Mike Ryan

80 degrees in February. What else is there to say?

Dad and I drove up to Sedona yesterday, then on up Oak Creek Canyon.

A "rock" near Bell Rock

The lime tree on Dad's patio in warm sunny Arizona:

I'm pleased to announce that I am joining Moshe Weitzman in Cyrve. Our specialty is content migration and transformation - the grunge work of fitting old information into new holes.

Past projects of mine
 

XML -> Mobile-compliant XHTML

I produced a mobile-compatible website for delivering 2008 U.S. Presidential election results to hand-held devices. This involved modifying the Drupal FeedAPI module (at that time still in beta) to read custom fields in addition to standard RSS fields (patch submitted).

As a follow-up project, in two days I created a system to take XML feeds of raw election data and produce mobile-compatible XHTML pages to present the results, for live updates on Super Tuesday. This system included a templating system so the client could easily style it to their own needs (they reported it took half an hour with my delivered system to complete the theming and customization), and has remained in operation through subsequent primary elections.

Did a good day's work, between the soon-to-be-updated Christ Church Unity site and token module debugging. That'll be the last significant Drupal work until after Drupalcon, however, as I'll be heading off to sunny Arizona on Wednesday...

It's about time for a non-Drupal post... Last night Sarah and I went to the Regattabar with our friends Kel & Pat, to see Mango Blue. We enjoyed the band very much - a great, energetic blend of Latin styles. Everyone in band - drums, timbales, congas, percussion, keyboard, two saxes, and bassist and lead singer Alex Alvear - did a great job (as did Alex's son, a Berklee student, sitting in on bass for one tune).

Excellent meetup last night. The stuff I actually thought to jot down:

My Lightning Talk was on my collaborative knowledge base project at the day job. The Node Auto Term (NAT) module was pointed out as an potential substitute for the book module.

Not much progress on this site tonight - just tweaked the Garland color scheme, and got rid of the secondary links title in the footer. Yesterday's patch to the token module needs a little more work - I'm going to the Boston Drupal Meetup tomorrow night, so that will have to wait for Thursday.

Yes, every single page so far is Drupal-related. The monomania will continue at least through Drupalcon...

Another step on the return to active web development... Setting up my books on this site, with the pathauto module enabled, I found that the book title was not being substituted in the URL as it should.

At long last, I'm joining the ranks of the Internet navel-gazers. I'm Mike Ryan, and this site will be my personal information store and bully pulpit rolled into one. Anything that interests me at a given moment might appear here - a review of the last movie I saw, ideas for websites to develop, musical musings or political pondering.