Hagen Graf's blog

building coverflow slideshows with flickr

Submitted by Hagen Graf on Tue, 2008-09-02 08:57.

I am always looking for tools to create slideshows. Yesterday I have found a "nice" possibility. If your pictures are at flickr, you can create a coverflow slideshow. It is possible to embed the slideshow via iframe in a website. Here in my blog I have not enough space Sad, therefore I made only a little screenshot to make you curious.

coverflow

Watch coverflow from the Drupalcon Szeged 2008 :

http://coverflow.tinou.com.s3.amazonaws.com...

create one:

http://www.tinou.com/coverflow.jsp

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Drupalcon Szeged

Submitted by Hagen Graf on Wed, 2008-08-27 08:47.

Drupalcon Szeged
What a nice Druplicon Smiling
Drupalcon Szeged
Where do the people come from?
Drupalcon Szeged
by gender ...
10 % is not bad for a computer conference Smiling
Drupalcon Szeged

http://szeged2008.drupalcon.org/

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First chapters of my new Drupal 6 book are on line

Submitted by Hagen Graf on Sun, 2008-07-27 18:58.

After many other projects I found the time to write a Drupal 6 book and record a new Drupal 6 video training.

Of course, it is in German language because of my origin. The book will be available on line for free at http://drupal.cocoate.com. It consists of three parts. Today I have published part 1 (the introduction and chapter 1-3). Part 2 will be published at August, 4th and part 3 at August, 11th.

The German Drupal video training is released and is seems, that it will be translated or better "new recorded" in French language.

For the book, the German publisher negotiates with an American publisher for a translation and they asked me to translate the table of content and the chapter 11, which is about CCK. My daughter Isabell did the tranlation of the texts and I did new screenshots. So a small part of the book is now earlier available for free in English than in German language Smiling.

See you in Szeged

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I'm going to Drupalcon Szeged, who else?

Submitted by Hagen Graf on Sat, 2008-07-12 10:21.

I would like to make an advertisement for the Drupal conference in Szeged, Hungaria,  from 27th - 30th august 2008.

I advertise, because I will be there too and I like Drupal Smiling

Great software, nice people, beautiful location, interesting country ... and the food ... wow Smiling

So - register immediately 

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What does it mean to be an Open Source author?

Submitted by Hagen Graf on Tue, 2008-06-24 04:58.

I hear daily about open source projects, the open source business model, what it means in terms of freedom, choice, risks, investment, etc... What I rarely hear about is what is life like for those who actually contribute and dedicate a part of their life to open source?

Read more: What does it mean to be an Open Source author?

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Joomla! 1.5 book review on zend.com

Submitted by Hagen Graf on Sat, 2008-06-07 07:54.

Another review of my Joomla! 1.5 book from zend.com with this conclusion

 

Conclusion
The book is very complete. It is a real beginning to end piece that has great instructional value. I can see it easily implemented in workshops etc. Up to chapter 13 not much knowledge is needed. Chapter 13 to 15 require some experience with php/html to be completely understandable. The only thing I really miss is a chapter about security. A lot of sites get hacked because of the behaviour of beginning developers. Some simple guidelines would have made a great addition especially for the beginning administrator. Hagen Graf was able to transfer his knowledge of the subject, combined with his teaching knowledge, in a way that organises the book into a complete tutoring and reference document. He is not just listing features and their use but also explains very clearly how Joomla! happened, what technology was used and how everything evolved. He is clearly very passionate about Joomla! which shows already in the preface starting of with "Joomla! is life!". But anyone that ever worked with Joomla! will easily forgive him and might be equally enthusiastic or become it after reading this book.

 

Read the full review -> Building Websites with Joomla! 1.5

 

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cross cooking & learning

Submitted by Hagen Graf on Mon, 2008-06-02 10:18.

With our company eduate.eu we are partner in several european projects. The focus of these projects are learning from each other, share experiences, do things together, developing special skills etc. - all in a European view.

The project I want to talk about is a G2 Learning Partnership Project and it is funded by the European Commission in the framework of Socrates. Funded by the European Commission means not that you can spend thousands of Euros in nice bars in Brussels. Funded means, that you get the flight costs (up to a limit) and a bit money for paper and printer ink in the office and so on.

Eduate.eu (Christine Graf) is the project coordinator of the Cross Cooking project.

Project description:
The project aims to rediscover and preserve traditions in cooking across Europe, whilst enhancing the possibilities of learning and cross-generational and cultural cohesion - read more.

So in these kind of projects there is no real money (in the sence of getting rich) involved and most of the people do not have IT skills. All of these projects needs a website and a communication system (even Phone, Skype, E-Mail, whatever). For most of the smaller projects it is nearly impossible to do something more than five HTML pages with the outcomes of the project. For this project we wanted to make few things different. We choosed Drupal and tried to develop the website in a way that the project participants can follow the development and still be able to use the website. That means no special design, no individual module development, etc because that would be too expensive. Another decision was to open all the content and the discussions, because we spend European tax money and the website visitors should see everything. If there were technical needs during the project, we installed a contributed module and tried to find a clever solution. The project started with Drupal 4.6 and now we have Drupal 5.7

And now?

After one and a half year and several meetings (real & virtual) the group has written a European cookbook in many languages on-line! This cookbook is a collaborative work made with the Drupal book module by people who never touched a computer before.

cookbook

Because they want to share all the recipes from Wales, Germany, Italy, Finland & Hungary  they decided that the cookbook is downloadable for free (download here). It is also possible to buy it but the most important thing is to try out cooking Smiling

cookbook

From my perspective this was a wonderful project and the group has reached much more for the development in Europe than they expected at the beginning!

And I am very happy about the fact, that Drupal is one big Lego Brick in this project.

At the moment the group has applied for another project with the name "doing2learn".

I am very curious!

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Video codecs, aspect ratios and other buzzwords

Submitted by Hagen Graf on Sun, 2008-05-25 19:39.

As I promised long time ago I will talk more about our european projects.

In one project, we have a few videos and today a had ... not a real problem ... but something like a chain reaction Smiling But finally the video from the turkish tv station made it on the website!

Video codecs, aspect ratios and other buzzwords

Btw:

Have you seen Sara & Christine in Ankara?

Icecream

Where was the shop?

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