At Drupal Camp Twin Cities 2011, I attended the session “Data Migration for Drupal 7,” by Ken Rickard of palantir.net. Ken is a core contributor, a co-author of the book Drupal 7 Module Development. He has worked on a number of important migration efforts, and is known as the migration expert at Palantir. This included some complicated migrations for ForeignAffairs.com and Grinnell College.

Here is the session description:

We’ll take an in-depth, technical look at the challenges of migrating external data into Drupal. Working from a live example, we'll use Drupal 7’s Migrate module to pull data into a Drupal site.

Here are my notes:

My second session of day one of Twin Cities Drupal Camp 2011 was “Getting started with jQuery and Javascript in Drupal,” by Geoff Hankerson of Artist Arena.

Here are my notes from the session:

DrupalCamp Twin Cities 2011 began with a keynote by Angie Byron, known in the Drupal community as @webchick. If you’re not familiar with her awesomeness, here is a bit about her:

Angie is on the Board of Directors for the Drupal Association, and the core maintainer for the just-released Drupal 7. Known simply as "webchick" on drupal.org, she led Drupal’s participation in Google Summer of Code and Google’s Highly Open Participation (GHOP) programs, and guided Lullabot’s collaboration on O’Reilly’s first Drupal book, Using Drupal.

A sought-after lecturer on a variety of topics, especially women in Open Source, she is the featured cover story of April’s Linux Journal.

Her topic for the keynote was "Getting involved in the Drupal Community." The room was packed: even her mom came! She’s a native Minnesotan and grew up in Rochester. So it’s no wonder that she is awesome.

Here’s a bit of what she had to say:

On a site I am working on, the theme is Acquia Prosper. The Primary Menu for the top navigation uses Superfish dropdowns if you turn them on. If you want a menu item to have a dropdown, you need to make sure that menu item is set to Expanded.

However, in many situations, you will also use the Primary menu for local navigation, so users can easily see what section of the site they are in, what page they are on and what other menu items are in that section.

One of the most important new techniques in web design is responsive design, which was introduced by Ethan Marcotte, an unstoppable robot ninja and one of my favorite people working on the web.

Since I work primarily with Drupal, I have struggled with how to integrate these new techniques with Drupal. Thankfully, Jeremiah Davis of Advantage Labs gave a presentation on “Responsive Design and Drupal” at Drupal Camp Twin Cities 2011.

Here is the session description:

Let me just start by saying that I really don’t believe I should be blamed for the very odd experience I had when I tried to use the restroom at the restaurant we were at tonight; I certainly was not trying to scare a 90-year old woman, and I did not deserve to be lectured by her daughter.

Also, I think there is a funny analogy to web accessibility in this story.

I have been a big advocate for web standards since I first read Jeffrey Zeldman’s Designing with Web Standards, well, let’s just say a while ago.

Here’s a quick Twitter productivity tip in Firefox 4!

Firefox 4 allows you to pin web app tabs so they are always available right when you login. Once you are logged into a web app, just click and drag on the tab to the left side of your tabs. Now, instead of a big long tabs, you’ll have a nice snug tab with just the favicon appearing, rather than the page title.

This works well with Twitter, email web apps, whatever.

Want to see my tweets on your web page? With just three lines of HTML?

No problem!

Step one

<div id="twitter_div"><ul id="twitter_update_list">&nbsp;</ul></div>

Step two

<script type="text/javascript" src="http://twitter.com/javascripts/blogger.js">&nbsp;</script>

Step three

<script type="text/javascript" src="http://twitter.com/statuses/user_timeline/MarcDrummond.json?callback=twitterCallback2&count=5">&nbsp;</script>

I just saw The Social Network, so once again, my love/hate relationship with Facebook is on my mind (or more accurately, my modicum-of-interest/hate relationship with Facebook).

As an aside, The Social Network is a great movie. May or may not be entirely accurate, but if you’re an Aaron Sorkin fan (and who doesn’t love the West Wing), you’ll love it. The story it tell does give some insight into how Facebook got off the ground, with some caveats that the tale is told from a certain point of view. Not an entirely one-sided point of view, but all the facts may not be on display.