It's been my great pleasure to work with the team at White Bird Dance over the last several years on their website. Not only have they been a great client and warm friends, but I have been exposed to the wonderful world of modern dance and am certainly better off, and more cultured, because of it!

When we first started out I was still knee deep in Microsoft based technologies and we developed the initial site using DotNetNuke. This platform served us well for three seasons, during each of which we updated the design to match the given season's unique style and added new features to keep the site fresh such as blogs and discussion forums. But there were also problems and limitations with that site. DotNetNuke did not excel in outputting a search engine friendly website, making updates was difficult and clumsy, there were almost no high quality community contributed modules (and they were not free), and developing custom functionliaty was expensive and complicated.

Drupal to the rescue!

So when we set out to udpate the site for the 2008-09 season, I felt it was time for a change and White Bird agreed. This new site rests on the Drupal platform, making for a more elegant site. Some of the improvements:

• Search engine optimized pages and URLs
• Lightweight, standards compliant markup
• Structured content so that performances can have fields such as videos, images galleries, companies, etc.
• A flexible calendar allowing to publish event information in multiple formats, incuding RSS and iCal.
• Image galleries and embedded videos.
• Threaded discussions about individual performances.
• A scalable platform to handle the increased traffic that we're sure is to come.
• The ability to leverage the thousands of community contributed Drupal modules.
• Build in search engine

In my clearly biased opinion, Drupal, and this new website, are a major improvement which will serve White Bird for years to come and help them a further their mission:

bringing the the best Portland-based, regional, national, and international dance companies to Portland, Oregon and to fostering the growth of dance in the region

Thank to the talented Annette Sabo for her design work and the hard work that Chad Greenwood and Christopher Roesing from White Bird put in to make it happen.

I have had the great pleasure of working with the team at One Economy Corporation since last December on their exciting new venture, PIC.tv, the Public Internet Channel, a network with a public purpose. always on. What exactly does this mean? A snippet follows below, but you can visit the site to learn more.

The Public Internet Channel (PIC.tv) is a next-generation, public-purpose online network. It inspires, informs, and entertains, helping people live better lives.

The Public Internet Channel combines compelling programming with a launching point into relevant information that provides the opportunity for people to take action.

Everything on the Public Internet Channel is relevant, current, accessible and, whenever possible, local — and always with a clearly-defined public purpose. The Public Internet Channel shows real people in real situations tackling everyday topics, from health to money to living a sustainable lifestyle.

It also provides users with an interactive “Make It Easy” toolbox that gives people instant access to local information and the tools they need to take action based on what they learned. By providing this tool directly to all Americans, we hope to narrow the “information gap” that divides communities and provide a common space that crosses racial, gender, age, religious, geographic and political barriers.

The site features original and licensed video content, which is streamed from the Brightcove platform. The site itself is based on the excellent open source Drupal content management system and web application framework, with significant customizations, mostly at the theme level. Special thanks to Greg Spies of The Interactive Department for his work in helping to develop the Flash rotators in use througout the site.

I have been honored to be involved with this project and it is a rare opportunity indeed to get a chance to combine one's professional skills with broader goals. That, combined with the smart and passionate people I have had the opportunity to work with, has made this one of my most rewarding projects. As Dan Fellini, the project's producer put it,

Savor it, believe in it, and let it energize you forward. There’s work to be done, for sure. There always will be. But it’s important work and we’re up for the challenge.

The site is still in beta and currently requires registration, but I encourage you to spend a moment looking around and provide your feedback.

Official Google Blog: Google learns to crawl Flash

Now that we've launched our Flash indexing algorithm, web designers
can expect improved visibility of their published Flash content, and
you can expect to see better search results and snippets.

Wow, this is big! There goes one of my main arguments against primarily Flash driven sites. I expect as the ability to properly index alternative types of media, that is items other than text and images such as Flash, video, and SilverLight, it will slowly and fundamentally change the way websites are developed, or even thought of for that matter. Why bother a traditional, hierarchical website when you can just invite chaos and allow your users to explore through a semantic search? Think Gmail vs. Hotmail.

Just winding down from a great day at the first ever Portland Drupal Camp. This was an unconference in the barcamp tradition, put on the Portland Drupal Users Group. The group that put the show together did a really fantastic job. It was a free to the public, all volunteer event, and was organized better than many paid events I have been to. Hats off to Grant and all the other volunteers who clearly spent a lot of time putting together a great event.

Speakers include many local Drupal wizzes, including Matt Westgate, president of Lullabot and co-author of Pro Drupal Development.

I was a co-panelist with Dan Mendell about at a talk titled Drupal in business, pitfalls, concerns, features for the business owner. Dan is the President and CEO of NeutralSpace, a new company whose focus is experimenting with and deploying collaborative technologies. He have a great presentation about his experiences with Drupal as a business owner, in many ways concluding that while is a good platform with many features available out of the box, successful projects still require a great deal of planning and talent to get them done. I then spoke about running a consulting business based on Drupal and, I think more interestingly, the pros and cons of using Drupal as platform for a web startup.

Working on launching MomHub, GreeRenter, and Newsvetter (for a client) has taught me a few lessons about the latter, although none of those sites have scaled to the point where a platform decision might really start to hurt. The basic takeaway in my opinion is that Drupal is a great tool for getting the common tasks done in an elegant and flexible manner. These include things like a user account system and managing content postings. Having these tasks taken care of lets project teams focus on adding value at the top of pyramid so to speak, not on the basics that any site needs to have. On the other hand, a truly unique idea (at the time) like Twitter probably lends itself better to custom development.

This is WAY over due, but I've been meaning to mention a new site that I helped put together and launch for the Portland Web Innovators.

This has been one of my favorite professional development and networking groups since I first attended an event over a year ago.  I had a hard time finding a group of people who are entrepreneurial, technical, independent, and creative.  Many other groups also have a narrow focus, which is also critical to have, but being more of a generalist myself, I find this one appealing.  Great job to Adam Duvander and Ryan Williams for starting it up.

 The site was a very natural fit for Drupal, since one of the primary goals is to connect a community of users. We took advantage of an excellent theme called Deco.  The site is in its infancy with many features to come, but please sign up and get involved in the mean time.

Stoll Berne is a leading regional law firm,

Deeply rooted in the great Northwest and nationally recognized for outstanding work for more than 30 years, Stoll Berne has achieved extraordinary results for our clients through practical, strategic and tenacious representation.

Level OS partnered with Stoll Berne to develop an attractive and practical dynamic website. Some of the project goals were to convey the firms new image and intuitively present complex and related information such as cases, attorney bios, areas of practice and articles. We turned to Drupal for the job. It's amazing ability to relate different types of content using views with dynamic arguments sealed the deal. For example, if you look at an attorney bio page such as Steve Larson's, it automatically lists all of that attorney's areas of practice. And the article link will show a filtered of list of articles where Steve made a contribution. Additionally, combining Drupal's core capabilities with some contributed modules makes for a top tier content management system, allowing Stoll Berne administrators to control every aspect of the site, from the menu structure to creating pages and other types of content, easily through the web based administration tools.

Alex and Shannon Pasco of PaperRadish were my design partners for this project, and they did an amazing job. Above is a screen shot of the site home page.  David Galyardt of Jetboy Studios did an amazing job developing the theme for the website.  Thanks to everyone involved in the project!

I arrived yesterday at the much anticipated SXSW 2008 Interactive festival and conference.  The conference is one of the largest discussions of technology, design, and culture and I am very excited to be here.  While I came down alone, I am sharing a room generously offerred by Adam Duvander, my parter in MomHub Hal Newton is here, and Rick Turcozy wrote about the many other folks from Portland that are here.  The biggest challenge I now face is deciding what panels to attend - there are about a dozen going on at any given time.

Session #1: Filching Design

Discussion about the pros and cons of borrowing designs and ideas from other sites.  The crowd was about half designers and half developers and, not surprisingly the developers felt it was alrigh to steal designs, and the designers code.  Jarred Spool was in the crowd and pointed out that the panel was mincing concepts by confusing trademarks, patents, and copyrights.  Hal later pointed out that the panel was fun and all, but really a bunch of designers playing lawyer

Session #2a: Contextual Web

Session #2b:e-commerce lessons from Zappos.com

Session #3: Keynote - conversation with Henry Jenkins and Steven Johnson

Session #4:Jason Fried - 10 things we learned at 37Signals

Evening Events

Frog Design opening party at the Mexican American Cultural Center.  

Beginning this Saturday, Level OS global headquarters will move to TenPod, a collecive space in the new Rocket Building on E Burnside and Sandy.  The building itself is stunning LEED certified project by Portland architect Kevin Cavenaugh.  With a striking bright red exterior, unique exterior art panels, and a wide open airy space, it will be a great place to settle into on a daily basis.

The collective nature of TenPod is another way this is not your typical office space.  The 12 desk space has no walls separating the businesses, just a collection of spacious built in desks.  So there are plenty of chances to get to know, and potentially collaborate with, your neighbors.  There is also a shared deck, conference room, and kitchen.

While I will miss my current downtown home, and appreciate the tremendous hospitality Mark and the Vision Site team have shown me the past few years, I am very excited about this change.  Please come on by for a visit starting next week!

My new address:
1111 E Burnside, #306
Portland, OR 97214