• BarCamp Vancouver report on NewsForge
  Sigh. Alex and Jonah make it into NewsForge before I ever do.
  (tags: socialsignal, alexandra_samuel, barcampvancouver)

Want to take the latest, greatest edition of Drupal out for a spin – and run it from the comfort and safety of your very own Mac? Only a few short years ago, that was strictly the domain of the geekier Mac users… but today, it’s a lot easier.

That’s thanks to programs like MAMP, which stands for Macintosh, Apache, MySQL and PHP. MAMP lets you install and launch these powerful tools without ever having to stare a command line in the face. And once you have them up and running (which you will in just a few clicks), you can install all sorts of server-side software on your Mac and access it through your web browser – programs like WordPress, activeCollab and, yes, Drupal.

Why do that? Partly so you can futz around with them even if you aren’t connected to the web, and with the kind of access no web host in their right minds would give you. Partly so you can configure, test and debug web sites on your computer without worrying that the world is watching. But mainly because, come on, this is kind of cool.

So let’s not waste any more time gabbing. We’re going to install Drupal (by the way, you can adapt these instructions for a lot of other server software): not boring old version 4.7, but the exciting new testing version with the very latest features. One of those features is an automatic installer, which is how we’re able to hold this down to five easy steps.

(If you do want to install version 4.7, then instead of step 5, you’d manually edit the settings.php file in Drupal’s sites/install folder, and then run a few MySQL files through PHPMyAdmin. It’s all explained in painful detail in the install.txt file that comes with Drupal.)

1. Get ready:
   • Download and install MAMP. (Go to http://www.mamp.info/en/home/ to find it.)
   • Then download the latest version of Drupal. (Go to http://drupal.org/project/Drupal+project and pull down “CVS” from the “Filter by version” menu. This will give you the version that includes an installer.)
   • Unzip it, and move the files into MAMP’s “htdocs” folder.
2. Launch MAMP and your favourite browser. If the buttons next to “Apache Server” and “MySQL Server” in MAMP aren’t green, click the “Start Servers” button. If that doesn’t turn the servers on, you’ll need to troubleshoot MAMP before you go any further.
3. Create an empty MySQL database for Drupal to use.
   • Point your browser to http://localhost:8888/phpMyAdmin/ and click on the “Databases” tab.
   • Under “Create a new database”, fill in the information for your database. Give it a name (say, “droopy”) and, in the pulldown menu that says “Collation”, choose “utf8_unicode_ci”. Click “Create.”
4. Create a database user account for Drupal.
   • In the left-hand sidebar, click on the home icon. (It looks like a little house.)
   • In the main pane, you’ll see two columns. In the left-hand column, click “Privileges”.
   • Under the table listing all sorts of users, click “Add a new User”.
   • Give the user a name (no spaces – make it a simple name). For “Host”, choose “Use text field” and enter “localhost”. Key in a password, and re-type it.
   • Under “Global privileges”, make sure none of the items are checked. Click the “Go” button in the lower right-hand corner.
   • The next screen allows you to edit the user. Scroll down to “Database-specific privileges” and, using the pull-down menu, select your Drupal database – in our case, droopy.
   • A series of checkboxes appear, just like the “Global privileges” screen a little while ago. This time, click “Check All” and click the “Go” button at the bottom right of the “Database-specific privileges” section.
5. Tell Drupal what database settings to use.
   • Point your browser to http://localhost:8888.
   • Fill in the information that Drupal asks for: MySQL as the database type, the name of the database (“droopy”, in this case), your user name and your password. Click the “Save” button.

If all went well, you’ll be looking at a screen that congratulates you on installing Drupal, and invites you to click on a link to visit your site. Add content, install modules, start theming – you can do it all. There are a few other things you might like to do (for instance, setting up a regular call to cron.php in crontab, and there you will have to open up Terminal); have a look at Drupal’s install.txt file for a explanation.

(Special thanks to Evan Leeson and Aaron McNeal for their advice on the MySQL/phpMyAdmin instructions. Very kind and generous, guys!)

• How Not To Promote Your Movie To Me
  A clumsy, half-assed marketer pitches a smart one… and off the top of his head, Darren Barefoot offers five ideas good enough that the studio ought to ditch their marketing firm and hire his, sight unseen.
  (tags: Marketing blogger_relations movie pr public_relations)

Joy Boyson has just officially let me know about Case Camp Vancouver:

CaseCamp is a marketing unconference open to anyone. Presenters share case studies of their work, with the goal of creating a commons for discussion, learning and networking.

CaseCamp sounds terrific: a high-speed series of 10-minute stories about how technology and marketing intersect (or, I guess, collide). It all happens Tuesday, September 26th at 6:30 PM at Republic, 958 Granville Street.

According to Bloglines, my online newsfeed aggregator, the 34 bloggers in my list of Canadian blogs have written a prodigious 631 blog posts in the past 8 hours or so. My list of BC bloggers is roughly as long; they’ve managed to rack up more than a thousand in the same period of time. And all the other bloggers that I read – a few hundred – have apparently written well over 10,000 blog posts.

Now, one of two things has happened. Either everyone else in the world has suddenly been blessed simultaneously by both a lot of free time and a hyperactive muse, or Bloglines is on the fritz.

And since a closer look at those posts finds that most are actually weeks if not months old, I’m guessing it’s the latter.

Here’s the thing: one of the beauties of a newsreader is its ability to remember the last post you read in each news feed, and only serve you up the new stuff. Lose track of what’s new and what’s old, and you also lose one of its most compelling features.

I’m sure the situation is only temporary, and they’ll have it fixed in a day or two. But this shakes my faith in a service that’s pretty core to the way I use the web.

• The Stephen Colbert “On Notice Board” Generator
  Pick eight people or things and put ‘em on notice
  (tags: funny generator graphics images tv stephencolbert)

I just posted at the Social Signal blog:

I had a great conversation on Saturday night with Kate Trgovac on Sean Holman's Public Eye Radio. The topic was Petro-Canada's foray into the video-sharing world of YouTube, a project Kate got rolling for them before moving on to her new gig. (The videos purport to explain why gasoline prices are so high.)

A good time was had by all… and something Kate said struck me. She likes the initiative, but finds the Petro-Canada videos themselves to be too corporate.

She's right – and on many levels.

Read the rest here.

When we replaced our ailing Airport Base Station with a Linksys WRT54GS, we had high hopes for trouble-free connectivity.

But alas, our G4 desktop, both of our iBooks, a MacBook and a PowerBook all had trouble getting the router’s DHCP server to give them IP addresses. It’s a problem I’ve had before, including in several Internet cafes with Linksys routers. I tried a lot: restarting the routers, fiddling with settings, trashing iBook preferences, swapping cables… nothing was working.

I was starting to reassemble the packaging for the Linksys and digging for the receipt when I decided to post my problems to the Mac OS X Hints forum. Within minutes – minutes I had the first reply. Soon, two Hall of Famers (whose usernames are TLarkin and Voldenuit) had me in hand.

Out of this came three valuable things:

• A troubleshooting strategy for WiFi connections;
• A suggestion that I try a dandy open-source replacement firmware called dd-wrt, which has crossed my radar before but definitely looks worth trying; and
• Quite by accident, the solution.

I was bracing myself for the full monty troubleshooting session when I decided to take one more shot at resolving things from the router’s control panel. And wouldn’t you know it…

The firewall was set to filter Port 113 (IDENT) — I don’t remember changing that setting, and wouldn’t have had any reason to, so I’m guessing that’s the default. Once I unchecked that option, all of our Macs — wired and wireless — began connecting and receiving IP addresses quite happily.

So there you go: stop filtering port 113 traffic, and your troubles might be over. (Of course, if someone has a cunning port 113 exploit, your troubles might just be beginning.) Otherwise, get ready for a long night of thorough troubleshooting.