Presentation at UIC IT Professionals Forum: Mapping with Drupal

Slides from the presentation I gave today (larger version here). A couple people came up afterwards and said it had inspired them to go off and try it themselves.

Mapping with Drupal from leoklein

Talk Next Week on Google Analytics

In the middle of 'project hell' as a colleague put it, but why let that stop me from giving a talk on Google Analytics at the UIC Webmasters Brownbag next week? (Actually it was the talk I was supposed to give last February when I blew it away in favor of talking about Responsive Design).

Slides: UIC Webmasters Brownbag on Responsive Web Design

Okay, so here are the slides from my presentation on Responsive Web Design that I gave today at the UIC Webmasters Brownbag. It's not the longest thing in the world -- I was only supposed to talk for 30 minutes but ended up going the whole hour. The group was great -- very engaged and asking a whole lot of good questions.

The Age of One App Per Website is Over

While preparing for next week's presentation on Responsive Design, I tried to recall my original uneasiness over the phone app frenzy. You remember -- that short painful period only a few months ago when either you were developing a phone app version of your site or you just weren't serious. You thought it silly? So did I. But it took me a second to remember why. I mean, this was before Responsive Web Design had sunk in as a possible solution. So why the initial uneasiness? And then of course I remembered: the notion that your average user was going to download a separate app for every site -- the equivalent of taking your collection of bookmarks and downloading a separate program for each -- was a complete absurdity. Thank God, we're beyond that. It's history.

Presentation on Responsive Web Design at UIC

Gearing up for a presentation on 'Responsive Web Design' that I'll be giving at the UIC Webmaster Brownbag next week. From the official announcement:

UIC Web Professionals,

Join us for a discussion about Responsive Web Design on Thursday, February 2, noon - 1 p.m. Leo Klein, Coordinator for Web Communications in the Office of Admissions and Records, will discuss Responsive Web Design as a significant development in how we approach web design -- what's got us to this point, the need to design for various platforms from PCs to tablets and smartphones. The session will include discussion of key topics including Media Queries and Mobile First.

Audience: all levels. Also, experience and thoughts from others on this subject is encouraged and highly appreciated.

Presentation: Joys & Sorrows of WYSIWYG

Thanks to Mick for organizing the Chicagoland Library Drupal Meeting in Oak Park. The presentation on "Top 5 Non-Obvious Drupal Modules" by Russ Bomhof and Geoffrey Hing from CRL was excellent (see slideshare). My presentation on implementing WYSIWYG is below. I'll have the audio up shortly. [link to earlier version of write-up].

Chicagoland Library Drupal Group : Dec. 7 (9:30a-12noon) at OPPL

We'll be having a get-together of the Chicagoland Library Drupal Group on Mon., Dec. 7 (9:30-12noon) at the Oak Park Public Library.

I'll be doing a presentation that's been near and dear to my heart recently: incorporating WYSIWYG into Drupal. It's called, appropriately enough, "The Joys & Sorrows of WYSIWYG".

Russ Bomhof and Geoffrey Hing from CRL (who recently launched their site in Drupal) will also be presenting.

Announcement from organizer Mick Jacobsen (Skokie Public) after the jump...

Web-Related Networking Group http://j.mp/zUCZ0
When: Monday, December 7, 2009 (9:30 AM - 12:00 PM) Where: Oak Park Public Library (In Person) (Oak Park, IL) Cost: Free

Join us for a discussion about content management systems. Learn from brief presentations by veterans and share your own stories, issues, and successes. Beginners welcome!

Two presentations have been scheduled for this meeting.

The Joys & Sorrows of WYSIWYG
A discussion of how and why to go WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) and what Drupal can do about it.

Presented by: Leo Klein, Reference PT, DePaul; OAR, UIC
University of Illinois Chicago
chicagolibrarian.com

Top 5 Non-Obvious Drupal Modules
Learn which modules proved to be important in building our new site.

Presented by: Russ Bomhof and Geoffrey Hing The Center for Research Libraries www.crl.edu

Open discussion will follow the presentations.

My Talk on Web 2.0 at UIC

I'd like to thank Scott Dixon and his class from the Biomedical Visualization program at UIC for their eager reception and interest in my talk on 'Web 2.0 - Origins, Directions & Methods of Evaluation'.

Slides from the presentation are available below or from GoogleDocs directly here...

Chicagoland Drupal4Lib BoF (3/20) - Report

We had a wonderful turnout of close to 20 librarians from all parts of the Chicagoland area. Knowledge and skill-level ran from seasoned veterans to people being introduced to Drupal for the first time.

Project Demos & Participation

We had a number of people show us projects they're working on, including Mikael Jacobsen of Skokie Public, Brian Smith from PALS and Colin Koteles from the College of DuPage. We also had healthy contingents from Loyola, Oak Park Public, [the 3 people sitting next to Mikael?], and the ALA.

Module & Technique Discussion

Questions or issues that came up included transferring a Wiki to Drupal, customizing Themes (in this case the Zen Theme), use of Panels and a short (and conflicted) demo on my part of CiviCRM.

Resources

I was happy to see that at least two other people had read or were reading the O'Reilly Drupal Book. We agreed that it was very good. I added that it was very hands-on and that you really wanted to have a working copy of the CMS in front of you as you went through the chapters.

Other resources that people recommended included, Learn by the Drop, some of the instructional material from UMich, and this interesting site bitnami.org where you can download all the apps you need (Apache, PHP, MySQL, etc.) to get Drupal up and running locally.

ALA in July

We also discussed plans for ALA in July. We'll be meeting as part of the LITA Drupal4Lib IG meeting. People expressed an interest in hearing from a speaker who could discuss where Drupal is heading in the near future -- with the next release. Happily, we have a number of excellent Drupal Developers in the Chicagoland area who could talk on this subject.

Most Embarrassing Moment

In an attempt to show beginners how easy it is to set up Drupal using cPanel/Fantastico (just to play around and experiment with), I completely flubbed up, ending with one error after the other. So yes, I will be leaving town and changing my identity. (Here's how it should have gone...).

Thanks to All

First thanks to the wonderful people at DePaul for letting us use their great Instruction Room.

Then thanks of course to everyone who came! I was so wonderfully surprised by the number and variety of people who came. It really energized me as to ideas and activities we can do for using Drupal for library purposes in the Chicagoland area.

Feel free to leave comments and hope to see everyone again!

Next Meeting(s)

We'll be getting together as part of the LITA Drupal4Lib IG meeting either on the Saturday (7/11) or Sunday (7/12), depending on conflicts, room availability etc. We then have a scheduled meeting in September at the downtown office of the MLS on September 25.

Note: Mikael Jacobsen is also organizing meetings for NSLS.

Ideas for Drupal4Lib IG Event at ALA in Chicago?

This is still a while off but I thought I'd put out an initial request before the holidays officially begin. It's a request for ideas and suggestions for the meeting of the LITA Drupal4Lib Interest Group at the 2009 ALA Conference in Chicago.

Feel free to leave comments either here or on the LITA Blog at:
http://tinyurl.com/Drupal4LibALAchicago

LAST JUNE/JULY IN ANAHEIM

Last June, we had a pretty nice BoF with librarians discussing Drupal projects they were working on. We also had a round-robin Q&A with librarians new to Drupal who were thinking about maybe using the CMS but wanting more information.

Here's my write-up of the event:

"Drupal4Lib BoF at ALA Anaheim"

ALA 2009 IN CHICAGO

So next year, happily enough, we'll be meeting in Chicago (my hometown) and I wanted to poll people to see what they thought.

A BoF is pretty nice but we could just as easily have a speaker or two, or investigate an interesting theme or topic.

Time-wise, I don't think we’d get more than an hour and a half -- two hours max. Fun things might include specific modules for library application, using Drupal in a library environment -- anything really.

So if you have any ideas or suggestions, if you'd like to speak or would like to see someone else speak, if there's a theme or topic you’d like to investigate, please leave a comment either here or on the LITA Blog at:
http://tinyurl.com/Drupal4LibALAchicago

With just a little work, I'm sure we can arrange something that our fellow Drupal4Lib'ers would look forward to.

Thanks for any help,

LEO
(2008-09 Chair of the LITA Drupal4Lib IG)

Drupal Talk II at UIC (5/30)

I'll be doing a follow-up to my talk on Drupal at UIC on Friday, 5/23 5/30 (1:30p-3pm) in Burnham Hall 308. The title of the Talk is: "The Wonderful World of Drupal Modules". Basically I'll go into some of the more important modules: CCK, Views, ImageCache, Panels, etc.

More info here: http://tinyurl.com/6exfs9

UPDATE: I had to postpone the talk by one week -- to 5/30.

Slides from Talk on Drupal at UIC

[Adobe Flash no longer supported]

Drupal for Libraries - Slides

[Adobe Flash Player is no longer supported]

First, I'd like to thank everyone for coming. I appreciated the energy and enthusiasm -- plus the good questions.

Above are the slides for the first part. For the second part, see the screencast "Creating a Library Database Page with Drupal".

I should have the audio file up in a few days. [Done 3/4/08]

NOTE: the 'full-screen' version at SlideShare actually looks pretty good. Have a look...

For the person who was having trouble using the "Sandbox" at opensourcecms.com, try the demo at http://drupal.demo.civicrm.org/

If anyone has any questions, feel free to contact me.

Again, thanks both to MLS and to the people who came!

UPDATE: Nice news from Slideshare:

"Hey leoklein!

Your slideshow Drupal for Libraries has been included in the Spotlight section on SlideShare.

Enjoy your day! the SlideShare team"

Must be the picture of me hanging upside-down that did it.

Screencast: Creating a Library Database Page with Drupal

In anticipation of my talk 'Drupal in Libraries' that I'll be giving to the Metropolitan Library System on Fri., 2/29 (1:30p-4:30p), I'm releasing the screencast 'Creating a Library Database Page with Drupal'.

The talk will be about Drupal in the context of Open Source Software and Content Management Systems as well of course as its application in a library environment. (more info and rsvp...)

The screencast goes over the points I'll be making in the second part of my talk.

Have a look an tell me what you think.

-- Link to Smaller Version (400x300) here... --

UPDATE: The slides and audio from my presentation are now available. You can access them by going here...

My Talk on Web 2.0 to Librarians from National Louis, Benedictine & the College of Dupage

Leo Klein at Benedictine University: I'd like to thank all of the librarians who came to my talk on Web 2.0 at Benedictine University yesterday.

We had a good group with representation from National Louis, Benedictine and the College of DuPage. Everyone was completely engaged and asked great questions -- even though I ran half an hour longer than scheduled (sorry).

I'd like to thank all of the participants. I'd also like to thank hosts Jack Fritts and Kent Carrico from Benedictine and Kathryn Miller from National Louis who did the original scheduling.

A copy of my presentation can be found here...

UPDATE: See the version on SlideShare.net here...