Dataseed featured on Guardian Datablog
We're thrilled that our Dataseed visualisation of UK mortality statistics has been featured on the Guardian Datablog.
This is where we try to share knowledge and insight that will help others. You can filter technical posts out using the category menu on the left.
Our work featured on front page of Drupal.org
Exciting news! Our work on Turner Broadcasting's General Entertainment multi-site has been included in Drupal.org's featured sites showcase. This includes a feature on the home page.
Continuous Integration - A Step by Step Guide
In the software development world, Continuous Integration (CI) is the process of continuously applying quality control to a piece of software in development. What this usually amounts to in practice is having automated systems that build, deploy and test your software each time a change is made. As software complexity increases, and more developers are added to the team, having these types of automated systems in place becomes essential to controlling the quality and cost of projects.
Introducing Survey Builder - Presentation
Survey Builder is a Drupal 7 module that allows you to create surveys, questionnaires, or plain old forms using a drag and drop interface. It makes use of the fantastic form_builder module, with views and features integration, and rules integration planned. Atchai has built this module and contributed it as open-source to the Drupal Community, first presented at the London Drupal Dropin event, held at Capgemini in December 2011.
A Semantic Web Platform for Health Data - Semtech London 2011
Mark Birbeck and I presented our recent work, sponsored by the NIC, on building a semantic web platform for health data, at Semtech London 2011.
Linked Data Platform Architecture mk. II
Since it's inception as a re-usable toolkit fed from the work we have been doing with the NHS National Innovation Centre, the Linked Data Platform has evolved. The core functionality is still focussed on taking data from spreadsheets and other structured sources (including SPARQL endpoints) and then visualising this data within a Drupal-based UI.
Google Refine vs XLWrap
We've been using XLWrap as a tool to take data from spreadsheets and turn it into RDF triples. At the time we started using XLWrap, there was no alternative that would enable us to generate multiple triples from one cell in a spreadsheet (we'll explain why this is important later), and there was also no Google Refine.
Spaces Module as a Drupal Multi-site alternative
If you want to share users, content and configuration between Drupal sites you have several options. The most common approaches are either to use a multi-site architecture, RSS feeds, or domain access module. In this post, I'll discuss an alternative method using Spaces and PURL modules, a highly flexible architecture that enables you to tailor multiple spaces that can appear to be completely independent sites, but which all run from the same Drupal installation.
Drupal Features Module Presentation
Here are the slides from the short talk I did on Development Seed's excellent Features module, at the February Drupal-Drop In, hosted at Microsoft's offices in London.
It was a great evening, where several people did a short talk on their favourite modules, or modules that they find themselves using all the time. Thanks to everyone who came along!
Feeding Drupal in Real-Time Presentation
I gave a talk on "Feeding Drupal in Real-Time" at the Guardian on Tuesday, for the Drupal Drop-In event. It was a great evening, I met lots of interesting people and enjoyed some fantastic presentations. Thanks to everyone who came and made the event a success, especially Robert Castelo and Mark Baker for organising, and Microsoft and the Guardian for sponsoring.
My slides from the talk are below, but I also did two live demonstrations which are kinda hard to reproduce here! However, here's what happened for anyone who missed it:
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