomers. The first few chapters–focussed on explaining the benefits of using drupal and guide the user through the initial setup–are a little clunky and may deter those not comfortable with installing databases and scripting languages. The style improves as the book progresses and Mercer covers his topics well, with a considerably better structure than several Packt publications I’ve seen lately. (sadly the book retains Packt’s ) ...

I may well have mentioned this here before, but living in the US I was frequently surprised by the number of people who, when hearing I was from europe confided in me their desire for the US to have good public transport. I wasn’t just surprised because as a Brit I’d been trained to think of our public transport system as very poor (it looks a lot better to me now than it used to), but also because I kept wondering how something so many people wanted could still seem so far off. ...

Whilst attending the ecampaigning forum I frequently had to dash off and find a quiet corner to make final tweaks to a site that was about to launch. Thankfully the wifi coverage at the conference was pretty good. Late last night we pushed the button and that project—a total redesign of the Greenbelt website—was launched. We’ve been working on it for several months, and I’m very pleased with the result. You can see a few words Paul wrote about it on the site. ...

Taking a couple of days out of the hectic schedule which has kept me from updating anything around here for a while, I spent Thursday and Friday in Oxford for the 2008 ecampaigning forum. It was a great event, and a good time reconnecting with old friends and making new ones. I live blogged several sessions and written up some notes over in the other place, but wanted to post a pointer here because it’s likely to be of interest to those who might normally avoid the tech overload on that blog. ...

While my live blogging efforts focussed on the more formal sessions at ecampaigning forum, most of the event’s time and content was spent in groups following the Open Space methodology. The gatherings for people to suggest sessions were instructive in themselves as they gave considerable hints as to the key concerns of ecampaigning practitioners. How to engage with the big social networking sites, whether to create your own, organising around big events (such as G8 summits and climate conferences) and ways of managing decentralised/coalition campaigns were some of the big themes, but the sessions covered a wide range beyond that such as engaging with young supporters, or older supporters, choosing content management systems, operating on a tight budget, pooling resources/tools and one hastily agreed discussion of twitter. What follows are a few notes on things that struck me. ...

For the next couple of days I’m at the ecampaigning forum in Oxford and am going to attempt to live blog the main sessions as far as possible. These notes are largely unedited, so they’re likely to be a bit sketchy. For context, feel free to post a comment and I’ll catch up with them when I can. MyActionAid Launched about a year ago. Built on plone which let them use out of the box tricks like forums, photo sharing, RSS, plus is open source so actionaid can re-invest in community. ...

For the next couple of days I’m at the ecampaigning forum in Oxford and am going to attempt to live blog the main sessions as far as possible. These notes are largely unedited, so they’re likely to be a bit sketchy. For context, feel free to post a comment and I’ll catch up with them when I can. Rolf Kleef talked about long tail as an introduction ...

For the next couple of days I’m at the ecampaigning forum in Oxford and am going to attempt to live blog the main sessions as far as possible. These notes are largely unedited, so they’re likely to be a bit sketchy. For context, feel free to post a comment and I’ll catch up with them when I can. ...

For the next couple of days I’m at the ecampaigning forum in Oxford and am going to attempt to live blog the main sessions as far as possible. These notes are largely unedited, so they’re likely to be a bit sketchy. For context, feel free to post a comment and I’ll catch up with them when I can. Used to work for first generation internet company in China - China’s amazon.com - as sales planning manager. Then went to Canada to do a marketing degree. Started to think differently about what’s happening in China and got interested in civil society. Became first staff member for public engagement in Greenpeace China. ...