Nick Lewis: The Blog

In solidarity with the Happy-Holiday-Patriots, I present to you these seasons greetings. Each was hand-crafted by me circa a year ago. I think they've aged quite well. Remember secular progressive brothers and sisters -- our glorious war against Christmas ain't over til... I guess its the 26th.

Seasons Greetings From God's Favorite President

With the exception of New Years, and Halloween -- I tend to be somewhat cynical about the holiday seasons. Now my detractors might argue that my lack of holiday cheer is merely a byproduct of the fact that at all hours -- be it Christmas freakin' day -- I have work to do -- and every second that I'm not working I'm digging myself a little bit deeper into a hole. However, my detractor's numbers are small -- and they are stupid.

I freely admit I wish I didn't have to work. However, relatively speaking, my bitterness about that particular aspect of the holidays is mere burp -- somewhat rude and unseemly. In contrast, any honest, reality-based reflection on the holidays will unleash a titanic hurricane of fowl odors; fierce winds, conjured from within the dark colon of American capitolism -- that morbidly obese drunk who eats nothing but cabbage and sausage. The stink is unbearable.

Today, while working on the redesign, and drupalfication of Cybertelecom, I was faced with a challenge: In addition to displaying the taxonomy terms that a node was filed under, I wanted to add a link to the term's RSS feed. The solution ended up being so bloody simple that I couldn't help but share it. Also, its worth pointing out that while this specific chunk of code is specialized, it reveals some damn useful tricks in dealing with the taxonomy from within single nodes.

In this tutorial's case, we will be calling the above function from within a node.tpl.php file. Within node.tpl.php file look for a line that reads:

Recently, I built a website for the International Peace Tiles Project. My goals were pretty straight forward:

1. Develop an interface that would allow users to upload photos of their peace tiles.
2. If users wished to swap their tiles with other users, have a system in place that would track the status of the tile.
3. Have tiles be searchable by location.
4. Gather user’s location and status of involvement

A good golden rule to follow is never make users enter data twice, and if certain functions (i.e. filing the tile under the user’s country) can be automated, automate them. So with that rule in mind, I decided to use CiviCRM to store user data.

Preface

I'm not an a-list blogger. At most, I might be considered an "influential blogger". However, I have both a professional and intellectual interest in the subject of blogging. I've been following the evolution of blogging for about two years now. This interest drove me out of college and straight into career of web design, development, and consulting that centers around "bloggy" web applications. That's my background, and I'm sticking to it.

Washington Post reports:

Hours after New Orleans officials announced Tuesday that they would deploy a city-owned, wireless Internet network in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, regional phone giant BellSouth Corp. withdrew an offer to donate one of its damaged buildings that would have housed new police headquarters, city officials said yesterday.

BellSouth, ironically, feels victimized that a city which was under 10-20 feet of water just a few months ago, would even consider giving free internet access to those who slowly come back.

Friendly word of advice to the slimebags whose thirst for money is like that of a crackhead for a rock: please go out of business as soon as possible so that you can stop humilating the rest of the human race with your leadership's empty quest for vanity, disregard for everything besides your own interest, and appallingly shitty service. Please, go away.

Three of you might have noticed that my blogging has been light. I'm not dead, though (though arguably, working 12 hours a day on drupal sites is a death-like experience). Anyhow, one project of mine, and Gene Crick's is beginning to take shape. I'd like to introduce telecommunity.us.

Though we're by no means "launched", we've nevertheless already received a lot of queries about it. If you're curious as to what it's all about, I think a good place to start is my boss/mentor's article in Community Technology Review.

Techstrategy.org (a very good, and very new blog -- do give it a read) brought a very noteworthy article to my attention. It discusses the large shift in how people approach volunteer work. However, I think these ideas could be applied to the broad spectrum of organizations which depend upon unpaid efforts from large groups of people. Excerpted from The New Unaffiliated Volunteers

Call them serendipitous, entrepreneurial, spontaneous, unofficial, out of the box, under the radar, independent or unaffiliated. These are the new volunteers that do what they want, when and how they want to do it. They do not feel obligated to do their volunteer work through established channels...

Some time ago, I mentioned the creation of Supr.c.ilio.us -- which is the only true social social tagging tagging website on the internet. Now, I'm a developer who works primarily in building web-based communities centered around advocacy or politics. My primary interest is not the internet, its people -- and how the internet can help people circumvent our governments in the pursuit of social justice, peace, and progress. That said, I'm not particularly interested in "tagging", "folksonomies" or the "web 2.0". I get into arguments with dear friends whenever these subjects arise, because my constant question is -- "yes, but why is someone going to want to tag that -- and even if they did tag it what does tagging it do for them or us?"

I felt I was alone in not caring about the web 2.0... then I found a new favorite blog: Super.c.ilio.us: The Blog. Here are just a few of my favorite gems I've read so far. Definition of flickr of

At present, Google can find 54,700 Drupal sites on the internet.

Drupal alexa rank has increased 600%+ in last year

Drupal node count has increased 290% in the past year