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With more than a decade of unbiased reviews of digital cameras under its belt, the Digital Camera Resource Page decided it was time to ugrade the underlying technology used to serve the reviews and move them to a multi-page format.  The new format helps split the in-depth reviews into more manageable chunks for the reader and provides additional ad inventory for the publisher.  Plus, the new content management system decreases the time it takes to publish a review and gallery.

The system was built on Drupal, which will make future expansion a snap. It uses multiple layers of caching to limit the load on the server and ensure users continue to get the fast page loads they’re used to.  It fits into the existing site architecture, some of which doesn’t use Drupal.  And it was deployed onto the active site with only minutes of total downtime.

Ensuring that old URLs continued to work was a challenge, but not insurmountable. Most of the system was built using contributed Drupal modules.  The majority of the custom code that was written was for the theme.  All in all, this is a great example of Drupal’s content management capabilities on a high traffic site.

(PS: If you need a digital camera, the Digital Camera Resource Page is the first place you should look!)

What started out as a solo quest to help a client fix a nasty problem has turned into a collaboration with several open source Drupal developers as we test, debug, and put together documentation for a nascent module.  It’s exciting. More later. I should be sleeping and there’s lots of work to do. But isn’t it great when you can say your work is fun?  This beats office politics, turf wars, and endless meetings any day.

Comedian Louis C.K.’s recent bit on the Conan O’Brian show about our ingratitude to technology and progress is hilarious and good for putting things in perspective.

Announcing the launch of another client site!  Need a technology PR and marketing firm?  Check out Affect Strategies, which just unveiled their overhauled Web site this past week.  The project was led by Tim Scott of THEM!.  I did the Drupal CMS engineering on the back end.

So the other day I went over to the local BofA to deposit some checks and I saw that they had some brand new ATMs.  Now, with the really old ATMs, you would put your checks in an envelope and type in the total amount of the deposit. And with the successors to those ATMs, you would insert your checks one at a time, sans envelope, and you would then verify the amount that the ATM automatically read off those checks with its internal scanner.

With these new ATMs, however, you can insert all your checks at once, again without an envelope, and the scanner will deal with them all for you.  Reduces paper waste; cuts out a few steps; sounds good, right?

It would be good if the brand new ATM that I used didn’t have problems scanning the amounts off every one of my checks.  Every single one.  And I would have just corrected the amounts at the verification stage, but the on-screen images of the checks were too small for me to read.

The only thing I could do was cancel the entire transaction, get my checks back, try to remember the amount on each one, and start over.  These weren’t big checks, maybe totaling a few thousand dollars, but trying to remember four several-digit numbers is surprisingly hard to do!

Fortunately — or perhaps not — it didn’t matter.  When I inserted the checks again, the ATM seemingly scanned them all without problem — and then showed me the calculated total: $82,550.25.

As nice as that would have been were it true, I cancelled the transaction yet again.  It’s then that I noticed the logo on the machine: Diebold, it said.

I’m happy to announce that Moon Travel Guides has just relaunched their site.  I worked on the project with Jason Salter and Eric Leland of FivePaths, an excellent Drupal consulting firm.  Check it out!

Amazon has agreed to refund the $175 fee I paid to attend its Amazon Web Services Developer Bootcamp in December.  I didn’t feel the bootcamp quite lived up to what it promised.  A marketing manager for Amazon AWS says the organization has received some “valuable feedback” and that they “will be making changes to improve the training and provide additional levels of training.”

More in-depth training that goes under the hood of an actual application would be great.  And if anyone attends an AWS bootcamp in the meantime, I’d love to hear how it went.

I’m attending the Amazon AWS Developer Bootcamp today in Silicon Valley, to learn how to use Amazon’s “cloud computing” services like Elastic Cloud Computing (EC2), and Simple Storage Service (S3), for lowering Web hosting and infrastucture costs.  Unfortunately, we’re off to a slow start.

Nearly three hours into the class, we’re still on introductory slides and there’s confusion among attendees about how Elastic Block Storage works.  Also, the network here has slowed to a crawl so even the presenter’s online examples are being impacted.  Usually, at conferences, I forgive the inevitable network issues that arise when a roomful of developers go online at once.  But when you charge for a class focused on Web-based technologies, I think it’s a requirement to be prepared to handle the traffic.

Still, I’m hoping things pick up after lunch and that we actually into the examples.  The goal is to get under the hood of a video sharing application that runs off EC2, S3, and other Amazon Web services. Fingers crossed.

Update: We got a little further after lunch, and finally got a little more hands-on with some of the tools available for administering EC2 and S3.  So we practiced launching Linux and Windows server instances, transferred files to S3 buckets, and mounted EBS volumes.

But we were clearly short on time and had to skip most of the code examples.  In particular, we never got to the video sharing application — which was the entire reason I signed up.  While administering AWS is a necessary step in developing and deploying applications on Amazon’s infrastructure, it’s hard to justify spending $175 and the related costs of an entire day away from the office only to come back with no real insight into the architecture of an AWS application.  The session was touted as a “Developer Bootcamp” after all.

What could the presenters have done differently?  Four things:

1. Skip the 45-minute-long “team building” exercise at the beginning of the day.  For a one-day session during which there is no other group work, there’s no need to “team build.”  If you want to encourage people to meet others, a 10-minute round-robin of people introducing themselves and saying why they are attending would suffice.
2. Don’t switch the software requirements once attendees arrive (as our presenter did.)  We wasted valuable time as everyone tried to download the new code samples and consequently brought the entire network to a halt.  People should arrive at the session with all the necessary software installed and ready to go.   If people need help with configuring the software, maybe ask them to arrive early during the breakfast portion of the day?
3. Ensure that the network can handle the traffic.
4. Don’t spend so much session time answering tangential questions.  The goal of the day is to provide a developer-level look at how one can build an application on AWS.  Attendees who have specific questions about AWS or need clarification on things that aren’t core to the session should be encouraged to re-ask their questions at lunch.

Hopefully the presenters will improve in subsequent bootcamps.  Based on the peformance at this one, however, I can’t recommend it to other developers.

Update 2: Amazon has refunded the $175 I paid to attend the class.

I’m excited about announcing the release of my first open source project: a major update to the Search and Replace Scanner module for Drupal.

The release builds on the work started by Tao Starbow of Starbow Consulting, which provided regular-expression-based search-and-replace functionality for CCK fields.  Version 2.0 adds an undo option, plain text searching in addition to regular expression searching, whole-word matching, and the ablity to limite searches to certain node types and nodes with certain taxonomy terms, among a half-dozen other features.

Many thanks to Jason Salter of awesome Drupal consulting firm FivePaths for co-writing version 2 with me, and to FivePaths for supporting development.

The module is currently listed as an alpha1 release, but we’ve been testing it heavily and it’s looking pretty solid.  I’m looking forward to seeing others use it and to getting feedback on what works, what doesn’t, and what we should add in future versions.

I’m addicted to Lala.com.  Since signing up about a week ago, the site is one of the first I load in my browser each morning.  And then I leave it up in the background throughout the day so I can listen to music as I work.

Without a doubt, Lala has replaced iTunes for managing and playing my music.  Why?

1. Lala lets me listen to any song in its entirety for free the first time I access it.  You can queue up an entire album and listen to it before deciding to buy.  ITunes only lets me listen to 30 seconds of a song.
2. Lala lets me see what other people are listening to, including those who have just listened to the same thing I have.  Chances are, we like the same music.  And if we do, I can choose to “follow” them and listen to new stuff they find.  This is the best use of online social networking I’ve seen so far.  I’ve already discovered five new bands I like.
3. Lala lets me “upload” my entire iTunes library to my Lala collection so I can access it from anywhere on the Web.  (You’re not actually uploading the files, just a list of them — Lala then streams their own copy when you access a particular song.)  ITunes limits the number of computers on which I can listen to my music.
4. If I like a song I find on Lala, I can add it to my Web collection for $0.10 and listen to it in its entirety whenever I want, as many times as I want.
5. If I do want to put a song on my iPod or burn it to disc, the cost is $0.89 — or $0.79 if I already paid the $0.10 to add it to my Web collection.  In comparison, iTunes songs cost $0.99.
6. The songs I buy at full price are totally-DRM-free MP3s.  That means I can burn them to disc as many times as I want, put them on music players other than the iPod, play them on as many computers as I want, and I’m not screwed if the service goes out of business one day.  Apple’s iTunes can’t beat that.

You should check Lala out.  And no, I don’t get any kickbacks for recommending the site.  I just thought you might be interested in what the future of music looks like.