drupal

I just gave my last talk this Sunday morning at the DrupalCampLA conference. The talk brushed on elements that contribute to effective designs for social networking websites. It's heavily inspired by Joshua Porter's new book Designing for the Social Web, and includes insight on which Drupal modules help support user participation. I also cover my own personal Drupal case study, P=MD, a social networking site made for my friends; with that experience, I learned that recruiting and retaining users is a huge challenge and requires an additional marketing/publicity mindset (beyond design and development) and I learned that all these modules in Drupal provide amazing functionality but it takes additional effort to make them all work together into a coherent, usable website.

The presentation files are here in PDF form and includes bonus slides on (1) how to promote the sharing of with your website as a viral marketing tool, and (2) what modules can harbor the collective intelligence of your crowds (your site visitors). I can upload a Powerpoint or Keynote file if you e-mail me.

I had a wonderful time speaking and I loved meeting new friends in the audience. I hope I can help out again with DrupalCamp and other Drupal promotions in the future, because this was such a valuable experience for me. :) read more→

I just gave my first talk for the public today at DrupalCampLA! DrupalCampLA is a complimentary, open-to-the-public convention at the Los Angeles Convention Center covering the Drupal content management system, and I spoke about creating static corporate sites from the ground up. I had about 100 or more attendees, so it was a healthy crowd. read more→

I'm still working and working on molding this site into something that's content-rich, and something that's worth visiting. The front page is sorely lacking — it doesn't even match the rest of the website's themes — but I have a good idea of what to create. To the top, I'll put an introduction to myself and what the website is about. To the left, I'll place a single highlighted feature post, and the most recently-updated posts (whether they be blog or publication or image). To the right, I'll put randomly-selected "selections" from the portfolio, and the portfolio index itself. Still in Photoshop mock-up stage; I'll need to code in the PHP. read more→