Arrived in Boston this afternoon. Easy flight. A quick trip down to Faneuil Hall for some chowda and then back to the hotel to meetup with a few Boston Drupalers.

Thanks to Chris, Lee, and Ajay — good people — I got to talk Drupal and be social over a nice dinner.

Tomorrow: I present to the New York Press Association, “Why you should use an open source content management system.” I wrote the talk on the plane ride here. I think it’s going to work.

I’m heading back to Boston tomorrow. (I say back because I grew up just north of the city.)

I’ll be speaking to the New York Press Association. Twice. One is on our use of Drupal in Bluffton and Savannah, and what we learned along the way.

The other is more interesting. I’ll be making a philosophical argument that newspapers (and other news orgs) should use open-source publishing tools whenever possible. The talk is meant to be provocative, and I’m still wrangling the details. I’ll post more after it’s over.

For those of you in the Boston area, we’re planning a small meetup on Friday. I’m also free on Saturday evening. Ping me.

Well, I’m back from Barcelona — at least for the day. Here’s one small camera phone pic that captures part of the trip: Correfoc. If you don’t know what that is, Google it, or look it up on Wikipedia.

Oh, and DrupalCON was excellent. But you already knew that, right?

As part of the presentations I will be doing in Barcelona, I have uploaded documentation of 5 unreleased modules.

You can go to my API site to see the modules. Attached here is also a sql file for use with the census.module.

censussql.txt is a MySQL dump file.

The schedule for DrupalCON Barcelona just came out. And, if you’re like me, and you like me, then you’ll be pleased to know that I’m doing no fewer than 7 sessions (plus a BoF).

1. * Affiliated Sites: A Cross Domain Approach covers using wildcard DNS, node_access, and Drupal trickery to create an affiliate model web network with shared content but restricted privileges.
2. * ‘Enterprise’ Drupal addresses some of the issues that come up when you try to integrate Drupal into an existing IT structure. It is not, however, an argument or a debate about whether Drupal is enterprise-ready. (Hint: it is.)
3. * Using Drupal With External Data Sources was actually the first session proposed. It’s a handy trip through Drupal’s built-in methods for using data stored in other systems. Very useful for enterprise installations.
4. Drupal SoC Showcase is just moral support (I think) for Aron Novak and the FeedAPI project that I mentored.
5. Drupal and the Future of News is a panel discussion featuring Steve Yelvington and NowPublic’s Michael Meyers. We’ll be talking about how Drupal changes the economy of news production and distribution, as well as other fun stuff.
6. Aggregation and Drupal is a panel discussion about, well, aggregation. The MySite module uses aggregation in a different way and helped lead to the FeedAPI spec.
7. Workgroup: Unified Content Abstraction is a chance for module developers to get together and think about APIs for common tasks related to displaying content outside its original context. Think MySite, Panels, or Drupal-powered widgets that can be generated using a single standard such as mysite_display().

* Indicates a solo performance.

And just for bonus points, all three solo presentations are on Wednesday! [Good thing I used to teach, and can do multiple sessions in a single day.]

Thanks to the organizers for putting all this together. I’m very excited about DrupalCON. And I’ll be posting some sample code before I leave town.

And if you’re going, and travelling with someone (like my wife) who is not attending DrupalCON, drop a note in the forums and meet up with us on Tuesday night. We want the non-Drupalers to have a good time in Barcelona together while we’re being geeky.

Note: I live in Augusta, GA (US), the home of James Brown.