Matt's blog

This time of year, the people at Fox News predictably start chattering about the by-now infamous war on Christmas. Accordingly, the people over at Daily Kos and other liberal motherships (like MSNBC, these days) start shooting back. A recent Rasmussen poll found that a majority of Americans would rather see "Merry Christmas" on ads and such. Republicans vastly preferred it, while Democrats were more tepid. I will break with my liberal brethren here and say that I actually prefer "Merry Christmas" to "Happy Holidays"... and I don't even celebrate Christmas.

I'm part of perhaps the first generation of people who grew up with commercially-produced computer games alongside their physical, real-world toys. I've been playing some kind of computer game (or console video game) off and on my entire life. When you break it down, all computer and video games have something in common. You face some task or challenge, you complete it, you receive points, cash, gold pieces, experience, skills, or some kind of reward. Those perhaps help you accomplish the next task. Eventually you exhaust all the tasks and have beaten the game (or maybe the game goes on forever depending how linear the narrative is).

Recently, I've been thinking about how cars are portrayed versus other forms of transportation in movies, TV shows, even commercials. In fact, what really prompted this was the following Audi commercial, which was picked up by a number of transportation and urban planning blogs. Observe.

Tomorrow is the primary election for New York City offices: mayor, city council, comptroller, public advocate, district attorney and probably a few other offices. The city is completely ignored in national elections; in fact, it is kicked to the curb by a lot of rural politicians, but I won't get into that.

The general election is in November, as per convention. However with the exception of the mayoral race, there is no realistic chance of Republicans or Independents winning anything except on Staten Island -- the current composition of the 51-seat council is 48 Dems, 5 others (3 GOP, 1 Working Families, 1 independent). Thus, the Democratic primary is effectively the real election for most of the offices.

Even though term limits for city councillors have been extended by an extra term, there are a lot of open and fairly contentious council seats, in addition to the citywide offices. Since I know you're dying to know, here is who I'm voting for and why.

I used to own a car. It was a teal blue 1993 Volkswagen Golf hatchback. I bought it when I was in college and had it junked a few months before I graduated, as getting it to pass state inspection would've cost more in repairs than I paid for the car. I used to drive that car a lot, as Middletown, Connecticut is not really a hub of mass transportation, and it was the only way to get back home to Maine.

I say this just to point out that I'm not really some kind of anti-car zealot. A coworker recently jokingly accused me of being such, and I also jokingly showed him my Transportation Alternatives membership card. I know that cars are the predominant form of transportation in the United States and we can't just change that overnight, even if I would enjoy it if we did.

This is part 3 in a series of posts about Drupal solutions for common issues raised in developing news sites. See a brief preamble in my first entry about the topic.

Solution 3: "This article says it was published way earlier than it was actually published."

This is a seemingly small problem, and a quick fix. But it's subtle, and a good illustration and how sometimes the programmers and journalists have different ways of thinking about the content.

This is part 2 in a series of posts about Drupal solutions for common issues raised in developing news sites. See a brief preamble in my first entry about the topic.

Solution 2: "Hey, I'm writing a book review. How do I make the book title italic in the story headline?"

Many are the times when I've wished we could get over our need to italicize titles of books, films and publications. Sadly, I don't make the rules of typography. Inevitably your editorial people will need to include bold or italic text (or even hyperlinks) in the headline (or the node title, as we developers would call it).

As you might imagine, a significant part of my job at the Observer has involved creating sites that make publishing news online easier. I am, and always have been, a staunch believer in the fact that Drupal is one of the best web frameworks for news and publishing. The plethora of news organizations that use it now or are planning to use it soon bears me out on this one. That being said, Drupal's base functionality does fall short in several instances for a lot of common things that news requires. So, I'm going to describe common solutions that I've come to know in the course of customizing Drupal for several different news sites.

A few weeks ago, I went on a couple of job interviews. Sadly, all the firms I interviewed with ultimately turned out to be what I consider bad citizens of the Drupal community, and of the open source development community in general. That is to say, although they were using Drupal and other open source tools and often running quite profitable businesses as a result, they seemed to have zero interest in contributing back parts of their work or even interacting with other community members to help with documentation, logistics, etc.

For the better part of last week, I was in Washington, DC attending this year's North American DrupalCon. Although a bit exhausting, mentally, it was a pretty interesting and enlightening experience. My first foray into the wider Drupal community was at last year's equivalent of this event, in Boston. It was there that I was more or less hired on the spot by the New York Observer, where I still find myself today. This year's conference was considerably larger (1400 attendees, up from 800 in Boston). I also noticed a distinct shift in tone. A year ago, the economy was still booming (or seemed to be). Development shops, media companies and even non-profits were in a hiring bonanza and looking to crank out new sites left and right. This year, everyone seemed much more contemplative.