Aaron Winborn (aaron), one of our developers, an editor of the Drupal Newsletter, and the contributer of several modules such as Embedded Media Field and Views Slideshow, will be the lead presenter of the Drupal Multimedia panel at Boston DrupalCon next week. He is teaming up with James Walker (walkah), Darrel O'Pry (dopry), and Nate Haug (quicksketch) on Monday, March 3, in the Site Building track, with a live demonstration integrating images, video, and audio onto your sites.

When Black Eyed Peas' Will.i.am released the "Yes We Can" video mashup of Obama's speech / song, many wondered why the file was uploaded to a relatively unknown site called DipDive.com.

Phase 2 of the DipDive project is phenomenal.

Collective video making - as users upload or share photos of Obama rallies to the site, the individual pixels of the video become collaged into a digital mosaic.

The Nation, America's oldest weekly magazine and most widely read journal of opinion reported recently on the "new tools and new talent" that is infusing the Democratic Party and buttressing the progressive left.

It is fitting that when the article describes early instances of the online infrastructure progressives built and the flaws of the older generation technology we inherited, the article quotes Adam Mordecai who described Howard Dean's the innovative websystem the nascent Advomatic built for Iowa.

Drupal 4.7.10 and 5.5 have been released and are recommended upgrades to existing Drupal sites.

Clients hosting with Advomatic will receive these updates free of charge, and will be contacted by us with details and scheduling in the coming days.

Recently, there has been an extraordinary amount of sneering, dismissive media attacks on America's young people and the utility of the internet in politics.  This website, Future Majority, dedicated to beat reporting on millennial politics has tried to correct the condescending, disdainful narratives time and time and time and time

Here at Advomatic, we're getting pretty good at the whole widget thing. The data thing has been our forte for a while, but now there's the widgets that we keep nailing, and of course we're still pretty good at the whole the speaking truth to power thing. Let's discuss:

The non-partisan Drum Major Institute for Public Policy (DMI) issues annual reports analyzing the impact of domestic legislation on America’s middle class. Literally grading Members of Congress based on whether their votes are for or against "legislation significant to America's current and aspiring middle class."

From praise to prizes to cash, Advomatic projects have been on a roll recently. It's a pleasure to offer this run down of some recent client-partners and the encomiums heaped upon their websites:

Our team has been so hard at work over the last few months that we've had little time to brag about the accomplishments we've achieved for our clients.

Well, this time, we have to make the time. Introducing the Maplight Presidential fund raising widget.

The Widget is a custom flash doohickey that allows you to embed a representation of the Presidential fund raising numbers you wish to display. If you like a mix of both you can show both. If you want just the leading Democratic candidates, it allows you to choose them. If you want to change the width or swap out colors, you can totally do that too. The best news of all is that we will be distributing more soon.

The amazing Neil Drumm built the data structure, Drupal module and javascript. He teamed up with another Advodude, Aaron Winborn, who did the flash integration. They worked with Pauline Au who churned out the sharp design. Congratulations to everyone on a job well done.

A nice person who shares the same name as a famous hair dude contacted me asking how to the drupal news aggregator block show teasers rather than simple titles. This is for the non-profit "The Epilepsy Support Centre". He pointed to this post on my personal site where I reference themable function overrides in template.php.

We're progressive movementarians. Advomatic is committed to building the online infrastructure for America's Progressive Movement. Much of our pro-bono work and discounted 'really cool cause' development work is for organizations that themselves aim to provide connective tissue for the Progressive Movement, organizations like Living Liberally.

Our newest mission project is BuyBlue.org.

Ever since NewsCorp put out that self-aggrandizing study on how MySpace is the best place ever to buy advertising, I've been thinking about what it means. The study was designed to double monthly advertising revenue from $30m to $60 and so much of the methodology is about brand identification and how well MySpacers react to banner ads versus flash ads etc. However, buried in the company's Press Release and tucked away in the study itself are a few gems that I think further one of my theories about how Millennials need and use Social Networks.

Take this quote for example from the PR:

”MySpace has thrived as a global community driven by self expression, discovery and connection of now more than 100 million people around the world who use it each month,” said Chris DeWolfe, CEO of MySpace. “Users are empowered to create and share, build and maintain relationships and in the process have created an entirely new medium that is deeply integrated into their everyday lives. Smart marketers know how to... meow meow meow [buy ads].

But did you catch that? I gotta say, that's pretty true, Chris DeWolfe. Users are empowered to create and share, build and maintain relationships and in the process have created an entirely new medium that is deeply integrated into their everyday lives.

But why...

One of the tasks that seems to persistently find its way to my doorstep is building calendaring systems. Always maddening, incredibly frustrating and never as easy as it seems it should be, building a system that deals with events and dates and times is a rite of passage for many developers. You can always tell who has had the mind-bending pleasure of dealing with timezones and daylight savings time. When presented with the subject they often develop a far away look that only those who have peered into the depths of pure insanity possess.

Today was a fun day. For those of you who missed it, we've archived all the materials from our one day stint as hard core Republicans.

You can see the complete site here.
Thanks for stopping by!

One of the great orgs we actively support, sponsor, and are building a new website for, is Drinking Liberally (DL).

I personally host a DL event at the Mayan theatre in Denver every third Wednesday of the month. The NYC Advomatic team attends one of the NYC DLs every week.

Well, apparently, we made an impression in Denver. The Denver Weekly Alternative Newspaper, Westword, has put Denver DL in their annual "Best of Denver" issue.

How do you promote deeper participation from your web membership, collect valuable demographics from them, and avoid triggering common negative reactions to data collection?

With a clear set of objectives for your web site, and some new ways of structuring features, you can help guide your members to action on behalf of your organization; all while collecting the information you need without turning off supporters with scary data-collection forms.

Thank you all for coming. Here are some brochures. Now please leave.

I've had difficulty explaining my networking concepts without resorting to some exasperated cliche like, "that's just how I think about it."

Well, turns out that scientists at the National Institute of Mental Health are coming to the conclusion that that's actually how the brain thinks.

Of course that's how I think about it. It's literally how I think...

Ray Oldenburg is an urban sociologist who writes about the importance of informal public gathering places. In his book The Great Good Place, Oldenburg demonstrates why these gathering places are essential to community and public life. He argues that bars, coffee shops, general stores, and other "third places" (in contrast to the first and second places of home and work), are central to local democracy and community vitality.

By exploring how these places work and what roles they serve, Oldenburg offers a compelling argument for these settings of informal public life as essential for the health both of our communities and ourselves.

China's "Netizens" number 130 million - and are growing 30% every year. Second only to the U.S., China is installing Broadband everywhere and internet cafes are the size of K-Marts and as abundant as Starbucks.

In 2005, Guo Liang of the Chinese Acadamy of Social Sciences published a study showing that only two thirds (and dropping) of Net users had email accounts, and of them, only a third check their email on a daily basis. Forty-two percent of Netizens did not use a search engine. Seventy-five percent had never made an online purchase.

Instead of replacing encyclopedias, newspapers, storefronts, travel agencies, yearbooks, and the U.S. Postal Service, Chinese people --both addicts and non-addicts-- were flocking to Video Gaming virtual worlds and million person-chat rooms. This is not the business-oriented Web of the West.

Guo's study explained that the Chinese internet user's online presence had very little in common with their real lives; they went online to escape. What and why?

This is a great photo set from Steve Garfield. He was in the blogger meeting with Senator Edwards and walked away impressed. You can read his and other New Englanders posts at a few blogs such as this.

Edwards, in an unorthodox move, is not asking you to join a campaign. He is asking you to join a movement.

The point is, if you open up your system to potential supporters, give them the tools that they need to organize, you reap the benefits.

Thanks to services like Flickr that offer open APIs and open source projects like Drupal, now these photos can go viral.

Can you imagine if everyone who took pictures at all 6 of Senator Edwards' events this week could easily add to the online chorus of folks whose pictures are a testament to powerful call to action that John Edwards made around the country?

We can. Advomatic builds on truly open source systems to harness this wave by magnification not centralization.

When setting up various services you will often be required to provide a subnet mask for the ip address you are configuring the service for. Sometimes you need to input the mask in the form xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx/xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx, sometimes in terms of a mask width, or bits, in the format xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx/ww, where 'ww' is the mask width (also called a CIDR mask). This conversion is something I always have to refresh my memory on and am often frustrated because I always forget the very simple relationship between these two ways to express a netmask value.