We had our first meeting of the Mid-Hudson Drupal Users Group yesterday. With about 7 people for the first meetup, we had a good mix of people who have never used it and some who make Drupal sites for a living. I’m very happy we finally met and excited for future meetups.
We talked about quite a few things, mainly on what we should talk about in the future. Here is some brain dumping from the session.
- We should meet monthly. Weekday evenings seem to work out best, especially with nice summer days coming up.
- Something that worked well and we will continue for future meetings is going around the room so each person can share their favorite module. This month’s list included:
- We should have a main topic of discussion for someone to present on. If we cannot get a projector from the library either Sean or Ben could probably wrangle up a projector for the night. Possible future topics include:
- Payment Gateways
- CiviCRM
- Ubercart
- Scaling and Caching
- Mobile design
- Organic Groups
- Taxonomy
- Possible things the group might do:
- Mentoring
- Peer Review (ex, “I need to display this data which includes x,y,z so I used modules k,q and d. What do you think?”)
- Homework Assignments
- Helpful blogs and video podcasts to pay attention to:
I think we’re off to a good start. We have some networking going and have already shared useful information. The next meetup will feature Vonn presenting on Taxonomy, which will most likely take place Wednesday, June 8th at 6:00pm. Vonn is lining up the Charwat Meeting Room at Adriance Memorial Library again. Pay attention to twitter feeds and the Hudson Valley, NY group at g.d.o to make sure you catch all the details.
You’ve all heard me promote the O’Reilly Media Wish list sweepstakes. Go read the rules but the basics are you generate a wish list of O’Reilly titles including books, ebooks and videos that total up to $500, and then you get an entry for the random selection. Slimming down a wish list to $500 is very much the hard part, but here is my selection.
(Disclaimer: All prices are O’Reilly prices with no discounts)
That’s right, a total of $499.29. I’m sure it’s possible to get closer to the $500 limit, but my goal was books I want and I will read. I’m happy with this list. Go read the rules an get your own entry in and best of luck.
If you somehow missed the fact that it’s November 1 or this past weekend was Halloween, November is here. So what? There are plenty of things going on in November in case you need more than all the new comics, games, TV, movies, etc.
Movember: You’ve spent all of October thinking about breast cancer awareness, which is great but now you need something else. Enter Movember, a month of moustache growing to bring aware to men’s health concers. No, this is not just a silly gimmic, this actually does raise money and awareness. Head over to www.movember.com to find out more, register, and check out various moustache styles to choose from.
NaBloPoMo: Yes, I’ve blogged about it before but it is time once more for National Blog Posting Month. I could have sworn this was an annual thing that took place in November but it appears to have branched out to now have themes for each month, November being “there is no theme” month. If posting regularly is something you are interested in go register and you might win prizes.
NaNoWriMo: National November Writing Month, the predecessor to NaBloPoMo. Yes I’m promoting another reason to have people write this month. NaNoWriMo gives people a goal of writing a 50,000 word book over the course of the month. But check out their site as it is also a fundraiser for young writers, but be patient as they don’t seem to be handling load well after having a Lifehacker post on them.
Edit: I did not see this until the second day of the month, but Linux Journal is running a daily giveaway each day of the month in celebration of the 200th issue. No purchase is necessary so head over to http://www.linuxjournal.com/giveaway for your chance to enter for a variety of things you can win.
In case you don’t have the pleasure of living near me and experience my recent Firefly excitement, here’s what you are missing out on. This month Dark Horse released a comic written by Patton Oswalt entitled Serenity: Float Out which covers a story focusing on Wash’s friends. Check out this io9 page for some story spoiling and a preview of the first few pages. I however am still waiting on my copy to arrive via snail mail.
Dark Horse is also releasing another Serenity series starting November 24 called Serenity: The Shepherd’s Tale…obviously covering much anticipated backstory on Book. I can’t wait, although I am seeing mixed news on whether it’s a series, a one time graphic novel or what….either way, exciting.
The stories of how these both came to be are interesting too, google around because I’m lazy but feel free to start at this Wikipedia article.
And to keep you entertained in the meantime, here is an excellent Firefly fanfic mini novel from 2008 written by Steven Brust. I remember reading My Own Kind of Freedom on a business trip and thoroughly enjoyed reading it and the author really covered the characters and feel of Firefly well. I fully intend on re-reading this in the near future.
This is helpful for anyone that prints articles to read for later or whatever purposes you come up with, but also to anyone that reads articles online. If you haven’t run across it before, PrintWhatYouLike.com is an amazing service that lets you format a web page for printing. So get rid of ads, select and remove that annoying comment section full of trolls, enlarge certain sections…
The best part is that they provide a bookmarklet to easily format a page you are reading. Sometimes I will use it just to clean up an article I am reading not to print, just so I can focus on the content and not all of the cruft that makes it part of a website.
So go check out PrintWhatYouLike, save some paper and ink.
