DrupalCon DC

DrupalCon DC Day 1 Highlights:

• Search Engine Optimizing the giant blue screens at the front of the main hall. First, we cracked the big blue screen algorithm. It was so simple! They were streaming all Twitter posts with #drupalcon tags, so it was insanely easy to litter the screen with incredible linkbait. Competition was fierce, but we managed to shoot to the front page of the big blue screen on every submission. No word on whether anybody else thought it was funny.
• Getting Wi-Fi every couple hours or so.
• Having my mind riddled by a 13-year-old programming whiz.
• Enjoying the awesome SEO session. We learned some cool new tricks, but were pleased to note that we already do pretty much everything they recommended.

Coolest session… The semantic web stuff, especially Calais. This thing looks sweet. Semantic web is a newer concept for me, but super exciting. We’re thinking up a cool way to package Calais into news feeds and blogging services for new sites… Maybe there’s a way to use it for our own site. Let’s find out! I’ll run this post through Calais and see what happens.

…

It suggested I tag this post with Search Engine, Wi-Fi, semantic web, and big blue screen algorithm. This task was kind of beneath Calais’ power, since it’s built to churn tag data from mountains of news content, but it’s still pretty cool.

Sleep time. It’s technically Day 2.

Today was my first day at a DrupalCon and I had a great time. Some of the highlights: getting seriously schooled by Dmitri Gaskin, Dries telling us about Drupal progress, and discovering Calais.

Tomorrow should be fun. I’m looking forward to the subjects of scaling and sharing data.

We’re excited to do lots of Drupal here in DC. So excited, IN FACT, that we’re working on websites right now instead of sleeping and dreaming about working on websites.

Day 1 of DC was pretty sweet. We threw down at beloved and historic Ben’s Chili Bowl. I also saw many, many dead trilobites and Grandmaster Flash’s original turntable at the National Museums of Natural History and American History, respectively.

We’ll keep you so posted. First session’s in four and a half hours!