For those of you who missed it, the event was pretty well documented via the twitter backchannel and flickr photos. Thanks everyone!

I'm back home now... oh - and I moved! I'm now living in a beautiful house at St. Clair and Dufferin.

So it's time to settle in for the holiday season, finish getting unpacked and settled and enjoy a little breathing room. To kick it off, I'm heading to #hohoto tonight. Looking forward to partying with my local Toronto people!

I will be there to present in the afternoon. Please come out and say "hi". Also, Lullabot will be sponsoring lunch (thanks guys!).

It seems like Toronto has gone Drupal crazy lately. I am loving all the local events!

The event takes place starting at 10am on November 22nd, 2008 at the Centre for Social Innovation. Be sure to check the website for full details. See you there!

Back in April, I did an Intro Workshop. This time, I'll be showing off theming in Drupal 6:

In this workshop, we will show the process of taking an HTML & CSS design and converting it into a fully working Drupal theme. Along the way, we’ll look at the 3 main aspects of Drupal theming, some best practices and a few tricks. Drupal 6 makes the whole process easier than ever, so get started making your Drupal site look not like a Drupal site!

The workshop is Tuesday Oct 28 2008 @ 630pm at Seneca @ York Campus in room 2112. See the workshop announcement for full details.

I'll be running 2 sessions again this year:

• Drupal and Views 2: Powerful Websites in Zero Lines of Code: This workshop will cover some of the power available to Drupal site builders thanks to the awesome new Views 2 module. 2 hours, 1 site, 0 lines of code. Rock!
• Using Drupal: Community Powered Code to Run Your Site: This year's presentation will focus on the secret weapon of Drupal: the community. Drupal's success comes down to the power of the people behind it!

Check out the full schedule and register now!. Hope to see you there!

I also spent a few hours last night at the Mozilla Toronto launch party. Mozilla is full of great people doing great work... it was nice to help celebrate their latest milestone.

If you haven't yet, go now. Get Firefox 3.

As usual, I'll be the one decked out in Lullabot gear talking about Drupal. Hope to see you there :)

We're putting together an exciting event this year. We have John Resig coming to talk about jQuery and ActiveState will be giving away prize packages. Plus we'll have two full days of information - tips, tricks, case studies and howtos. Make sure to register soon! We already have over 100 people signed up!

Also, we are actively seeking both speakers and sponsors. Propose a session or contact us if you're interested in sponsoring or have other questions.

Hope to see you there!

For those of you here in Toronto that are unaware, PHUG is the new local PHP User Group. They have a lot of momentum and are an exciting group - I look forward to more collaboration in the future betweeh PHUG and DUG-TO.

The workshop will be Drupal Basics - a crash course in everyone's favourite CMS. We'll look at the core Drupal concepts, how building sites in Drupal works, and some basic theming tricks.

It's a free event, but space is limited so please register. Looking forward to meeting some new faces!

UPDATE: P.S. this isn't an April Fool's joke ;)

OK, so I love my adopted nation. I do. But, what's a guy (or gal) got to do to get affordable, unmolested bandwidth in this country?!?

I've written before about the abysmal mobile data situation in this country. Canada has one GSM network - and we pay the price for it.

But, until recently, my internets were safe at home. See, I'm a very happy subscriber of TekSavvy residential DSL: clean, clear, reliable, affordable bandwidth. Well, that's until Canada's copper monopoly decided to start throttling my bandwidth.

People have been talking and blogging about the events. You can follow the events at Free Our Bandwidth and, if you haven't before, read more about net neutrality. It's time for some real change. CRTC, where are you???

Canada, I'm fed up. Oh, and ketchup chips suck too.

• As previously mentioned, Khalid was elected to the Drupal Association.
• Dan Kurtz - who was instrumental in the organization of last year's DrupalCampToronto - recently released a really neat looking module called Teleport which aims to be the Quicksilver of Drupal. Sweet!
• Inspired by our last meetup, Jason Swaby went ahead and ported a template to a Drupal 6 theme.

Way to go, guys! It's so awesome to see the local gang rockin' out in the global community!

That said, the character of the event sure has changed... grown up? Sold out? Not sure. They're certainly *big*. There's lots of time spent on the sponsors (who's generosity I don't mean to belittle). There's little time for questions to the demo'ers. Few of the new people stuck around for drinks after the event and there were people in suits!?! Maybe I'm crazy, but perhaps the disruptive, un-conference events need to get disrupted?

There were some interesting demos/talks last night. My highlights were:

• SlashID : nice to see another Canadian identity startup. I have to admit, their demo wasn't great, but talking with Zeev afterwards was interesting. They took some pot-shots at OpenID which made for good debate. Enough to warrant a post of it's own... to be continued...
• ShapeShop (Ryan Schmidt) has a pretty awesome looking 3d modeling tool and was able to at least bring a laugh or two to otherwise well-behaved crowd.
• Mark Kuznicki: *rocked* the ignite format with Co-creating the Creative City. Good timing and good execution on a topic heavily laden in it's own jargon. I encourage you to check out his slides for all the missing info he wasn't able to get into his allotted 15 seconds per slide!

I will say, it was great to see everyone and it was really nice to not have to drive home afterwards ;) See y'all again in January (I hope).

For those of you who hadn't heard: two weeks ago (on November 1st), I moved. I have finally said "so long" to the suburbs. If you're familiar with Toronto, I'm now living on Gladstone Ave, just north of Bloor (near Dovercourt Park). I have to admit, I'm pretty darn happy about it.

Despite having been on the road for 11 of my first 15 days in my new place, I feel like I'm already starting to settle in a bit. I've already met 4 neighbors, am walking distance from pretty much everything I need (including Rosie's convenience on the corner which just so happens to stock organic dairy and organic coffee!) and it turns out a handful of friends already live in the 'hood.

More soon I'm sure, but expect to see me around the city (and at the office) a whole lot more now!

Drupal Hands-on will be a workshop-style crash course in building sites with Drupal. I really dig doing these things, it's amazing how much you can do with Drupal in a few hours.

Drupal under the hood is my "formal" presentation. Essentially, I'm going to give a brief hour-long overview of Drupal's internal architecture and hopefully inspire some hackers in the audience to dive in.

Some might say that alone is reason enough to attend, but if you're not convinced check out the rest of the awesome speakers. I can't say it enough, I think this is a really well done event and there's still room so register now!.

If you missed the announcement, we're going to start things off on Thursday with the Toronto Drupal User Group meetup - for regulars, please remember we're at 215 Spadina (4th floor) this month and on Thursday (not Tuesday).

Friday night through Saturday night we'll be taking part in the Ontario Linux Fest. We've sponsored a welcome party on Friday night (and, yes, the location is so secret I don't even know where!). Angie is speaking Saturday morning and we'll be hanging out, probably in the Drupal BoF room (check the schedule). There's still space, so register now!

Come on out and say "hi"!

As I've related to some folks who've asked already, I thought BarCamp went really well. My entire morning was packed with very interesting conversation : talk of a Canadian mobile users advocacy group (to help instigate change in our wireless data rates, followed by an excellent discussion about Mozilla with Mike Beltzner, and then a pretty killer debate/discussion about the new Facebook developer platform. Perhaps it was just me, but I was pretty well spent by lunch so the afternoon seemed a little less jam packed. I did lead a session on OpenID which spurred some interesting questions and discussion, but after that I kinda just hung out.

Yesterday, I spent the day at the Enterprise 2.0 Conference down at the Metro Convention Centre. While sometimes referred to as "enterprise camp", this was nobody's unconference. Despite some scheduling snafus (we ended up having to hold both tracks in one room and things ended up over an hour off schedule), I think it went well. Of course, I was there doing my .

Sadly, however, I think that about wraps my participation in tech week. No, for those who keep asking, I will not be attending Mesh today and tomorrow. Maybe next year...

I also wanted to mention that I've uploaded slides for 3 of my 4 presentations: Welcome and Drupal Overview, OpenID and Intro to Module Development. I also did a semi-impromptu session, Building an event site in an hour which outlined the building of drupalcamptoronto.org (which was based on the work from the oscms summit site). I've had several inquiries about notes - list of modules, cck and views exports, etc. I'm actually working on a full, longer write-up on that... so stay tuned! :)

Thanks again, everyone! See you all next year (or at a user group meeting soon!). ]]> 2007-04-23T00:00:00-04:00 http://walkah.net/blog/walkah/openid-at-democamptoronto13 Tomorrow night I've volunteered to subject myself to the scorn and ridicule of the local TorCamp community by sticking out my neck and doing a demo at DemoCampToronto13. Actually, it was this post by David Crow that inspired me, specifically:

And if I have to sit through a demonstration of a tag cloud or web login form, so help me.

So, naturally, I'll be doing a presentation exclusively about login forms... and I'll probably throw in a tag cloud for laughs. As for the 6 questions, here's what to expect:

1. Have you attended a previous DemoCamp? Yes. I've blogged about my attendance in at least 7, 11 and 12... I'm pretty sure I was at others as well...
2. Who are you? Previous experience, what makes you qualified for us to listen to, etc. I'm James. My qualifications: I'm currently the guy working on bringing OpenID support to Drupal core. I've also been involved with "Identity2.0" implementations dating back to SXIP's 1.0 protocol back in 2004 or so. Most recently, I presented OpenID to the attendees of the OSCMS summit in Sunnyvale.
3. What does your product do? Er, well my "product" is the better way to login (tm).
4. What hard problem, interesting insight, or cool feature will you be demonstrating? Well, we're gonna look at eliminating the registration form from the internet and solving Identity2.0.
5. What are you hoping to get out of presenting? Well, aside from the guaranteed love, respect and admiration of my peers - I'd like to raise OpenID awareness amongst local developers and inspire them to OpenID-enable their applications. I'd also like to gauge interest in doing something like an OpenID Mashpit locally.
6. What does the community gain by hearing you present? Hopefully a better idea (or initial awareness) of what OpenID is all about - what problems it solves (and what it doesn't) - and the inspiration to start using it for themselves and in their applications. That's right, all in 5 minutes.

There you have it. If you haven't yet, sign up and I'll see you there.

Full details, registration and session proposals are all being handled at http://drupalcamptoronto.org/ . Hope to see ya there!

For those who may be interested, we're in the process of ramping up planning for the next DrupalCampToronto. We're looking for space (ideally for 100-150 people) over two days - May 11 & 12, 2007. Anyone interested in helping to plan, organize and/or present please get on the organizers mailing list.

Thanks again everyone - see you all next month!