I'm pleased to announce that my panel at this years SXSW Interactive was accepted. Yeah! This is one of my favorite conferences all year, and I'm looking forward to getting the opportunity to expose more folks to the cool new music recommendation services out there.

Look for more details about panel speakers to emerge as things are confirmed, and a big thanks to everyone who voted for the panel!

A few rainy weekends ago, I had the urge to roll up my sleeves and build something. Every web application I've built in the last few years has been built on Drupal, and I wanted to see (remind myself) what it would be like to develop an application from scratch (where "scratch" = a random collection of open source components combined with bits from Drupal). I also had given myself the timeframe of a weekend, so building "Basecamp right" was out. I wanted a simple coding project.

Since I'm extremely childish, immature, and a fan of the practical joke, I decided to build a web app that let you send an email to someone, but make it appear as if it comes from someone else. I decided to call it Prankmail. Frivolous, slightly dangerous, and perfect for a rainy weekend indoors.

Skipping to the good part, you can check it out at:
http://prankmail.org

And if you would like to read about how I built it, and how the
"build from scratch" process compares to building a Drupal site, continue on:

Before I really started with application specific code, I wanted to grab a few Open Source pieces and get a simple and efficient framework to build on (We're not using Drupal, after all).

I wanted to have clean URL's (none of that goofy query string nonsense) so I took a look at how Drupal uses MOD_REWRITE and .htaccess files and cobbled together a simple solution. I've also been looking at the new Zend framework, and I like the way it maps URL's to controllers. I am also a fan of Drupal menu system, so I hacked up the arg() function from Drupal, and made it route URL's to controllers. I like Ruby's "convention over configuration" and so by default, I set it up so a URL of '/message/123' gets passed to a function 'controller_message' with an arg of '123', if that function exists.

SXSW is still months away, but I can't help but get excited already. The list on upcoming.org is growing, and panels are being selected using a cool new tool that lets people vote for which panels should be added to the conference.

Speaking of panels being selected, yours truly has proposed a panel for this years SXSW. I know that the panels that do the best, seem to be the ones that are slightly confrontational, a bit tongue in cheek, but still very informative. So keeping that in mind, my proposed panel description is as follows:

With the unprecedented accessibility of recorded music, how can we discover that hot new band when there are millions of possibilities at our fingertips? Fortunately, many companies address this very question. Find out which service creates playlists worthy of a veteran DJ, and which service recommends tracks like an iPod set on shuffle as they battle it out in the ultimate playlist smackdown. Based on audience feedback, trophies will be awarded.

You can vote to have my panel added to the SXSW conference here:
http://2007.sxsw.com/interactive/panel_picker/#panel_23

I’m stoked to be speaking tomorrow about music at the O’Reilly EuroOSCON conference tomorrow. So far, the conference has been quite interesting and I’ve enjoyed hearing about new projects and new approaches. The things I have enjoyed so far are:

• Tom Steinberg’s “Hackers guide to democracyâ€? and mysociety.org. We need something like this in Canada. Maybe built on Drupal. Hmmm…
• Bre Pettis (of Make Magazine fame) and his cool drawbot
• Tim O’Reillys’ keynote, which was a well put together summary of things we all know. But when you hear it all said again in a clear concise voice, you just can’t help but get excited.
• Hanging out with Drupal folk.
• Daisy, which looks kind of cool.

Looking forward to DrupalCon and BarCamp, coming up this weekend!

Colin Brumelle

2006

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Moving to San Francisco

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created on Tue, 2006-08-08 16:42

With equal parts excitement and trepidation, I am on my way to San Francisco at the end of this month. Bryght has several clients in and around california, and considering the tech scene in the bay area, an increased Bryght "presence" will be a good thing. My goal is to eventually make the San Francisco office dwarf our Vancouver office so all my colleagues will just move down, but that might take a while. The real reason for the move has more to do with Krista (my partner in crime) completing her PhD in medical sociology, but I'm quite excited to be at the epicenter (or at least an epicenter) of all things webby.

One thing that is proving difficult though, is finding a quality place to live. So in the spirit of the lazyweb, I'm trying LazyApartmentHunting (with the help of Craigslist). If anyone has any leads, please let me know.

If anyone wants to meet up in San Francisco in September to talk about Bryght, Drupal, or Music 2.0, just let me know. First round of drinks is on me!

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