Bevan Rudge JavaScript and web technologist

Are you heading out to vote this morning? Have you thought about how each of the parties support open source? The Greens's IT policy explicitly states a number of policies about encouraging Open Source in Business, Government and Education.

It's hard to beat that! Further; The Greens use Drupal and CiviCRM heavily in both their public-facing and internal systems -- their actions match their words. Go Greens!

Together with some friends and colleagues we have been working hard to organise, finalize and publish details of what will be the two most important days for Drupal in New Zealand:

DrupalSouth: The New Zealand Drupal Event for 2008

DrupalSouth is the New Zealand Drupal Event for 2008. DrupalSouth will bring NZ's Drupal community together for the first nation-wide Drupal event and the first ever Drupal camp in NZ.

Online retailers BWMsnow and SKATEgear require the professional services of a Drupal vendor or developer to take over the maintenance and future development their websites.

BWMsnow is NZ's largest online retailer of snowboard gear and has been operating for more than 4 years internationally, focussing more heavily on the NZ market in recent years. BWMsnow was NZ's only online retailer of snowboard gear until recently. BWMsnow is a NZ limited company which continues to grows significantly every selling season (March to June).

Usability testing (hereafter "UT") is getting a lot of attention in Drupal -- and rightly so IMHO. If we aim to have "100%" test coverage on Drupal's code and functionality for Drupal 7, it stands to reason we also need test "coverage" on Drupal's usability. If not, it's far too easy for bad interfaces to be developed that pass all the functional and unit tests, but fail miserably in the real world!

Jimmy Berry (aka boombatower) of GHOP fame plans to take the initial (but giant) steps in this direction in the Google Summer of code 2008.

I just got this email from Mozilla about the soon release of Firefox 3 release candidate, asking addon developers to get their extensions updated and released for FF3 RCs. If you have an extension released on addons.mozilla.org you would have received this email too. I have two variations of FF2's default Mac theme that enable favicons in the bookmarks toolbar: Mac Favicon and Mac Favicon XL.

I arrived in Boston yesterday afternoon, absolutely exhausted after Usability testing at UMN -- which was amazing. See the report at 9am on Monday to hear why. It was snowing heavily here this morning. Today I need to prepare for my presentation on Scalable Theming and my parts of the Usability presentation, and try open another US bank account.

Here's my photoblog to date:

[Update: this had the wrong tag to get on Planet Drupal]

I'm really looking forward to DrupalCon Boston 2008. The highlight for me will likely be meeting a bunch of really great people I have come to know, respect and be inspired by;

• Everyone at CivicActions; My awesome colleagues and team-mates for the last 6 months.
• Dries Buytaert; For obvious reasons.
• Karoly Chx Negyesi; It's been great having your support on SoU. I want to put a voice to your words, code-comments and even php code!
• Folk from the Usability Group; Eigentor, Gaele, SteveJB, Yoroy, CousinHub and many others.
• Neil Drumm; You're usability discussion at BADcamp (I listened to the podcast) was inspiring and interesting for me.
• Kent Bye; You have contributed a lot of videos and screenshots that have been inspiring for me. Then there's Backtrace Vizualizer which is just amazing.
• Angie Webchick Byron; You're never-ending support is inspiring and motivating. Where do you get all that energy from?
• And too many others to list here...

Is there something wrong with your brand when it reminds people of toilet humour?
The best two minutes of entertainment I've had in months:

I just heard on the lullabot podcast #53 that lullabot is going to Melbourne to run training sessions in April 2008.

With the Drupal Mini Conf after Linux Conference Australia, and Lonely Planet launching their drupal development in Melbourne, it seems like Melbourne is shaping up to be the “Drupal Capital” of the Southern hemisphere.

Please help me get to DrupalCon Boston! Funds will help improve usability in Drupal by allowing me to dedicate more time to various usability projects. Thank you for your support.