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A simple tool for offline mapping and custom data overlays

We just released Maps on a Stick, a simple client-side mapping tool that lets you access map tilesets and mash them up with information while you're offline. Maps on a Stick runs on either a USB drive or directly from a hard drive and allows you to browse custom baselayer maps and add KML overlays to them without connecting to the internet.

Here's a look at Maps on a Stick. The data overlay is from a U.S. Geological Survey KML file showing recent earth quake data, and the baselayer map is the World Light tile from MapBox.

You can zoom in on the maps, just like you can with any slippy map.

Some examples of what you can do with the latest Drush

Over the last few years Drush has matured significantly and has seen an incredible uptake in usage. It's become indispensable in the day to day workflow of innumerable Drupal users and has been accepted with open arms by contributed module developers who are finding new and wonderful functionality to expose via its clear command line interface.

What not many people realize is that beneath this simple command line API beats the heart of a far more flexible and powerful beast. Drush was written with re-use and scriptability in mind, with this entire concept deeply ingrained in its design, and this is a large part of what gives it its power and flexibility. This will be even more apparent in Drush 3.0.

Below is a rundown of some useful things you'll be able to do with Drush 3.0.

Remote procedure calling

Each Drush command can be called from within any other Drush command, spawning a new process and returning structured and meaningful information to the calling script. A more accurate terminology would be that Drush commands all operate on a somewhat RESTful API , which is similar to XMLRPC and other RPC mechanisms that you may already be familiar with. Because of how this feature is implemented in Drush it can not only call Drush commands locally, but it can also call Drush commands on a remote server via SSH.

Up until now this functionality has been hidden within the API and only systems such as Aegir really made use of it. For example, in the Aegir hosting system we re-use the drush updatedb command when we do site migration and to run updates, and we have a single drush provision-backup command we can simply call when we need to make a backup.

What about security on remote calls?

Remote Drush calls run over SSH and require you to have your key already added to the remote server's list of authorized keys. Therefore Drush isn't capable of doing anything that you don't have the necessary permissions to log in manually and do on the server itself. It just does what it does best - automate away some of the steps so you get your results quicker.

DAI using Open Atrium to help their GIS teams in Pakistan communicate

Development Alternatives Inc. (DAI), one of the leading international development contractors, has deployed Open Atrium to help its GIS team in Islamabad communicate with its office in Peshawar and headquarters back in Bethesda on a capacity building project. In addition to improving team communications, they decided to use Open Atrium to boost the project's transparency for USAID and to get a sustainability win by using open source software that can stay behind with the local team in Pakistan long after the mapping project is completed.

Below is a short Q&A I had with Andrew Ross from DAI's GIS office about his work and how Open Atrium is helping.

Q: Can you tell us about your project and your team in Pakistan?

A: We are working on a capacity building project to assist organizations in Peshawar and develop capacity in many areas. Specifically our project currently has four GIS staff based in Peshawar, and we also have an office in Islamabad. We produce GIS products for a number of clients and share development statistics with other organizations. We are also developing systems to help share this data. Workflows are difficult to establish as our staff are frequently move between offices.

Lightning talks on the Boxes module and a new Drupal site and its data migration

The March Washington, DC Drupal meetup will be tonight (3/8) at 7:00 pm at Stetson's. After missing last month's meetup due to the snowmaggedons, it will be great to catch up with everyone.

As usual there will be a round of lightning talk where anyone can take the floor and talk - for five minutes or less - on a Drupal related topic. So far two people have volunteered:

• Jeff will talk about the Boxes module, which produces exportable and Spaces-friendly blocks

• StevenC has volunteered to talk about a website he built for a local construction firm that included a data migration from a legacy MS SQL database and some complex back-end programming.

If you'd like to give a talk, post about it in the comments here and come ready to talk. More details on the meetup are in the Washington DC Drupal group. Hope to see you tonight!

Drupal, dot gov, and a data challenge this week in Washington, DC

After a positively beautiful weekend here in Washington, DC, we're set to have even warmer weather through most of the week. Dare I say that spring is finally here? While it will be tempting to be outdoors as much as possible this week, there are some interesting technology events scheduled that may just convince you to head into a bar. Below are the events that caught our eye, and you can find a full like at DC Tech Events. Have a great week!

March 8

7:00 - 9:00 pm

DC Drupal Meetup: Interested in learning more about Drupal - the increasingly popular open source framework - or want to geek out with other Drupal developers? Then come out to tonight's meetup for good conversations about the content management system and how it's being used by developers in town. We'll be there :)

Wednesday, March 10

5:30

New Tech Happy Hour: This networking event brings together people working in new technology and ICT4D to talk and share ideas, and usually draws a big group.

6:00 pm

Developers Roundtable + AppShare: This meetup is an opportunity to pick the brains of other local technologists, with topics of technology, marketing, and operations all on the table. Also, there will be pizza and beer.

To better tag content in multilingual versions of Managing News

We just added support for Yahoo! Placemaker's geo-recognition service to Managing News. This is an optional replacement for the default place-term lookup feature and can be enabled and configured in the administration section of Managing News. For those new to automatic geotagging services, Placemaker is a free API that leverages Yahoo's GeoPlanet location database to identify where in the world a particular piece of content is relevant.

Here is a look at Managing News using Placemaker to tag content in Chinese:

There are a few reasons we wanted to do this. The first is that we've been working on multilingual versions of Managing News and found that the core geotagger is not able to correctly identify word breaks in languages like Chinese and Arabic. The Placemaker API is able to receive and parse content in 21 languages and return place names in the language you request. This flexibility greatly extends the accessibility of Managing News to non-English users.

Second, it's not always easy to find a list of location terms with latitude and longitude for the places for which we want to track news. Will White has a great post about customizing maps on Managing News, but we wanted to make it even easier for end-users to download the software and get going.

To get set up using Placemaker geotagging with Managing News check out the DRUPAL-6--1 branch of the Managing News profile on Drupal.org. The included makefile will let you build all the necessary components from source. This feature will be included in the next release of the project from ManagingNews.com, but we wanted to let folks who couldn't wait access it now.

Citizen Technology and Election Accountability Conference in Nairobi, Kenya

National Democratic Institute's conference on Citizen Technology and Election Accountability here in Nairobi just wrapped up. The two days brought together election experts and technologists from all over the region. Much of our discussions focused on how to move away from relying on impressionistic and anecdotal data and start properly integrating technology into on the ground operations to provide more real time, representational data that will help teams better communicate about complex situations.

I got to talk about real time election observations and mobile data collection (specifically our recent integration of Slingshot SMS into Managing News) and led a session on publishing data for "Results Management and Visualizing Election Information" where I discussed our Afghanistan Election work. In addition to walking through the communications strategy behind our Afghanistan election data project from last fall, I showed the first public example of "Maps on a Stick", a client-side mapping tool that we will be releasing later this week. Maps on a Stick makes it easy to carry around custom map tilesets and mash them up with information (read KML data) and is designed for low and no bandwidth environments. The bad internet at the conference venue made the demo awesome.

Create a single sign-on experience based on Drupal's OpenID stack

Small pieces loosely joined is one of the defining paradigms of the web and in many cases we recommend investing in two or three smaller websites rather than a single big one. Smaller sites are cheaper to build and maintain and by keeping sites independent you give yourself maximum flexibility for future decisions.

A big piece that has been missing in making loosely coupled sites work well is a solution for scattered identities. Imagine the following scenario. In a set of five independent websites you would like to have users sign in once and be able to access any of these sites. Further you would like to have a central location where you can see user activity on all of the five sites. And of course you'd like to allow users to update information like their email address centrally and have the next notification from any of the five sites go to the new address.

This is exactly the challenge that one of our clients - Sandusky Register - faced with several loosely joined Drupal sites. After a survey of available single sign-on solutions, we decided to go with an OpenID based approach since we needed to support different domains, wanted to avoid sharing user tables and did not want to add complex system requirements for browser clients or the server.

Making using OpenID really simple

The great advantage of this scenario is that we know which five sites need to play nicely together and all of them are Drupal sites under the client's control. This premise allows us to add an additional site as a designated OpenID provider that we call "Hub" and make all five sites point to the Hub as their default identity provider. The resulting user experience is somewhat similar to what we are used to from Google or Yahoo. When users click 'sign up' on a site, they are kicked over to the Hub to authenticate and then transferred back and automatically logged in to the original site. Check out the screencast:

A demo of OpenID simple sign-on can be downloaded from github in the form of two Drupal install profiles. The two modules that are at the core of the simple sign-on experience are OpenID SSO and OpenID Provider SSO. If you take a quick look at the source, you will see that they are quite simple - both modules simplify only slightly the behavior of the OpenID and OpenID Provider module (props to walkah for both modules at this point!).

Details on the latest release of Aegir and what it will allow you to do

The Aegir development team has just released our latest piece of tech out onto the world. Aegir 0.4 Alpha 6 is the first major step in a series of milestones reaching toward the goals we have for 0.4. The biggest change in this release is that Aegir now supports multi-server use. You can now see a listing of all the servers that your Aegir site has access to provision sites on, letting you more easily configure your environment correctly.

In previous releases of Aegir, there were two separate node types that represented database servers and web servers respectively. We discovered pretty early on that this was problematic when trying to represent the real network topology we wanted to manage. If you had two web servers that each had a database server installed, we were required to share the single localhost database node between them, and even then this only worked if the two database servers were configured in EXACTLY the same way.

The major change in this release is that we've created a single new node type - named "server". We've then abstracted each of the previous servers or daemons into a new layer called "services". Each conceptual server node may have multiple services it provides (such as mysql or apache).

PHP, startups, elearning, and photography this week in Washington, DC

Finally, some warmer weather! It's still a bit premature to say that spring is on the way with snow in the forecast for Wednesday, but we will get a nice break from the freezing temperatures for most of the week. It's a great excuse to head out of your apartment/house to check out a local technology event. Below are the events that caught our eye, and I have to say that I'm most excited for the DCist Exposed photography exhibit on Saturday - though I'm definitely biased from working with one of the exhibitors. A full calendar of events is up over at DC Tech Events. Have a great week!

Tuesday, March 2

7:00 pm

NSCoderNightDC: Do you develop for macs or the iphone, or are you looking to get started? Come out to meet other developers and talk technology and the latest random Mac/iPhone news of the week, over some tasty desserts.

Wednesday, March 3

6:00 - 8:00 pm

DC PHP Developers Beverage Meetup: This monthly meetup is a chance for php developers to get together to talk code casually over a few beers. Just look for the fuzzy blue elePHPant once you get to the bar.

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