Last night I spent about 6 hours working with a group of techies and geeks in putting up the Drupal infrastructure for a Haiti-focused hub for . The purpose of the organization is very simple: CrisisCommons brings together domain experts, developers, and first responders around improving technology and practice for humanitarian crisis management and disaster relief.

I spent most of the time configuring a list of modules I use for a better user experience and user interface in Drupal as well as multimedia and file management. I don't have all their names (and I apologize) but I have most of the twitter handles of the people with whom I worked with last night : @yoavlurie @chadcat @ssekaran @alexdc @yessoprince @fuzheado @elstudio @NickDickover. I want to give a big shout out to Kai Chang, for alerting me to the call to action.

If you know Drupal theming (phptemplating) and/or have experience, please give me a hollaback. We need you.
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more animals

We have a new server.

We're working out the kinks with it's configuration and more importantly pageload speed.

No, the path to the FILES folder still needs fixing. Images will still be broken for a few more hours.

We should be done with this mutha tonight.

Enjoy the LOLCat.

It took longer than I expected but the site upgrade is done. We're still working out the kinks so if you find something funky, please don't hesitate to tell us.

Michael Arrington over at TechCrunch wrote an "intervention" post for Robert Scoble about his addiction to FriendFeed (and by extension Twitter).

What has he gained? On Twitter Robert has nearly 45,000 followers and has written over 16,000 messages. On Friendfeed Robert has nearly 23,000 subscribers.

So lots of people follow Robert on those services, but they aren’t visiting his site and the content he writes is on someone else’s server. Plus all that content is just really forgettable, compared to a good thought piece that people refer back to over time. There is no direct way to monetize any of that content, which is something that a full time blogger with a family really needs to think about.

Meanwhile, all this attention from Robert has certainly helped the valuations of Friendfeed and Twitter. How much of that value does Robert receive? Zilch.

So Robert has spent 2,555 hours spent reading tens out thousands of mostly inane Twitter and Friendfeed messages, and has written a few thousand messages of his own. Meanwhile, we as a community lost the regularly entertaining and thoughtful posts of a great writer.

Robert dutifully responded over at Scobleizer :
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I may have to switch hosting companies yet again. The company I am with right now have no one on staff that knows how to set or manage a Drupal-centric server.

I need an expert who can take my Drupal 4.7 sites, upgrade them to latest D5 and then set up a multi-site installation --meaning, porting all upgraded sites to a "one code base, multiple databases" setup. This means though that you have systems administrative experience and can effectively sort out what my server may need in or to optimize it's hardware as well as it's software (Apace 1.3, MySQL 4+, PHP 5)

Extra brownie points if you can  :

1. talk me into going straight into D6 (the issue for me is the lack of key modules) and
2. also throw in a CiviCRM installation into the mix.

And yes, I will pay. Just make an offer per/project and/or per/hour. Just email me at admin [at] culturekitchen [dot] com.
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¡En español, carajo!

I am happy to announce that finalmente, I have created the best possible grammar UI (user-interace) that will make it easy to use accented charactes in Español, Português and other romance languages.

Accents are not easy to introduce in a blog post. You need to know how to convert them to HTML (or also called "Ampersand") characters. I have customized the editing toolbar to include all the accents, as well as the cent and Spanish exclamation and question characters.

Just click on the Help button and you'll see the complete selection explained :

How do you use it?
To create the HTML version [ español ] of the word español, all you have to do is write the word espanol, highlight the letter "n" and then click on the tilde ( ~ ). When you publish, the character will appear correctly interpreted.