Planetaki Planet drupal

Week in DC Tech: February 6th

2012-02-06T19:34:46Z

There is a lot happening in the technology scene this week in Washington, DC, with events on openness in government, R, and mobiles in international development. Add to the mix two storytelling events and some happy hours, and it’s a great week. Below is our roundup of events, and you can find a full calendar over at DC Tech Events.

Tuesday, February 7

7:00 - 9:00 pm

The Anecdote: Stories about Not Love: In preparation of Valentine’s Day - or in spite of it - come out for a night of storytelling about failed love, dating troubles, and overall bad romance. Danny Harris from the People’s District - whose stories we helped map - is one of the presenters.

Wednesday, February 8

9:00 - 10:00 am

Open Innovation: Tools to Solve Problems and Grow the Economy: At this event held by the Center for American Progress, exiting U.S. CTO Aneesh Chopra will talk about his work pushing for open policies around innovation and how the government can stay on track - and open - moving forward.

Thursday, February 9

3:30 - 5:30 pm

Mobile Disconnect: Can Mobile Solutions Really Combat Global Poverty?: This panel discussion hosted by the New America Foundation will look at the potential of mobile phones aiding international development and political activism, and also the limitations in their use.

6:00 - 10:00 pm

ICT4Drinks in DC: After the Mobile Disconnect event, attendees and others in the international development and technology sectors will meet to continue the discussion over drinks. If you want to talk mobiles in development and pick the brains of presenters and attendees, check this out.

6:30 pm

R Lightning Talks: Want to dip your toe into a bunch of different topics around R? This month’s R user group will feature seven lightning talks on topics like R’s spatial tools, version control in Git, and webscraping with R.

Saturday, February 11

6:30 - 9:30 pm

Nerd Nite: Nerds in Love: Want to start your Saturday night by learning about the science of love, sexual attraction to objects, and frogs mixed with some drinks and live music? Then Nerd Nite at DC9 is your ticket.

Drupal 7.12 and 6.24 released

2012-02-02T04:05:05Z

Drupal 7.11 and 6.23, maintenance releases which fix security vulnerabilities are now available for download.

Drupal 7.12 and 6.24 also fix other issues reported through the bug tracking system.

Download Drupal 7.12
Download Drupal 6.24

Upgrading your existing Drupal 7 and 6 sites is strongly recommended. There are no new features in these releases. For more information about the Drupal 7.x release series, consult the Drupal 7.0 release announcement, more information on the 6.x releases can be found in the Drupal 6.0 release announcement. Drupal 5 is no longer maintained, upgrading to Drupal 6 is recommended.

Security information

We have a security announcement mailing list, a history of all security advisories, and an RSS feed with the most recent security advisories. We strongly advise Drupal administrators to sign up for the list.

Drupal 7 and 6 include the built-in Update status module, which informs you about important updates to your modules and themes.

Bug reports

Both Drupal 7.x and 6.x branches are being maintained, so given enough bug fixes (not just bug reports) more maintenance releases will be made available, according to our monthly release cycle.

Changelog

Drupal 7.11 only includes fixes for security issues. Drupal 7.12 also includes bugfixes. The full list of changes between the 7.10 and 7.12 releases can be found by reading the 7.12 release notes. A complete list of all bug fixes in the stable 7.x branch can be found in the git commit log.

Drupal 6.23 only includes fixes for security issues. Drupal 6.24 also includes bugfixes. The full list of changes between the 6.22 and 6.24 releases can be found by reading the 6.24 release notes. A complete list of all bug fixes in the stable 6.x branch can be found at git commit log.

Security vulnerabilities

Drupal 7.11 and 6.23 were released in response to the discovery of security vulnerabilities. Details can be found in the official security advisory:

SA-CORE-2012-001

To fix the security problem, please upgrade Drupal.

What is included with each release?

We made two versions of both Drupal 7 and 6 available, so you can choose to only include security fixes (Drupal 7.11 and 6.23 respectively) or security fixes and bugfixes (Drupal 7.12 and 6.24). You can choose your preferred version. We are trying to make it easier and quicker to roll out security updates by making security-only releases available as well as ones with bugfixes included. We hope this helps you roll out the fixes as soon as possible. Read more details in the handbook.

Update notes

The default.settings.php file was changed in Drupal 7.12, to add documentation about PDO attribute override capabilities that were added as a result of #1309278: Make PDO connection options configurable.

The robots.txt file was changed in Drupal 6.24 to block filter tips from search engines. The .htaccess and (default.)settings.php files were not changed in Drupal 6. Additionally, indexes were added to the node_comment_statistics and comment tables, for performance.

Known issues

Bug fixes in 7.12 release cause problems with the Internationalization (i18n) module. i18n users are encouraged to update to 7.11 to get the security fixes, and hold off on the 7.12 upgrade until #1351678: Follow menu_link_get_preferred active trail handling for custom menus and #1050466: The taxonomy index should be maintained in a node hook, not a field hook are resolved. (Note: Help here would be greatly appreciated!)

Drupal elections this week: all candidates meetings and when to vote

2012-02-01T03:51:48Z

Elections for at large Drupal Association elections are kicking into high gear with two all candidates meetings this week before voting opens Friday.

Election candidates will participate in all candidates meetings are scheduled over the next two days (Wed., Thurs. or Fri., depending on your location). The first meeting, intended to work for people in the Asia and the Pacific, is scheduled for 01:00 UTC on Thursday. That's 5 PM PST on Wednesday for those in the US and Canada.

The second all candidates meeting at 17:00 UTC Thursday is timed for participants in Europe, Africa, and the Americas.

Then on Friday voting will open. Details on voting will be posted to association.drupal.org.

See the elections announcement for more on how to learn about the candidates.

Week in DC Tech: January 30th Edition

2012-01-30T19:55:29Z

There are several interesting events happening this week in Washington, DC, from strategically using open data to improve response to climate change to mapping traditionally undocumented areas and slums to talking real-time data at Tech@State. See our roundup below for the events we’re hoping to attend this month, and find a full calendar over at DC Tech Events.

Tuesday, January 31

Noon to 1:30 pm

World Bank Climate Data Briefing: On the heels of opening up of a large climate dataset, the World Bank is hosting this discussion on how open data can help respond to climate change. This meeting is specifically focused on developers working with data and data visualizations, and climate change experts. Alex and Eric will be there to talk about the benefits of open data and how to release it in usable ways.

Wednesday, February 1

7:00 - 9:00 pm

GeoDC Meetup: This month’s meetup will look at mapping slums and other un ddocumented areas, with speakers presenting on the techniques they’ve successfully used to map areas in Nairobi, Dar es Salaam, East Jerusalem, Cite Soleil, and more. Really looking forward to this one.

Thursday, February 2

7:00 - 9:00 pm

CocoaHeads Meetup: This meetup will feature two presentations from Apple developers and give you a chance to meet and talk with local developers building on the platform.

Friday, February 3

8:00 am - 5:00 pm

Tech@State: Real-Time Awareness: Access to real-time data and the ability to quickly process and analyze can tremendously help when responding to disasters and breaking events. Tech@State will look at how to deliver real-time data and use it effectively. Alex and I will be here, specifically interesting in talking about data visualizations.

Saturday, February 4

8:30 am - 4:00 pm

Tech@State Unconference: Following Friday’s event, this will be a hands on dive into using technology to help collect, filter, analyze, and visualize real-time data. Check it out if you want to work with some real data and code.

Announcing the MapBox Blog

2012-01-30T19:55:29Z

As you’ve seen from the amount of mapping posts on this blog, we’re ramping up our investment in MapBox - our open source mapping tools backed by a cloud platform for sharing and embedding custom maps and beautiful worldwide maps. To capture this momentum and communicate about MapBox news, we just launched the MapBox Blog over at MapBox.com. Follow us there or via RSS and Twitter.

Moving forward, all MapBox news will be posted on MapBox.com instead of here. So if you’re following us on Twitter @developmentseed, now would be a good time to follow @mapbox too. Of course we will continue posting here on DevelopmentSeed.org/blog about our data visualization and open data strategy projects, Node.js development, and local technology events.

DrupalCon Denver Final Sessions Are Posted

2012-01-26T21:09:05Z

The final session selections for DrupalCon Denver were announced this week. DrupalCon will take place March 19-23, 2012. Get your tickets soon so that you don't miss out on over 100 sessions across 8 tracks! This year we have added tracks specifically for Non-profit, Government & Education, in addition to Community, Commerce, Mobile, Design & User Experience, Business & Strategy, Coding & Development, Site Building, and Core Conversations.

Conference Dates:
March 19 - Pre-conference trainings -- over 16 from beginners to advanced + API Hack-a-thon

March 20 - 22 - Three complete days of 104 sessions starting with Keynotes: Dries Buytaert, Founder of Drupal and Drupal Project lead, Mitchell Baker, chairperson for the Mozilla Foundation, and Luke Wroblewski, digital product leader coming to talk about mobile.

March 22 - Drupal Means Business - included with conference registration to learn how to integrate Drupal into your business.

March 23 - All-day Contribution Sprint -- one of the largest anywhere!

Plus, parties, ski trips, networking, contests and more, all for the $350 conference fee! Thank you to our wonderful sponsors for helping this to remain one of the lowest cost open source conferences around.

Get your ticket to DrupalCon Denver today. What are you waiting for? We want to see you in Denver!

P.S. Conference registration is $350 until February 21 or when tickets are gone! Early registration helps us to plan the conference and keep our costs low by only ordering what is needed. A limited number of 1/2-priced student tickets are still available.

Follow @drupalcon on Twitter or find us on Facebook.

Getting Involved in the Drupal Community: Survey Results

2012-01-23T21:19:02Z

Introduction

Drupal.org has over 725,000 registered members in 228 countries. However, only a very small percentage of this members contribute back to the project. Why is this? How can we attract more contributors? What can we do to make it easier for people to contribute? Which areas of the Drupal project would people want to contribute?

To get answers to these questions, two surveys were conducted in 2011 by the community to understand the experience of contributing or considering to contribute to the Drupal project.

This is a combined report of 358 respondents’ responses to the surveys.

Methodology

The first survey focused on the Drupal contribution experience for the Prairie initiative and received 303 responses. It was written and conducted by Leisa Reichelt (leisareichelt) that ran from April 25, 2011 to September 20, 2011.

The second, the Getting Involved survey, [list of questions] received 55 responses. It was written and conducted by Heather James (heather), Dharmesh Mistry (dcmistry) and Lisa Rex (lisarex) from October 21, 2011 to November 9, 2011. This survey focused on the respondent’s Drupal profile; their expectations, roadblocks, motivations; and Drupal areas that need most contributors, among many other things.

Profile of the respondents

Prairie Survey

Of the 303 respondents, 64% were non-coders and 31% were non-active contributors.
A big majority (71%) of the respondents from the survey identified themselves as “an established, active member of the community”. The majority of the respondents regularly contribute (41%) and a good amount stated that they contribute occasionally (36%). The majority of the non-active contributors (36%) have never contributed to the project.

Getting Involved Survey

The majority of the respondents identified themselves as Site Builder (68%), and/or Developer (59%). A significant portion of respondents identified themselves as Themer (34%) and/or Project Manager (29%). It is also worth noting that 73% of the respondents cited Drupal as their source of income.

Note: Each of the surveys focused on different aspects of Drupal contributions.

Executive Summary

The findings from both surveys are summarized below, but also see:

The contributing experience

From the Getting Involved survey, it was found that the big motivator for people to contribute was simply to improve Drupal and support its community (40%). The other motivator was to grow their knowledge and network (25%). However, when the Getting Involved survey asked about their opinion about the existing community structure, a majority of the respondents (48.9%) had a negative reaction. They thought it was fragmented, chaotic, not great and could use improvements.

The majority of respondents of the Prairie survey thought the experience of contributing was:

“Very much” rewarding and collaborative: Majority of the respondents of the Prairie survey thought the experience of contributing to the Drupal project was “very much” collaborative (47%) and rewarding (46%). However, the non-coders and the non-active contributors either stayed with “somewhat” or swayed between “very much” and “somewhat” with no statistical significance.
“Not really” to “somewhat” efficient: Majority thought the process of contribution was “not really” efficient (43%) or “somewhat” efficient (40%) with no significant statistical difference between the responses. Non coders shared the same feeling.
“Somewhat” intimidating, confusing, unwieldy and supportive: The respondents of the second survey thought the experience of contributing to the Drupal project was “somewhat” intimidating (46%), confusing (49%), unwieldy (43%) and supportive (52%).
Split between “Very much” and “Somewhat” inspiring, exciting and friendly: When asked about the experience of contributing in terms of inspiration, excitement and friendliness, the majority swayed between “very much” and “somewhat” responses with no significant statistical difference. It is worth noting that in all the four categories (Rewarding, Inspiring, Excitement and Friendly), the majority of non-coders and non-active contributors stuck to “somewhat”.

What do people want to contribute?

Respondents of the Getting Involved survey mostly want to contribute on Documentation/technical writing and PHP development/LAMP (54% each). The next area with the most interest is training (46%) and Mentoring/Support (32%).

What areas need the most contributions?

The respondents thought documentation (12 respondents), Drupal.org. (7 respondents) and Design/UX/Usability (6 respondents) needed the most attention from other contributors.

What areas of Drupal community do you think need the most contributions?

Although the respondents from the second survey thought the contributing experience was “very much” collaborative, majority (47%) thought “Redesign the issue page to make it easier to collaborative effectively” as a “very important” initiative. Besides that, the respondents (overall, non coders and non active contributors) agreed (47%) that “Redesigning parts of Drupal.org to help newbies find ways to start contributing” as “very important”. This number was higher for non active contributors (55%) than the others.

Other Findings

Across profiles (of the second survey), “Creating ‘team’ pages to aggregate activities and people interested in a topic” (48%) and “Designing better tools for planning large initiatives” (41%) were deemed as “quite important”.

For “Designing a reputation system to show what different people are expert in and how well they are known by the Drupal community” majority of respondents swayed between quite important (32%) to less important (39%). This was also true for non coders and non active contributors.

Roadblocks to contributing

The major roadblock from they getting involved was lack of information on how to get involved (and whom to contact) (42%). This issue of getting started (48%) was also found in the Prairie survey.

Lack of information on how to contribute, what to work on or whom to contact (42%)
Don’t have time (18%)
“I don’t know enough technically” (16%)
Intimidation factor (13%)
Want to talk/need guidance from mentors (13%)
Slow turn around time to get feedback/or to get committed (7%)

‘Get Involved’ pages and Drupal.org

Only 16% of the respondents of the Prairie survey visit the ‘Get Involved’ pages on Drupal.org. 46% of Prairie survey respondents took the opportunity to complain about Drupal.org. They wanted a better Drupal.org. (24%), better tools to collaborate (5%), and an efficient issue queue (5%). For Drupal.org., they particularly wanted to find information easily (4%).

How could we improve the experience?

To make the experience of contributing better, non-contributors wanted better information to get started. And the contributors reiterated this when asked what would have been helpful when they started contributing. Besides that, the second most important thing that mattered was the human aspect. The personal touch would have been helpful to the contributors while they were starting and the non contributors want to work with experienced contributors. It is worth noting here that a significant number of respondents are interested in helping with this (Training - 46%, Mentoring/Support - 32%). (Responses from the Getting Involved survey)

Other noteworthy things

Designers and non-programmers who responded (11) to open-ended question in the Prairie survey complained that contributing to the project was heavily code focused, that designers did not get the credit they deserved, and that they did not know how the non-coders could contribute to the project. Like the respondents from the Getting Involved survey, the non-programmers also reiterated that they did not know where they were needed.
A small but considerate amount of Prairie survey respondents were discouraged by other community members and slow turn around time (8% each)
The Getting Involved survey also asked as to what do they expect from a community leader, and they wanted someone who could moderate discussions/issues, offer guidance, and carve a plan for the community.

What do you think about the existing community structure?

Conclusion

We hope the findings from the survey will be helpful to the Drupal Association and the community on the next big priorities for Drupal.org. It is evident from the findings that a significant effort is required to provide effective, easy-to-find information on how to get started with contributing to the Drupal community. However, help from other community members is needed to keep the momentum going.

Next steps

Some conversations/efforts have begun toward this goal of improving the contributor experience, such as redesigning the Community, Support and Getting started landing pages, redesigning the issue queue and more.

We need to identify areas that need leaders, and areas that need contributors. Contributors are in demand for documentation especially.

If you are interested to contribute to this effort to provide better documentation for getting started with contributing, great! There are several open issues on improving Getting Involved content, including the Getting Involved landing page and Getting Involved Guide. Please visit this link to read about other community initiatives that might be of interest to you. If you are unsure where you can best help, please contact Lisa Rex (lisarex), who can point you in the right direction.

If you have any questions about the survey/findings, please feel free to contact Dharmesh Mistry (dcmistry).

Week in DC Tech: January 23rd Edition

2012-01-23T21:18:48Z

Interested in learning about Python, meeting other people behind tech startups, or just working into the night with friends? Check out our roundup of technology events in Washington, DC this week, and check out that full event calendar over at DC Tech Events.

Monday, January 21

8:45 pm

DC Nightowls Co-Working Group: Interested in brainstorming, bouncing ideas, hacking, or just working late night? Check out this meetup to get some work done and meet other productive people.

Tuesday, January 22

6:30 pm

DC Lean Startup Circle Meetup: Folks from local startups like UmbaBox, mphoria, and HelloWallet will talk about their strategies for reaching out to new customers and keeping them on board at this meetup.

7:00 pm

DC jQuery Meetup: This month the DC jQuery group is teaming up with the Selenium meetup to talk about testing suites like Jasmine and others.

Saturday, January 28

11:00 am - 2:00 pm

Python Web Scraping 101 for Journalists: The good folks at the Sunlight Foundation are hosting this hacking how to, introducing the fundamentals of Python using a simple web scraping example. If you’ve been wanting to dive in or hone up on Python, you’ll want to check this out.

GDAL 2.0 to Support MBTiles

2012-01-20T23:06:22Z

GDAL, the library underlying nearly all major open source geospatial projects (it’s used in apps like QGIS, ArcGIS, and Google Earth), has gained MBTiles read support. This adds a big name to the list of MBTiles supporting implementations because GDAL shines at data exploration and format conversion. It means MBTiles will be easier to use from any application that uses GDAL, and the list is impressively long. Once GDAL 2.0 is released, this potentially means you’ll be able to open MBTiles files directly in applications like QGIS. But already with GDAL trunk you can do fancy things like:

Query remote mbtiles for their metadata:

$ gdalinfo /vsicurl/http://a.tiles.mapbox.com/v3/mapbox.geography-class.mbtiles | grep description

One of the example maps that comes with [TileMill](http://mapbox.com/tilemill/) - a bright and colorful world map that blends retro and high-tech with its folded paper texture and interactive flag tooltips.

Or turn Konstantin’s gorgeous Iceland Map into a single 1.5 GB image suitable for high resolution printing:

$ wget http://a.tiles.mapbox.com/v3/kkaefer.iceland.mbtiles
$ gdal_translate kkaefer.iceland.mbtiles iceland.tiff
Input file size is 16384, 16384
0...10...20...30...40...50...60...70...80...90...100 - done.
$ ls -lh *tiff
-rw-r--r--  1 dane  staff   1.0G Jan  8 18:12 iceland.tiff

Or even remotely lookup a temperature anomaly value for a given coordinate in the World Bank Climate Scenario A2 Map:

$ gdallocationinfo /vsicurl/http://a.tiles.mapbox.com/v3/worldbank-climate.wbc-temp-anom-a2.mbtiles -wgs84 2 49 -b 1
Report:
  Location: (5279P,11525L)
  Band 1:
    
    Value: 255

More details about GDAL’s MBTiles support are on its docs page.

This is brilliant. I noticed the addition two weeks ago in #gdal IRC and quickly realized it was Even Rouault (profile/blog) at work. He’s a true force of nature - an amazingly smart and focused developer and one of the lead maintainers of the GDAL project. This is a very key position now that the lead and founder of the project Frank Warmerdam has been hired by Google and his commits have understandably declined. In addition to helping maintain a huge project, Even seems insanely deft at adding new drivers overnight to the delight of programmers the world over.

So, thanks for this awesome feature Even, and thanks Frank and others for creating such a powerful library for developers like Even to build on. We notice :)

A Google Maps Alternative: Switch to MapBox

2012-01-21T06:53:50Z

We just launched MapBox.com/switch, a walk though showing how MapBox is much more than just a mapping API. Particularly when combined with open source libraries like Leaflet, MapBox provides an incredibly powerful alternative to big traditional providers. The goal of /switch is to show how you can get up and running with an open mapping stack supported by a scalable cloud infrastructure.

In addition to featuring the open source wins of the MapBox Platform, the campaign also highlights some price comparisons. Specifically we’re looking at Google Map’s new price increase for high-end users, which for many businesses that depend on maps, are potentially debilitating. While we continue to look at Google Maps as a powerful integration point for MapBox, and something we continue to support for layering under custom maps, some organizations need to exit Google maps all together to save resources and are looking for viable alternatives. With MapBox, you have options.

To be clear, though, we are not trying to make a one-to-one comparison. MapBox doesn’t have its own satellites orbiting or cars roaming cities. We are not in the business of managing routing information to provide driving directions nor do we currently have the geocoding infrastructure that Google does. But we are in the business of making fast and beautiful maps, and for many organizations incredible base maps at a fair and flexible price makes MapBox a real alternative to Google Maps. Check out our new custom OpenStreetMap base maps that we’re launching later this month.

Read more about how to switch to MapBox and reach out to us if you want to talk about custom pricing packages or longer term contracts.

Podcast 100: A Look Back

2012-02-01T11:48:05Z

Nate Haug, Jeff Eaton, Addi Berry, Matt Westgate, and Jeff Robbins reminisce on the past 6 years of Lullabot, running a virtual company, the ways in which Drupal has changed, and visit a few of the projects we've worked on.

Release Date: January 19, 2012 - 3:24pm

Album: Lullabot Podcast

Length: 77:50 minutes (30.53 MB)

Format: mono 44kHz 54Kbps (vbr)

Drupal Association 2012 elections are on!

2012-01-19T23:43:37Z

Come one, come all! As of January 18, 2012 nominations are open for the 2012 elections of two "at large" directors of the Drupal Association.

The at large directors are intended to represent the Drupal community. Specifics of the election were decided through a community-based process with participation by dozens of Drupal community members. More details are in the proposal that was approved by the Drupal Association board.

Who can vote?

Voting is open to all individuals who have a drupal.org account by the time the elections begin and who have logged in at least once in the past year. These individuals' accounts will be added to the voters list on association.drupal.org and they will have access to the voting.

To vote, you will rank candidates in order of your preference (1st, 2nd, 3rd, etc.). The results will be calculated using an "instant runoff" method. For an accessible explanation of how instant runoff vote tabulation works, see videos linked in this discussion.

How to run

Candidates needed! If you are considering running, please head over to the nominations page and read up on what's involved. From there you can fill out a candidate profile. You'll be asked for some information about yourself, like why you're running . When the nominations close, your candidate profile will be published and available for Drupal community members to browse. Comments will be enabled, so please monitor your candidate profile so you can respond to questions from community members.

Elections process

Elections will be held from January 27 to February 7, 2012. During this period, you can review and comment on candidate profiles on association.drupal.org and engage all candidates through posting to the Drupal Association group. We'll also be scheduling and announcing two phone-in all candidates meetings, where community members and candidates can ask questions and get to know each other.

Thanks and see you at the polls! We'll post another front-page announcement and announce via @drupal on Twitter when we're ready to go.

Docs Team 4th Quarter 2011 Update

2012-01-19T00:04:07Z

Hello from Jennifer, your friendly Drupal Documentation Team leader! It’s time for a quarterly update on what’s happening in the Documentation team. As you probably heard, Ariane's role in the Documentation Team has changed, and she is no longer my co-leader (sob!), so I'm looking for a new deputy leader or co-leader (watch http://groups.drupal.org/documentation-team for details). Here's what Ariane and I oversaw in the Documentation Team at the end of 2011, with a look forward to 2012.

September - December Events

The Documentation Team is holding weekly ”Documentation Office Hours"—one-hour IRC meetings on Tuesday afternoon (North American time), open to anyone for questions and discussions about contributing to documentation. It seems like it's been very helpful to have a definite time when people can get together on IRC, and we plan to continue with this schedule for the foreseeable future.
In October, I was able to attend the Friday of the Bay Area Drupal Camp (BADCamp). We had a small documentation sprint, and a few people got up to speed on writing API documentation patches. Also, Kathy (kathyh) spent the afternoon writing a new guide for novice contributors to Drupal core, based on her experiences as a novice contributor -- thanks Kathy!
We started an API documentation cleanup sprint in November, to bring the Drupal 8 and Drupal 7 core API documentation much more in line with our documentation standards (see meta issue). My big hopes for this sprint:
1. Lots of documentation cleanup -- YES! The sprint is not finished yet, but MUCH more of our documentation is up to standards. In the process, a lot of weird wording has been fixed, and the documentation is clearer and easier to scan. Also, people usually copy/paste an existing documentation header when creating new documentation (or at least use an existing one as a model), so the more we clean up existing documentation, the better future documentation is likely to be.
2. Lots of participants -- YES! My hope was that some people new to contributing to Drupal API documentation would see the sprint as a good way to get up to speed on making Drupal patches, and on the API documentation standards. And they did!
3. Build a Drupal Core Documentation Issue Queue Squad -- Yes! Part-way through the sprint, I put out a call for participants to start reviewing other people's patches as well as creating patches, and they did! And now some of them are helping out with the "documentation" component of the Drupal Core issue queue -- watching for new issues, making patches, reviewing other's patches -- which was my secret hope all along (for the last several years, it's been a rather lonely issue queue, since I have had to either write or review nearly every patch in it -- that model is not sustainable, so I'm really happy to have some company).
Thanks to xjm, xenophyle, sven.lauer, Lars Toomre, aenw, rc_100, jn2, aspilicious, chris.leversuch, barlantz, synth3tk, agentrickard, ... and probably more who joined after I made this list -- sorry if I forgot your name! This sprint is still going on, so if you’d like to participate, visit the meta issue, which has full instructions (novice contributors welcome!).

Documentation Infrastructure Updates

The last quarter of 2011 saw some changes to Drupal.org that are quite beneficial to Documentation writers, editors, and users -- and more are on the way! Here's a list:

After much discussion, we came up with an overview plan for how to restructure Drupal documentation into Community, Curated/Help, API, and External Index documentation in September of 2011 (see http://groups.drupal.org/node/175174). During this quarter, we started putting the transformation into place. The first step was a mammoth design issue (190+ comments!) for the Community Documentation (which is a rename of the existing Documentation on Drupal.org in the early fall. The results of that process are partly deployed (read on for details), and more are coming soon.
One of the main conclusions of the mammoth design issue was that one of the biggest barriers we see to people contributing to the online documentation on drupal.org is reluctance to click the Edit button -- people just aren’t sure whether it’s really OK. So, the redesign of the documentation pages that was deployed in January 2012 included:
- The existing Documentation pages on Drupal.org have now been renamed "Community Documentation", to reduce the perception that you have to be part of the "documentation team" in order to edit.
- The page status and other meta-information has been moved to the sidebar
- At the top, there’s a list of several people who have edited the page, with a clear invitation for you to edit the page.
Hopefully these changes will help overcome this barrier -- we’ll see!
We added two taxonomies to Drupal.org documentation pages: keywords and experience level. Right now, they have only been selected on a few pages, but hopefully going forward the keywords will help people find related pages, and the level will help set expectations for the knowledge level needed to understand the page.
Everyone can now upload images to Drupal.org (issue). Angie/webchick and Daniel/sun made a module that made it safe for people to upload images, and it was deployed in October of 2011. There are followup plans to remove the restrictive Documentation input format from most pages (i.e., to unlock those pages), and to get rid of the Documentation Admin role -- no one should need this role now, since everyone can now upload images and use tables using the default Filtered HTML input format.
BUEditor was deployed on Drupal.org in October of 2011. This module adds a small toolbar with HTML shortcuts to rich text fields (documentation node bodies, comments, etc.). While this falls short of being a WYSIWYG editor, due to security concerns with existing WYSIWYG modules, this is probably as close as we'll get for the foreseeable future.
Neil Drumm and Jennifer spearheaded an effort to commit and deploy some updates to the software for api.drupal.org in November 2011 -- thanks to aenw, solotandem, and Greyside for contributing patches for that deployment! If you would like to work on the API module, check out the issue queue (http://drupal.org/project/issues/api) or find jhodgdon in IRC to get oriented. A new deployment to api.drupal.org should be coming shortly, with a lot of user interface updates and more new contributors. Stay tuned!

Next Steps

If you're interested in helping with Drupal documentation:

New contributors: start at http://drupal.org/contribute/documentation to learn all about contributing to documentation, or come to the weekly office hours (see Events section above) to ask questions and get started. (Jennifer recently edited this whole section, so it should be up to date.)
Drupal Documentation announcements, discussions, and events are posted on http://groups.drupal.org/documentation-team and on Twitter (@drupaldocs).
API documentation cleanup sprint (for programmer-documenters): http://drupal.org/node/1310084
Work on the API module: http://drupal.org/project/issues/api -- the issues are all prioritized, so look for ones with priority "major" for the current priorities. Or pick up any issue you're interested in -- we won't say No to a good patch.

Open Climate Data Meeting with the World Bank

2012-01-19T07:47:36Z

Over lunch on January 31, the World Bank is holding a meeting with developers and data and climate change experts to discuss how open data can help address some of the challenges of climate change. Eric and I will be there to talk open data best practices and specifically on our experience mapping open data for the World Bank and the Global Adaptation Institute.

This meeting comes on the heels of the COP 17/CMP 7 Climate Change Conference in Durban two months ago, where the World Bank released a series of climate data sets to improve climate and development decision-making. Now that this climate data is available to a broader audience, the World Bank is bringing together an overlapping community of development practitioners, climate change experts, and programmers to further explore how to use open data to improve decision making, planning, and communications. This meeting takes place in addition to the World Bank’s efforts to get a larger audience using its data through the ongoing Apps for Climate Challenge.

Eric and I are looking forward to discuss using open data with an eye toward visualizing it, specifically by creating compelling map-based visualizations like the climate change maps on climate4development.developmentseed.org. We’ll also show how easy it is to add more data to existing maps like this through overlays, to tell new and different stories with your data.

You can find more information about the event on the World Bank’s site, and rsvp to attend the event in person or online.

Projected temperature changes by the year 2100 according to one scenario.

Mapnik Creator Artem Pavlenko Joins the Team

2012-01-19T07:47:36Z

Artem Pavlenko, the creator of Mapnik - the amazing map renderer at the heart of many open source mapping tools ranging from our map design studio TileMill to huge live updating datasets like OpenStreetMap - has joined the MapBox team. He comes on board after playing a critical role in the launch of MapQuest Open, which is based on open source Mapnik and OpenStreetMap data.

Artem is a incredible addition as we further grow the MapBox platform this year. Most recently he has been working with Dane porting TileMill to Windows.

Artem will continue to lead Mapnik’s core development - in fact his main work right now is focused on developing for Mapnik 3. All of this work will result in huge performance improvements for us, which will be critical as we build out our world base maps and further scale our platform. After years of coordinating together in the open source space, it is amazing to get to work together on the same team.

Mapping for Nonprofits at Tonight's NetSquared DC Meetup

2012-01-17T16:41:48Z

Tonight’s NetSquared DC meetup will look at how nonprofits are using web maps and discuss emerging tools that are making custom mapping easier, more flexible, and more affordable. I’ll be there presenting on where we see the future of web mapping heading. I’ll specifically discuss the open source map design tool TileMill and how it allows users to quickly turn a spreadsheet of data into a beautiful, custom online map.

Speed, design, and usability are what really matter when communicating data, and custom maps are now a viable option for nonprofits of all budgets. I’ll highlight how three nonprofits have leveraged open source mapping tools to change the way they communicate, showing how A Wider Circle maps its furniture donors and recipients to better target its efforts, how ONE.org has used maps and data to boost public awareness of a humanitarian crisis, and how the urban history initiative People’s District maps its storytelling. Danny Harris from the People’s District will be joining me to talk more about their map tells the stories of DC.

Screenshot of ONE.org’s famine mapping presentation

Lastly I’ll give a sneak peek of our coming soon minimal OpenStreetMap baselayer, which serves as an alternative to the common Google baselayer map we’ve all seen a million times. InterAction will also be presenting tonight on how they use maps to help their member organizations connect and collaborate with the NGO Aid Map, made by our friends at Vizzuality and also powered by open source.

I’m looking forward to meeting with the local NetSquared community and helping more nonprofits communicate their data through smart maps and visualizations. TileMill is only getting easier to use, and with new $5 a month plans for MapBox Hosting, custom web mapping is in reach of a much larger audience.

Designing a Minimalist OpenStreetMap Baselayer for MapBox

2012-01-17T16:41:48Z

I am designing a new minimal OpenStreetMap base map in TileMill to use with MapBox hosting platform’s map builder. The goal for the design is a general OpenStreetMap layer that can be used as a light, very subtle background for compositing further data on top of. Here is an early look at the features and design aspects I have been working on for the map.

I used the OSM Bright template as a starting point for the design and removed all color, choosing to limit the palette to light grays. For simplicity, most land use and land cover area types have been dropped, however wooded areas and parks remain and are indicated with subtle textures instead of color.

Label improvements

For city labels I’m making use of the ‘simple’ label placement logic new to Mapnik 2. With this method you can specify multiple placements for the renderer to attempt, and the label will be rendered in the first one where it fits. The result is more cities end up being labelled at low scales.

Improved label placement in the Northeast United States.

I’ve also created shield styles to show route numbers for major highways like I-95 at mid-level scales.

Road improvements

The style now includes more types of roads. Tracks have been added, as have pedestrian routes, bike paths, and bridleways, which are shown as dotted lines. Roads without general public access (for example private roads) are shown faded out.

The rendering of overlaying tunnels, streets, and bridges has also greatly improved, with most overlapping lines separated and stacked in the proper order.

Overlapping bridges in Boston

The tunnel and bridge improvements are one of the more significant changes. The method I used was inspired by the bridge handling in Michael Migurski’s excellent High Road project. The method involves pulling multiple copies of the same bridge or tunnel segment from the database in order to render the casing and fill. Road casing is something I normally handle in Carto with multiple symbolizers on the same object. But in the case of bridges where you are dealing with potentially many overlapping layers, it’s easier to control the rendering order with PostgreSQL’s ORDER BY than it is with Carto attachments. Some modifications to the ImpOSM import mapping were required in order to bring in the layer tag value from the OpenStreetMap data.

At first glance it might seem like I’ve removed the outlines from standard roads. What I’ve actually done is made the casing the same color as the land. Rather than a standard outline, this provides a pseudo-knockout border when roads pass over tunnels or land cover textures.

Trails cutting a path through a wooded area in Chicago.

This border is slightly wider trails, cycleways, and railways. These features are represented by thinner dashed lines, and a wider outline give them some breathing rooms from any background texture and also makes for nice-looking bridges.

Coming soon: OSM Bright

Many of the adjustments that I’ve made for this minimal style are things that can be pulled back into the OSM Bright template project. I’ll be working on doing this in the near future as I wrap up work on the minimal design. Keep an eye on GitHub for these improvements as well as our blog for information about when the minimal design will become available on MapBox.

MapBox for design

Try using TileMill to style your own data or pull in extracts from OpenStreetMap. If you are new, check out our documentation on mapbox.com/help and follow us on Twitter @MapBox - you can also sign up to our email newsletter for updates every few weeks. When you’re ready to share your maps, check out MapBox plans starting at just $5 a month.

Documentation Team Leadership Change

2012-01-17T01:01:28Z

Hi everybody -

Hope you all had a great holiday, and are easing into 2012 nicely! I'll cut right to the chase with this announcement: effective pretty well immediately (as this has been in the works for a little while now), I'm stepping down as Documentation Co-lead.

Awwww, sad, I know! It's been quite the experience, and I feel like along with Jennifer and the other docs enthusiasts, we've gotten a lot done over the course of the last year and a bit of official leadership term. It's been great helping set the direction of the documentation plans, and working with everyone who's been interested in improving the documentation, as well as many of the core and contrib development teams.

After taking some time off in the summer to decompress and figure out where I wanted to go with all of this, I realized that despite feeling like I've been effective in the position, it's taken a lot of my time away from other things in my life, and from actually writing docs and working on other areas of Drupal. And that was definitely okay for a certain timeframe, but it's not something I want to do forever. Now that the Community Documentation infrastructure changes have been rolled out, my side of the leadership role is effectively being put on hiatus. We've talked this over with Dries, and he also feels it's fine for Jennifer to continue managing the API docs and infra solo.

What does this mean to you all? Probably not any huge changes, I'll still poke my head in on the issue queue, IRC, etc. now and then. But my "official responsibilities" will no longer exist, including hosting Documentation sprints, attending meetings and docs hour, doing docs conference sessions, etc. And when I do work on Docs, it'll more often be in a writing/editing capacity. I'm also hoping to spend some more time doing other fun things like patch reviews for Drupal core, and continuing to attend Drupal events. ...And also, spending more time knitting, socializing, doing yoga, and all those other things I neglected while I was spending all my evenings online!

My time helping lead the project's documentation team has had high points and low points, but overall I feel like I've learned a ton, gotten a lot done, and am leaving the state of the docs in a better place than when I started. That's really all I could hope for! Thanks so much to Jennifer for being an amazing co-lead with whom to share a brain, and to all the fantastic Drupal and docs enthusiasts who've made this experience a positive one.

I hope to see the tentative docs infrastructure plans come to fruition during the coming year. This will result in a small team of dedicated core docs maintainers (including myself) taking over the helm of the future "curated" core docs section, and also see docs maintainers appointed for other contrib projects' curated documentation. And of course, work on API documentation and docs infrastructure will continue; Jennifer and other team members have been focused on this for a while now.

Keep rocking the docs folks, thanks for everything, and I will see you around!

-------------

Jennifer here... I'd like to thank Ariane for a great year of co-leadership! I'm currently planning on staying on as Documentation Team Leader for 2012.

What I'd like to do is take on a deputy leader or co-leader sometime soon (watch http://groups.drupal.org/documentation-team for details and an official call for interest/applications). This way we can have a smooth transition to the next documentation leader, and start the trend of time-limited leadership for positions like this in the Drupal community (to prevent burn-out, let new people have a chance to lead, etc.). Anyway, rest assured I'll still be asking Ariane for advice and help, and I'm excited that she's still excited about being involved in documentation in her new capacity!

Week in DC Tech: January 16th Edition

2012-01-16T17:06:08Z

There’s a lot going on in the Washington, DC technology space this week with meetups on Node.js, nonprofit mapping, big data, SOPA, and more. Below is our roundup of the events, and you can find the full local calendar at DC Tech Events.

Monday, January 16

7:00 - 9:00 pm

NodeDC Meetup: Want to learn more about the high performance javascript engine that’s powering more and more data heavy sites and our set of MapBox tools? Come out for this meetup to learn more about node.js, see what’s being built with it, and meet local developers.

Tuesday, January 17

7:00 pm

Netsquared: Modern Mapping: We’re presenting at this month’s meetup talking about how nonprofits can use web maps to better communicate about their work, track operations, and connect people. We’ll also walk through how technical and non-technical users alike can go from a spreadsheet to an interactive web map in ten minutes using TileMill and MapBox tools.

Erlang Hack Night: Come out to hack on Erlang with other developers. This event will group two to three people of various coding levels together to address a common challenge while pair programming. It’s a great opportunity to improve your Erlang coding and grow the community.

Wednesday, January 18

10:00 am to Noon

Emergency DC Tech Meetup: There’s no doubt that if passed, SOPA will hugely impact the technology community. DC Tech is organizing people to go to the Hill to advocate against the measure.

6:30 pm

Big Data and Mongo DC Joint Meetup: The Big Data and Mongo meetup groups are teaming up this month with presentations on MongoDB and advice for monitoring big data systems.

Thursday, January 19

7:00 pm

ONA: Homicide Watch: This month ONA’s meetup will look at Homicide Watch, a website that covers every single homicide in Washington, DC from the criminal act until conviction. The site has received good attention for giving a voice to victims and for providing some of the most thorough crime coverage in the area.

NodeDC Highlight: The State of Node on Windows

2012-01-16T17:06:09Z

Tonight I will present on the state of Node.js on the Windows platform at this month’s NodeDC meetup. We kick off at 7:00 pm at Stetson’s.

Node.js is the high performance javascript engine at the core of MapBox. Six months ago their team announced plans to support Windows with Microsoft’s direct help. This was exciting to us because it meant TileMill, our open source map design studio, could also potentially support Windows. In November when the first release of Node landed that included Windows support, we started scoping out what a TileMill port to Windows might look like. As you can see from Friday’s launch of Mapbox.com/Windows, it looks hot.

At tonight’s meetup I will talk about how to get started with Node on Windows, gotchas, and what to watch for in the future. Please RSVP if you can make it. You can also sign up for updates about TileMill on Windows as we get closer to launch.

The NodeDC meetups are held once a month and are open to everyone, with people of all levels of node.js and programming expertise welcome. Check out nodedc.github.com for more details, and follow @NodeDC on Twitter for updates.

StreetEasy Makes the Switch to MapBox from Google

2012-01-12T04:16:03Z

StreetEasy.com just switched to MapBox.com hosting, setting them up to save $250,000 this year compared to paying Google’s new 2012 map API fees. More than just being a huge cost savings, the map they designed in house using OpenStreetMap data in TileMill and integrated on their site using Leaflet just looks sick and gives them nice editorial control over everything from neighborhood boundaries to what labels show up where, details that matter when your product (real estate) is all about location. With MapBox hosting’s compositing, they can add additional map layers without redoing their base map or seeing a performance hit. Sebastian Delmont, who leads the technical team at StreetEasy just blogged the details about the switch in “Good bye, Google Maps… thanks for all the fish”. I wanted to highlight a couple key excerpts, which hint to the much larger trend of a convergence of open data, open source, and a large field of mapping providers. This ain’t 2005 any more.

StreetEasy decided to build our own maps using, among other tools, OpenStreetMap, TileMill, MapBox and Leaflet, instead of paying hundreds of thousands of dollars per year to Google. And yes, the money pushed us into doing it, but we’re happier with the result because we now control the contents of our maps. more

…

We did the math and came up with numbers that reminded me of Oracle licensing in 1999. Six, seven, eight hundred thousand dollars. We met with Google salespeople, expecting to negotiate better terms, and they were nice, and they offered us discounts, but only to about half of what we’ve calculated. more

In our opinion, their price was off by an order of magnitude. It’s very, very hard to work out a $2 CPM cost in any site’s business model, when most of the time, if you’re lucky, you’re making $1 CPM off your pages. And yes, StreetEasy does much better than that, and it would not have bankrupted us, but it would have also meant giving away a significant chunk of our profits. more

Pricing wise we think this will cost StreetEasy around $1,000 a month hosting with MapBox. They are set up with a $499 Premium account and are using the new pricing add-ons that we just rolled out. This is more than just talking about gig transfer, this is about compositing, analytics, and simple API integration, and here they are on MapBox.

A look at StreetEasy’s main NYC base layer in MapBox’s analytics.

The pricing conversation part is big, but what is bigger is how hot this map looks and how much that matters. Beautiful maps matter. It matters to both StreetEasy and it matters in general and our bet is that once people realize how easy it is going to be to make custom maps with TileMill and awesome open data sites like OpenStreetMap there is going to be a larger paradigm shift. As Sebastian said, “I think 2012 is going to be the year of the Open Map. And I’m happy to be part of the front lines.” And StreetEasy is not alone. This move follows on the heals of Neil Sweeney’s post on Fubra making the move to “Google Maps Free Alternatives” and more recently Ed Freyfogle from Nestoria blogging on “Why (and how) we’ve switched away from Google Maps” and in general fresh excitement around OpenStreetMap just rocking, like MIT’s post on “‘Wikipedia of Maps’ Challenges Google”. Just today Sean Larkin from ThinkShout, a creative open source team that does a lot of environmental work out in Portland captured what this shift means for even small NGOs.

While beautiful maps have been a staple of the web for the last decade, development of highly-customized maps historically has been expensive and has required a very specialized skill set and tools…Fortunately, the advent of HTML5, CSS3, jQuery, and other modern web technologies has paved the way for new, open source, cross-platform compliant mapping technologies to develop stylish and interactive maps. more

This market here could be huge. Google has been saying that they are only going to be charging 0.38% of users that are over their TOS limits - but that is still 4,000 people based on estimates from BuiltWith.com, which has tracked 1 million sites using Google maps. Market wise this breaks down to: 19.7% news/media, 14% businesses, 10% shopping, 8% travel and 5% government.

Like I said last week when I blogged about our investment priorities for the year, 2012 is going to be awesome.

From Google Maps to Open Source With MapBox and Leaflet

2012-01-12T04:16:03Z

Switching from the Google Maps API to an open source library like Leaflet gives you the ability to choose between new, open, and less expensive mapping alternatives like MapBox, MapQuest Open, and OpenStreetMap.

Since releasing our API connector Wax and documenting the MapBox API in its totality, we’ve paid special attention to making sure that MapBox maps work in numerous clients - Modest Maps, Leaflet, Polymaps, OpenLayers and even the Google Maps API v3. We’ve been able to do this because the entire specification is open source, including our interactivity code, and because we provide something that Google doesn’t: direct tile access.

While you can use TileJSON to automatically configure our maps, it’s just a shortcut to adding a normal layer to a mapping API. It’s simple to use MapBox tiles without using any code from MapBox - so it’s also easy to try out different tile providers to find the one that best fits your usage and budget. Leaflet is a great place to start in making the jump from Google because it’s very similar to the Google Maps API.

Creating a basic map with Google Maps:

var map = new google.maps.Map(document.getElementById('map_canvas'), {
  center: new google.maps.LatLng(51.505, -0.09),
  zoom: 8,
  mapTypeId: google.maps.MapTypeId.ROADMAP
});

and in Leaflet:

var map = new L.Map('map', {
    center: new L.LatLng(51.505, -0.09),
    zoom: 8,
    layers: new L.TileLayer('http://a.tiles.mapbox.com/v3/mapbox.world-bright/{z}/{x}/{y}.png')
});

Markers and overlays in Leaflet

Unlike Modest Maps, the nano-sized framework we use for MapBox Hosting’s embed functionality, Leaflet supports an array of markers and polygon overlays very similar to Google Maps. There are custom icons, and you can bring in your GeoJSON for polygon overlays.

For large datasets and powerful styling controls, TileMill is unbeatable, but smaller dynamic data can work really well in Leaflet - and often better than it does with the Google Maps API. One example of this is StreetEasy, a real estate aggregator that just made the switch from Google Maps to custom MapBox maps.

Adding a marker in the Google Maps API looks like:

var marker = new google.maps.Marker({
    position: new google.maps.LatLng(51.505, -0.09),
    map: map,
    title:'Hello World!'
});

And in Leaflet it isn’t much different:

var marker = new L.Marker(new L.LatLng(51.505, -0.09));
marker.bindPopup('Hello, world!');
map.addLayer(marker);

Try out Leaflet

If you’re looking to experiment with alternatives to Google Maps, Leaflet’s a great way to go. It gives you flexibility between tile providers, a rich feature set, and unlike the Google Maps API it’s BSD-licensed open source code. For help working with Leaflet and MapBox, just ask us on the MapBox support site.

MapBox for fast, reliable custom map tile hosting

In addition to your data markers and polygons rendered through Leaflet, you can add in layers of map tiles for a custom base map, or additional features like restaurants, transit stops, or neighborhood boundaries. Try using TileMill to style your own data or pull in extracts from OpenStreetMap. When you’re ready to share your maps, check out MapBox plans starting at just $5 a month. MapBox includes server-side compositing so your maps will be fast even as you add more layers and work well on mobiles.

Geo DC Meetup Tonight: User Experience

2012-01-11T20:13:13Z

The first Geo DC meetup of the year is tonight, January 11, at 7:00 pm at Stetson’s Bar and Grill, and will focus on the user experience behind maps. Our cartographer AJ will present on the design and user experience of maps integrated into websites, such as the World Bank’s climate change maps, and map-based web interfaces like you see on the Opportunity Index. He’ll run through key points to keep in mind when designing online maps and interfaces that users enjoy, understand, and get more meaning out of.

Tim Deegan from Forum One will talk about how map design has evolved over the years and touch on some of the latest thinking in user experience, and Andy Chosak from the Mobility Lab will talk about designing Transit Near Me, an application that shows transit services near your current location.

The Geo DC meetup happens once a month, usually on the first Wednesday of the month. The next meetup will be on February 1 and will focus on slum mapping. For updates, join the meetup group and follow @geonerdsdc on Twitter.

See you tonight!

Week in DC Tech: January 9th Edition

2012-01-09T20:08:59Z

After a few slow weeks around the holidays, the DC tech space is heating back up with events on map design, startup networking, and social events like the monthly Nerd Nite. Below are our picks for the week, and you can find a full calendar at DC Tech Events. Have a great week!

Wednesday, January 11

Noon

Hackers and Founders Lunchtime Meetups: This brand new meetup brings technology creators and investors together in small groups over lunch. It’s organized by the folks from the Hacker News meetup group and powered by Wednesdays.com.

7:00 - 9:00 pm

Geo DC Meetup: This month the Geo Meetup will look at the experience of using maps, with lightning talks on designing intuitive maps, how maps have changed over the years, and special considerations needed in transit maps. This meetup always draws a enthusiastic crowd of folks working in GIS, geography, and map and is a great opportunity to meet people working in the field and learn about what they are making.

Saturday, January 14

6:30 - 9:30 pm

Nerd Nite: The Republican primaries have brought religion to the forefront of politics, but one question not being answered is why isn’t America more secular. This month’s Nerd Nite will answer this, plus why some smart people box and the environmental impact of chicken farming. In between talks, you can listen to music from local artist Adrian Krygowski and of course grab some drinks.

Announcing New MapBox Add-on Packages for Power Users

2012-01-10T04:28:01Z

In addition to MapBox.com’s growing customer base, our users’ hosted maps are scaling in popularity and complexity. Today we’re announcing aggressive pricing to add more storage and transfer bandwidth to your MapBox Premium account. The idea is to provide simple, transparent pricing add-on packages on demand, with no long term commitments. This flexibly and scalability lets your account grow and change just like your business, in affordable $50 increments that you can turn on or off on a monthly basis.

MapBox accounts include ample storage for you to share interactive data visualizations and custom base layers that you create with your own data. Now as your storage needs grow, you can add additional packs of 10GB for just $50 each per month.

When your map embeds go viral or you integrate them into a website or mobile app with high traffic, you can affordably scale up your MapBox hosting account by adding extra sets of transfer bandwidth at just $50 a month per 50GB. You get the ability to host custom interactive web maps at a fraction of what large search engine companies charge.

Increase your storage and bandwidth amounts by going to the Account tab in MapBox Hosting, and scale up or down as your needs change.

Extremely competitive pricing

MapBox’s sole business is to help you design and share fast, beautiful interactive maps for the web and mobile devices. As a result, we built a rock-solid hosting infrastructure that can scale for the most popular sites online at an incredibly affordable price. Concretely, 1,000 additional map views beyond your account’s included transfer bandwidth will cost you about 32 cents. Google charges $4.00 for each additional 1,000 map views for stock public maps, and more for Premier accounts. That’s a savings of over 12 times with MapBox, let alone all the additional features you get like compositing, analytics, embed widgets, web-based and offline mobile support, and complete design control using your own data. And there is no long-term contract to sign — just scale up or down your storage and bandwidth allotments monthly as your needs change.

Committed to open source and open data

In additional to fair pricing, MapBox comes with no restrictions on how and where you share your maps. You can make custom maps using your own data in both public and private applications at no additional cost. TileMill, our map design studio, is completely free and open source, so there is no additional cost for using one of our base maps or designing your own from scratch.

We are also committed to providing the best data for maps by supporting the OpenStreetMap community. You can add an OpenStreetMap layer under your own maps for street level detail. Our MapBox world maps feature clean world maps for data overlays as well as satellite and terrain imagery from public sources like NASA and Natural Earth.

Make the switch to MapBox

It’s easy to migrate your mapping stack to MapBox. Check out our extensive documentation at MapBox.com/help to get familiar with our services and the MapBox API. We offer our premium subscribers 24-hour turn around on any questions and can help you prepare for a migration to MapBox - just post a note at support.mapbox.com. Learn more about our Premium services, and take the tour. If you have questions about what kind of hosting will suit your needs or want to get on the phone to learn more, just contact our team.