Site upgraded to Drupal 6

<p>It may or may not be obvious to you, but I upgraded my site recently to Drupal 6, I used the Acquia distribution of drupal, figuring it had a bunch of modules i was going to use, and then I added a few more that were not included.  I could have just downloaded all the modules I needed, but I figured I would go with Acquia's disto for now.</p> <p>While doing the upgrade i took the time to clean out some (but not all) db cruft.  This database goes back to the days of CivicSpace, and me not knowing as much about drupal.  Back then I used a db prefix, so I spent some time removing the prefixes from over 100 tables.  That sucked.  But I learned the mysql syntax for renaming tables "RENAME TABLE" that was easy enough.</p> <p>I still have a problem with the collation on quite a few tables, and i think that is effecting some character issues.  Basically, the version of my theses (which is 10 years old this year!) that is on this website has all kinds of funky characters in it.  It may or may not have to do with table colation.  I will get around to putting a clean version up, but you can always download the PDF if you are interested.</p> <p>I'd say "check back soon for more updates" but that may not be the case, we'll see.  I've really tried to simplify things and make this website more of a "personal aggregator" so you can find me on Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTub, FaceBook, Delicious, etc….</p>...

Blog Actions Day 2009: October 15th

<p><a href="http://www.blogactionday.org"><img src="http://www.blogactionday.org/imgs/badges/bad-180-150.jpg" border="0" alt="" align="left" /></a> I just signed up for Blog Action Day 2009.  The topic is Climate Change, or as some are starting to call it: Climate Disruption. My actualy blog post will probably be filed on <a href="http://civicactions.com/blog">The CivicActions blog</a>, but I'll be sure to copy it hear as well.</p> <p>I was pretty shocked to hear about the massive flooding in Georgia, where it seems just last year, the region was suffering from a terrible draught.  This summer in seattle it was VERY dry, for longer than usual, while in NY it was VERY wet, and not nearly as hot.  What all of this points to is "Global Wierding" of the weather.  We cannot really predict where it will be hotter, where it will be wetter, where it will be cooler, and where it will be dryer, but I think that it is safe to brace ourselves for more weird weather, more unpredicatble weather. And climate change related displacement of people, especially but not exclusively in developing...

Slide Deck: Free Tools To Set Up Your Listening Strategy

Yesterday I gave a presentation at Seattle NetTuesday (originally mentioned here).  The presentation went really well. I delivered it Pecha Kucha/Ignite style (15 slides, 20 seconds per slide is a bit of a hybrid, Pecha Kucha being 20/20 and ignite being 20/15). Listening: Free Tools & Techniques for Nonprofit Brand Monitoring View more documents from Gregory Heller. “A powerful global conversation has begun. Through the internet, people are discovering and inventing new ways to share relevant knowledge with blinding speed.” (The Cluetrain Manifesto, Levine and Locke Here are some of the links from the slide deck so you can easily follow them: Google trends – Good for checking the search volume of keywords Delicious.com and my posts about Delicious subscriptions Google News Search Search the news and get RSS feeds of your searches to put into your RSS reader of choice Google Blog Search Search blogs and get RSS feeds of your searches to put into your RSS reader of choice Technorati for blog search and statistics Twitter and Twitter Search Trendrr is good for keword data visualization and monitoring Twendz visualizes Twitter posts and assessess sentiment Facebook Lexicon allows you to graph keword usage on Facebook Google Reader Full Featured RSS reader with public sharing tools, my preference Blog Lines Full Featured RSS reader Net Vibes Full Featured RSS Reader Monitter Twitter search that allows you to monitor multiple keywords or hashtags in real time and also filter by geolocation. Our Social Media Resouce page Please feel free to share your ideas and resources in the comments of this post, or contact us if you would like to...

Free Tools To Set Up Your Listening Strategy

On Tuesday September 22nd, 2009 (tomorrow) I’ll be giving a lightening talk at Seattle NetTuesday on free tools that nonprofit organizations can use to develope and execute a listening strategy to enhance their use of social media and the web. NetTuesday is an international event that takes place in cities around the world on the 4th Tuesday of the month.  In Seattle the event starts at 6pm at Soul Repair on 10th Ave and Pike.  You can RSVP via Facebook. A few other folks will be giving short presentations (each only 5 minutes, sort of Ignite style). My talk will cover the use of Google Reader, Twitter Search, Google News and Blog Search alerts and even Delicious, and how organizations can use these tools to find out who is saying what about their organization or cause. I will followup on Wednesday with a blog post containing my slidedeck and more detailed notes from my presentation, possibly even a...

CivicActions Bookmarks on Delicious

Last year I wrote about how an organization could aggregate shared bookmarks from multiple people and present them on their website.  In the recent redeisgn of CivicActions.com we implemented this functionality.  You can see the shared bookmarks feed in the center column at the bottom of the home page, or you can look at a more complete list. What follows is a few screen shots that point out exactly what you need to do on Delicious to make this happen.  You will want to review the above referenced blog post for a step by step.  These screen shots correspond to steps 5 through 10. Step 5: Click on the Subscriptions Link Step 6: Click on “Add a subscription” link under the search box on the right hand side.  Step 7: Enter the Tag you have decided on using Step 8: Click The Check box for “From Specific User” and enter the user name of that user. Step 10: Subscription Bundles: Alluded to in the earlier post you can group subscriptions into subscription bundles which is VERY useful if you want to have multiple feeds of bookmarks aggregated from the same, different or overlapping sets of users.  Click on the “Subscription Options” collapsed menu, and then the “Subscription Bundles”   Click on the “Create” Button to create a new bundle.  You will need to then give it a name, probably use a semantic name, either the tag that the bundle is based on, or something more meaningful that related to how you are going to use the feed from that tag bundle.  After you have named the Bundle you can...