Development Seed Blog

If You're In Boston, Join us at Lucky's Lounge for Happy Hour Tonight

Three exciting happy hours are happening all in one place tonight, so if you're interested in Drupal and Nonprofits, Intranets, or News, swing by Lucky's Lounge tonight to meet others working in these areas and unwind after the first day of Drupalcon with a few drinks. Come on, it's only three blocks away from the Convention Center. Map.

When you leave the Convention Center, make a left on Summer Street, walk two blocks and make a right on A street. Lucky's is right at the intersection of A and Congress. Be sure to get there early - the first couple of rounds will be picked up and food will be available to order.

Here's the line up:

• Drupal and Nonprofits, 6:00 pm
• Intranets, 6:00 pm
• News, 7:45 pm

We're hosting the Drupal and Nonprofits events, along with Gregory Heller, and want to bring people together who develop and use Drupal at nonprofit organizations. It will be great to share stories, experiences, and needs with others working with - or at - nonprofits. The Intranets event will definitely be eye opening as people building intranets and portals with Drupal come together to show off what they're doing.

After these wrap up the News happy hour will kick off at 7:45, organized by Ken Rickard, Michael Meyers, and Gary Kebbel. This sounds like a great chance for developers working on news platforms to meet people in the news industry. 

Hope you can make it!

Meet Our Metrics and Strategy Ninja

A couple weeks Steve Olson officially joined the Development Seed team and boy are we excited. Steve will be helping us build smarter communications solutions. He’ll spend most of his time measuring the success of the online tools we build and helping us to maximize their impact. He’ll also be using this knowledge come up with creative, results driven communications approaches that we know our clients will love.

Flickr's greets its global audience with censorship

This week Flickr greeted its new international audience with a surprise: radical censorship. Originally I planned to write about how wonderful it was that Flickr added multilingual support for seven more languages. I was going to predict that its number of users and photos would quickly explode. That was before Alex clued me into the buzz from the German Flickr community, people who have been blocked from accessing a good chunk of Flickr’s content.

To access all content on Flickr you need to sign in with a Yahoo! ID. And now if you’re Yahoo! ID says you’re from Germany – or Singapore or Hong Kong or Korea – you’re blocked from accessing “moderate” and “restricted” photos. Because of the country you live in.

Getting wget and cron onto the same page

Managing News is starting to move past proof of concept, and we’ve officially begun working to improve its core performance. Earlier this week RH Reality Check – the latest organization we’ve customized the tool for - told us that Managing News wasn’t pulling in new content from RSS feeds as often as it should have been. In some cases feeds hadn’t been updated in a week. And an aggregator with week-old news certainly doesn’t enhance an organizations communications capacity. Here's an image of one of its feeds "thinking."

When Alex looked into the issue, he found another one – duplicate feeds. Luckily what at first seemed like two big problems was fixed with just one tiny change (and a lot of Alex’s brainpower, of course).