Willy Dobbe - This Blog should have been an instrumental, but the words got in the way. [Blog of Bert Boerland]

1M Drupal installs and counting! (11110100001001000000 initiative)

Sun, 16 Jun 2013 09:23:17 +0000

Within 1 year (Q1/Q2 2014?) we will have 1 million registered Drupal installs. We all know the total is higher due to mostly Drupal SaaServices that don't have the pingback enabled and we should always explain that.

However, 1.000.000 is still a freaking big number (11110100001001000000 in base 2 even bigger :-) and we should use this for marketing our product. Apart from the usual suspects there are not that many web based solutions that come even close to one tenth. Big proprietary CMS vendors do very well if they sell 10.000 per year.

All the reason to celebrate, for example by making

an easy to embed history infographic,
an interactive timeline like trends or zeitgeist, plotting the number of installs against events in time and or place from the community
press releases (they never seem to work though :-( )
give the one millionth Drupal user something, for example a Drupal 1.0 install on a 5 ¼" floppy disk signed by Dries

For sourcing, we can use the influence, people and money of the DA (if they would be in on this), ask companies to work on this pro bono, preferably together and have a fund raiser; "One tenth for one"; 1/10 of a monetary unit of your country per Drupal install you maintain. A dime per install per American, 10 eurocents per Drupal for EU’s, 1/10th of a Rand in South Africa etc. This shows that we are truly global and if people do not donate 10 cents but 10 dollars per install for example (we should hint to that, especially to the cheap Dutch :-) we could raise a bit as well, more than 1/10th of a million if played well.

What are your thoughts, how should we proceed? Please follow up on BAM on g.d.o.

DopHertje

Sat, 15 Jun 2013 21:07:18 +0000

Hertje in de tuin bij

Cool idea? And yes, in the dark you will still have your flat iOS design :-)

An infographic of Bert Boerland's FourSquare checkins

Thu, 13 Jun 2013 18:36:05 +0000

Watch Plex on an unjailbroken Apple TV (3) with PlexConnect

Thu, 06 Jun 2013 17:14:55 +0000

I am a big fan of Apple gear, use it a lot. And hence I am a big fan of Plex, the best way to use media from a single source on many devices. Abroad on a wifi network, I can stream the TV shows form home to my iPhone for example. Great stuff.

I also own an Apple TV3. And to be honest, it was gaining dust. Yes it runs iOS, but you can not jailbreak a TV3. And default teh Apple TV 3 is rather limit in use.

This is the reason that an Apple TV2 (can be jailbroken) is about 1.5-2 times as expensive on the second hand market. The device can do less, has lower specs, worse connections, but can be jailbroken and hence can be used to install a Plex client.

Enter PlexConnect! A set of Phyton scripts to be run on your Plex server. The servcie to be run as root, opens UDP/TCP 53 to start a DNS daemon. And all this proces does is look for request towards trailers.apple.com and rediect this towards the localhost of the plex server and serve the Javascript and XML files that render a working Plex client on the Apple TV. All you have to do on the AppleTV3 is alter your settings so the DNS the device is using is in fact your Apple TV!

The you start your unsued trailer app (ever used it? really?) and you have nearly full (channels arent working) Plex functionality.

Great stuff!

Using the Kinect as a security gesture 3D game device

Fri, 31 May 2013 19:23:54 +0000

An oldie, from DevCon20, Kinectasploit v2

Using a gesture based kinect interface to start two dozen security tools.

Source code at github:

"Complex, I know but that was the point ;-] to include many, many tools in a graphical, gesture-driven environment and have them
useful enough to hack into a system and retrieve a file from the windows VM's RECYCLE bin folders."

Presentation of ProjectPAAS held at DrupalJam 2013

Sat, 18 May 2013 18:42:47 +0000

Projectpaas drupaljam 2013 rotterdam from bert boerland

The presentation of held at the DrupalJam.

A service that give a detailed opinionated report on how to improve the service of your Drupal website.

There is no box, do not try to think out of it :-)

Tue, 07 May 2013 17:06:39 +0000

There is no box. Do not try to think out of it...

Bert Boerland Bold

Wed, 01 May 2013 13:34:04 +0000

Just uploading ONE single image to a webservce and ending up with a 3D model of the person. No hair though..

SFO is a giant squid

Wed, 01 May 2013 09:55:00 +0000

Every now and then you hear some news about or see some pictures of "Giant Squids".

What about the San Fransico Airport?

Grotere kaart weergeven

Hiep hiep hoera, anti joods en de latijnse val

Thu, 25 Apr 2013 12:08:00 +0000

Mooi dat internet. "Gaat heel groot worden" zei ik als grap 10 jaar geleden... Grap is al heel lang niet meer leuk. Difficilis facilis, iucundus acerbus es idem: Nec tecum possum vivere, nec sine te.

Wel leuk, elke debiel kan "er iets opzetten", Ecce signum

Dus de ene debiel mompelt wat over dat "Hiep Hiep Hoera" roepen anti semitisch is op zijn jaren 80 blog (Ad vocem):

Velen zijn onbekend met de duistere en antisemitische achtergrond van de kreet HIEP! HIEP! HOERA!

Het woord "hiep" komt vanuit het Latijn. Het was oorspronkelijk HEP! HEP!
H E P is een acroniem:

H = Hierosolyma [Jeruzalem / Jeroeshalajim]
E = Est [is]
P = Perdita [verloren, vernietigd, ten gronde gericht, vergeten]

En de andere crowdbedielen roepen op crowdpedia:

One theory is that it is an acronym from the Latin "Hierosolyma est perdita" ("Jerusalem is lost"), said (without verifiable evidence) to have been a rallying cry of the Crusaders. [...] There is no contemporary evidence for the "acronym theory".

Deze debiel met zijn jaren 70 blog? Die zegt Quidquid latine dictum, altum videtur.

Aart is the Dark Knight (aka Batman)

Sat, 30 Mar 2013 18:35:54 +0000

Aart is Batman.

ProjectPAAS

Fri, 29 Mar 2013 19:53:41 +0000

A couple of weeks ago we launched the website of a service we have been working on hard for over half a year. The project started as a SAAS about performance and hence the internal project name was “ProjectPAAS”. As it goes with internal project names, it became the name of the service it self.

12 seconds start now

I still have problems explaining what the service is doing in an elevator pitch. But basicaly one installs a module on a to be tested staging site from d.o with the funky URL /project/paas, configures the service on the portal of projectpaas.com and then wait an hour or two. We start a service to measure your site from the outside and from the inside, analyse the data, make a report and when you check your mail you get an in depth report on all the elements of the chain that are relevant to the performance of the website.

We measure from one or more selectable (EC2) locations in the world with over 150 metrics and we only report on real data, no yslow wisdom. We know what influence speed, we see how it is configured at your site (with the module or from the outisde) and we simulate to find the the optimal value would be for your use case.

The cliché for example that one needs parallel download (images[1-4].example.com) to bypass the maximumum connection a browser can have to a host, is just that, a cliché. When one takes DNS lookup,TCP slow start and the sliding window in to account, for certain usecase, having images[x].example.com might actually be slower. So we are opinionated, we measure, we analyse, we report, you gain speed.

Easteregg

I really like retro future so we used this for a theme around the site and facebook. But since easter (Dutch "pasen" is coming up,
do check the projectpaas.com website, find the easteregg and twitter about it. :-)

This posting isn't as much about the service of ProjectPAAS as it is about why we made the service. To share our experience and to get feedback from you. There are two reasons we made it, one is internally driven and one is externally.

The internal reason is that we have been building some of the most visited sites and webapps in Drupal in the Netherlands. So after some time we got good at performance, we understood what to do and what not to do for the complete stack of elements that define speed, HTML, CSS, Linux, Apache, MySQL and yes, Drupal. Word got out that we were good and siteowners that have been building their site at another company, came to us for advice on how to get more speed in their site.
Once we had done a dozen of these reports, we wanted to make the reports more easily accessible for the site owners and website builders. This is part of why westarted the Performance Reporting

Land here

The external reason might be more interesting for you. We made the SAAS because we think that the CMS landscape will change and our business will change.

The landscape will change. 10 years ago everybody had his/her own CMS, there were more CMS-es then websites it seemed. 5 yeas ago it was clear who were going to be the winners in the consolidation, 80% of the proprietary "solutions" were gone and open source was no longer a dirty word in enterprises. Within the open CMS-es, the global top 5 was visible though especially in Europe there were still many local open source CMS-es. This consolidation perse was good open source and especially for Drupal shops.

However, the market won't stop here. Most of the Drupal websites are not complex, they don't have any connections to backend systems, less than 10k pageviews per day and are relatively expensive to build and most of all expensive to maintain. Here is the business case for open source SAAS, solutions based on open source software like Aqcuia and Wordpress.com offer. These solutions with standard modules and a customisable template is good enough right now for 20% of the Drupal sites out there and will cost a fraction of what building it "by hand" will cost.

The users of these open source SAAS hosting solutions will only grow. Good for the parties offering these services, bad for the Drupal shops that have been building relatively simple portfolio sites. By itself, this trend might have a big impact those coding Drupal core, modules or working in for example the security team. This is not meant in a bad way, but with most of the sites going towards a smaler group of SAAS companies, the number of "independent" individuals adding to core or writing modules might actually get lower, they might have another itch. It will be very interesting to see how this will develop, I might be completely wrong here.

Performance takes time

Traditionally most Drupal shops do projects, do maintenance and do consulting. Some have found a nice niche, a place geographically apart, a specific vertical or a certain service like migration from another CMS. However, most Drupal shops build relatively simple websites for SOHO plus. I know there are many shops that work for high end enterprises. But not all the 280.000 Drupal sites fit in the Alexa top 100.000. So I do think that if you are a Drupal shop, you have to find your sweet spot the next couple of month. On the one hand we have operational excellence (a SAAS to host sites like gardens or a service like ProjectPAAS itself) and on the other hand customer intimacy (the complex sites with lots of integration with backend systems and complex workflow). There might be space between these two, but the portfolio site area will get very crowded and Drupal will not be the best tool to serve this in my opinion. This is part of the reason why we build our first SAAS around a product we understand and is close to our core business. We are already planning next services that might still be build in Drupal but will target a broader audience.

For the moment, if you are intersted in our product, dont be shy and talk to us on twitter or faces us. Potential resellers or users are welcome to fill out our form. We really do hope that our product can help you build faster websites and thereby push Drupal even more ahead of the curve.

get your ticket to the Frontendunited Event in London now

Fri, 29 Mar 2013 19:05:28 +0000

A small plug, if you want to attend the Drupal event about design, frontend development and usability, be sure to take a look at frontendunited.org, London, April 13-14. I do think there are some of the best speakers lined up both from within our community and related communities, for example Christian Heilmann. The venue must be the coolest one ever to house so many Drupalistas. So think about ordering a ticket (free hugs from mortendk when you select community sponsorship) or become a sponsor and get some free tickets.

Order now and win a pony.

Frontend United, From Amsterdam to London

Sun, 03 Mar 2013 15:46:14 +0000

Last year, I was one of the coorganizers of Frontend United In Amsterdam, The Netherlands. I have organized dozen of events, DrupalCons, DrupalJams, DrupalCamps totaling a dozen of events. The best and most funny to organize of them all however was the Frontend United conference with good friends Jesper, Marek, Morten, Philippe and angel Isabelle. The weekly conference calls quickly became a selfhelp group and the best comedy channel available.

The fun we had organizing the event, clearly payed off and turned the event in to the best event I ever attended. Mostly because Fronten United is different. We have some rules to live by and these rules help us organize it and give the best value possible to the attendees. In fact, we try to be for Drupal what TED is for technology! Our rules are simple

Outside in, not inside out
Attendees first, not the sponsors (or mobile :-)
Grow horizontally, not vertically
Maximum value for attendees
Nerds rule

These are simple rules, resulting in a great conference. Outside in means we will look at technology, design. The unimportant stuff and then but only then Drupal. We look at speakers who are architects, painters, people whose actions or ideas are completely irrelevant for Drupals community in the narrow sense but if mapped on our community, code or license of great influence. We value attendees above sponsors. We do *heart* our sponsors, they are the best. But in the end the sponsors and the organizers work for the attendees, not the other way around. We will never do a sponsored talk, an opening by a sponsor or a case-study, mixing content and sponsors is the best way to kill a brand in our opinion. We believe in growth, but not that a number like “attendees” has anything to do with growth. We aim at 250 people max per conference and grow in quality from there. We will never have 2.000 attendees but will have the best sessions available. As for the nerds part, the group photo was taken at 13:37 time.

We succeed in all of these rules last year. All but one. Despite the fact that one sponsor went belly up and did not pay our fiscal agency, the Drupal Association (thanks!), we still made money. And thereby did not give the maximum value for our attendees.

Or did we? If you look at this blog by friend Baris Frontend-United was awesome or at the blog of the king it looks we succeeed in givin the attendees the best con ever! It was great to hear jan Willem Tulp talk about data visualization and the story of how Jeroen Wijering sold his a license for his video player to YouTube for $25 is still great to hear. No matter what your question was (“$25 per server? Client? Month?”) his answer would be $25.

Here are some snapshots of the money we made with sales and the hat-round, the venue “Pakhuis de Zwijger”, the banner with the sponsors, the excellent t-shirt with the infamous astronaut and the drinking venue with the Druplicon as a logo.

So far for 2012. On with 2013. With the help of a great all-female team in the UK, we are pulling the best Drupal conference of once again, backed by the Drupal Association (thanks), in London, 13 and 14 of April, in Cargo. Ticket sales will start shortly, great keynote speakers are already lined up but we need you as a speaker and as a sponsor! So please earmark the date in your agenda, think about an inspiring talk Frontend related and download the attached sponsor brochure. And mail we if you are interested in sponsoring, bert AT boerland DOT com.

Now lets rock London!