Over at twitter.start4all.com you can find lots and lots of relevant twitter links, API's uses, media coverage and other relevant links like this mashup of my timeline.

And you can find a list with "famous twitter people" in different countries. And guess what?

Yes, all famous people... and me

If you missed the Drupal Association session during last DrupalCon Szeged, see the video of Dries, Larry and me at archive.org. The presentation handles some of the basics of the Association and Larry answers many questions regarding the GPL and Drupal. Be sure to check this out and provide feedback on what you would like to know more about the association (for example in this posting).

What made Szeged a very good place for the EU DrupalCon? Not the fact that it was a 2 hour train ride from the airport. Not the fact that it was in Hungary, DrupalCountry, region 4, language 2 on Google Trends. But the fact that is was a nice warm small town, you could walk almost everywhere, the fact that 1/3 of the population is younger then 25, the fact there was a nice festival happening, the fact that every 100 meters you could spot a Drupal nerd: the fact that a town could become a Drupal Town!

If you live in the Netherlands and want to make sure that the next DrupalCon EU edition will be as good, make sure you join our effort to let Maastricht become DrupalTown 2009! See our Drupal Nederland group posting "DrupalCon Maastricht 2009"

(more flickr shots)

Maastricht is located in the south of the Netherlands, close to Germany and Belgium. It is a nice old town, see the wiki entry, not too big and with a young population.

If you are from Germany, Belgium or The Netherlands, please help us out to nominate Maastricht to the Drupal Association by raising your hand in this node!

This story start with a one dollar bill I found the last day during the DrupalCon Szeged 2008.

A dollar, I thought! This must be my lucky day! So I took it with me and decided it was my lucky Dollar. Little did I know.

We took the train from Szeged to Budapest at 10 a clock, 2 hours later we were at the airport and went for a small snack. We had plenty of time, yet - I am not going in details here - it was very frustrating to see the plane leave, to see the gate getting closed, with you at the wrong side of it. It became a very expensive snack, a bit more then a dollar.

We tried to get the next plane towards Amsterdam, it was fully booked. The next one was overbooked. So we got a flight to Vienna and then to Amsterdam. After checking in, going through customs again, waiting 2 hours, we found out it was cancelled. We got rerouted towards Muchen and then to Amsterdam. After 3 hours waiting the plane actually left the ground, one hour late. We missed our connection to Amsterdam and slept at an 4 star hotel nearby. Not that we enjoyed the hotel because we had to get up at 5 AM to catch the next flight. Only to find out ...

...it was cancelled. 28 hours after we left Szeged, we were at home. Most west coast Americans attending the DrupalCon were probably already in bed. It thought me however a couple of lessons. One of them I wanted to share. There was no single airline that was responsible for the chain of events or knew about it. Sabre

(the independent computer network that all airlines use) is great, they can realtime reroute any passenger over any airline towards any destination. Yet, it is not in use a trouble-ticketing system, airline B knew nothing about my history and when failing to deliver they happily transferred me to airline C. Nobody saw my complete chain of events, from A-Z.

This is a lesson I need to pickup; whenever you fail to deliver a service to a customer, try to place it in the chain of events the customer already experienced. It will not make the delivery better, but you will understand the feelings of the customer better.

Now regarding DrupalCon. Here is a small update. I really REALLY liked the conference. I talked to lots of people, attended more sessions then I planned, got active in a couple of BoF's and co-presented one with Larry and Dries. So here is a small update on stuff I found.

It is great to see that the -on the spot during DrupalCon Barcelona- made up number of 7% female is broken!

With 10% of XX chromosomes during the Con we do represent the number of females on Drupal.org versus the number of males. Sure, it should have been 50%, but as the great Rop Gonggrijp once said, if you are female and want to become a computer geek, you better start electrocuting your Barby when you were 5 years old. And not many girls do so hence the ICT sector could use some more females. With webchick being the co-maintainer of D7, the Open Source community also shows there is no glass ceiling for females.

But hold on, we might have hit 10% XX chromosomes, but can you see what is wrong with this picture?

10% female, but 99,9% white! I am not the pro-positive discriminating kind of person. But I think I saw 1 (one!) black person during the complete conference. If you want to break barriers, we really should look at this as well. 90% of all people active in Drupal are white males, 10% white females. So, lets make sure that the next DrupalCon will be more representative for the population using Drupal! After all, Open Source is there as the big equaliser; there are no secrets (only information that you dont have).

Some other thoughts on the DrupalCon. I really like the talk of Mark Boulton who will be doing the redesign of "d.org", see the video on the Association site. A right balance of humour and content can be very powerful. I loved the story Mark and Leisa Reichelt
pulled together. Leisa is however (see the video) very wrong on one part. And it is a classic mistake to make showing there is still a big gap between designers of code and UI.

Leisa claims that she was amazed to see that most experienced Drupal users typed the URL on drupal.org instead of navigating through the site with a mouse. Now, I am not claiming that the UI of Drupal.org is good, not at all. Mark and Leisa have lots of work to do to make it better navigable and we -as the community- a lot to keep it clean by having some kind of styleguide on how to address the user and a better policy on how and when to promote a story to the frontpage (if there is going to be a frontpage in the classical sense after the redesign).

However, graphical designers only look on how to navigate through a site within the site, this since they are CMS agnostic. What they do not count as usability is the browser chrome, you do not control it as a website and you do not need to emulate the browsers functions. However there is one small part of the browsers chrome that is related to usability; the address bar! It is used by the person on the site just as much as the mouse is, it infleunces the page and hence is part of usability. The fact that graphical designers -and this is not to bash Leisa in any way- do not think of it as usability only shows there is still a huge gap to be bridged between code and design monkeys. The address bar is part of usability and the fact that the functionality of a site is reflected in useful predictable URL's like /node/add shows this. We all have to learn here to help the user navigate what is best for him or her and we should be aware that most some people type faster then they can click: bofhmode]" The world's only useful point and click interface is a .44 Magnum" [/bofhmode].

BTW: someone wants a dollar? Free shiping!

Today I had some time to arrange a ticket and an hotel for the DrupalCon Szegged 2008, pftttt! Just in time. Then I had some time to nerd around so I created a Y! pipe for All Things DrupalConSzeged2008 related (assuming that that would be the tag?). Feel free to run, edit, copy, change my pipe over at pipes, Yahoo! ID !required! You can see geolocated Flickr images, tweets, delicious links and much more in many formats (for example an RSS feed. feedback in the comments please, I'll update the pipe to reflect your thoughts.

And yes, that is the reason I do not program, even the pipe! looks bad and is not that smart build