CivicActions

One of the findings of the Drupal usability testing at UMN in February was that users like, use and like to use contextual help. Many of the participants explicitly said that they would have liked more of it during their evaluations and in debriefing.

As a developer it is difficult to anticipate where contextual help is appropriate, needed or perhaps why it's even necessary. While usability testing is possibly the only way to effectively determine exactly where contextual help is needed and useful and where it's not, I think this example might help developers understand when where and why contextual help is likely to be helpful. This is part of developing sympathy for the user.

Google is announcing Friend Connect tonight, a service advertised to "help website owners grow traffic by enabling any site on the web to easily provide social features for its visitors." Friend Connect employs OpenID and oAuth which is a good start, but how it puts them together is lacking vision and, disturbingly, may raise significant privacy concerns.

At the Vancouver DrupalCamp there were, of course, the inevitable questions about what modules people use regularly. Boris suggested at one point that people should add to the growing body of information out there about popular modules.

So here is my short list of modules i use on nearly EVERY site:

• CCK, plus various cck field modules like link, imagefield
  

This is a very well done ad from the Courage Campaign:

The Minnesota Search Sprint is unofficially over. Earnest, Djun, and Blake have already left. Chad is local, but I've said goodbye to him too. Robert and I leave tomorrow. And David is vacationing a few extra days in sunny Minnesota (because it's warmer than Montreal???).

DrupalCamps help bring out creativity. This weekend I attended Vancouver's DrupalCamp, and I really enjoyed myself. On top of it, I am always amazed by talking with others at these types of events. Other developers who I think really know their stuff said to me, "The camps are great. They remind of how much more I need to learn." I thought they knew it all!

Attached you'll find the latest revision of "my" IA presentation at DrupalCamp Vancouver 2008. This presentation has been evolving since DrupalConBarcelona.

Attached you'll find my slide deck from Your Introduction to Panels 2. This was a really fun talk to present, and the room was packed. I hope people found it useful and if you attended and have any feedback, please let me know so i can sharpen the presentation for DrupalCamp Seattle.

LIVE FROM THE MINNESOTA SEARCH SPRINT...

The sprint team of Robert Douglass, Blake Lucchesi, Djun Kim, David Lesieur, Chad Fennel, Earnest Berry, and myself, began work at 8am on this uncharacteristically warm sunny May day at the University of Minnesota.

Many folk don't know that the ACLU has a TV series called "The Freedom Files". Season 2 can be seen on PBS stations throughout the country. Episodes can also be viewed online at aclu.tv which we re-launched for the new season recently.