MyNaTour is a travel community committed to sharing “real and responsible tourism,” living green, and respecting local ways of life. Their web presence is a fine Drupal site, and they asked us for a little help in making it even better.
We upgraded MaNatour’s core Drupal installation plus about three dozen modules, correcting several major security issues along the way. We also added Facebook integration, migrated the site’s hosting to Bluehost, removed an obsolete subdomain, and more.
Thing: Social, Super-Sized by social-creature. “The same technology that allows us to be more connected than ever before imaginable, on its flip side, perhaps even simply through contrast, has increased our capacity for loneliness. We have built up a new tolerance level, and all we do is want more more more. Hence, the compulsion to feel a part of something, something massive, surrounded by hundreds of thousands of other people, all experiencing the same trending topic stream together as it scrolls by.” We should feel both comfort and horror when we think of the ways technology is enhancing (taking advantage of?) our prehistoric/biological need for social connection. In other words, how would Genghis Khan have used Foursquare?
Thing: 10 Ways to Access Blocked Stuff on the Web by Lifehacker. Now, if a site wants you to pay money for content, and you choose to access that content without paying, you’re stealing — whether you like Rupert Murdoch or not doesn’t change that fact. However, there are plenty of times when we’re unable to get to something, and there’s a perfectly good reason to bypass whatever’s in the way. Whether that means getting around Gmail downage, avoiding an overeager office or university page-blocker so you can get work-related research done, dodging an oppressive government, or watching legally streamed TV from another country, the internet always wins.
Thing: Why Teenagers Are Growing Up Slowly Today from Newsweek and Kids Learn Math Easily When They Control Their Own Learning from Psychology Today. The construct that comes to mind when we use the word school has little in common with the ideal learning environment. And it’s not about tweakable elements like student-to-teacher ratio — it’s about the whole concept of school and what we’re really trying to accomplish. You know this. But it’s worth repeating from top to bottom until everyone knows this.
Double Bonus
I swear I’ll do three sets each of Radioheads and Ghostfaces at max weight, max reps for saying this out loud, but CONFESSIONTIME: I like two Creed songs. So it’s with only 99% ironic passion that I’m able to join in the LOLETARIAT on mocking this song Scott Stapp recorded for the Florida Marlins.
But you’re telling me you’re serving up “One-strike-two-strikes, swing aweey-ahhh/ A Diving Catch-hh! A stohe-len beeaase-ahh/ A perrfec game-uh! A trih-pul play-ahh!/ Anoe-tha playhoff ra-ace, YES?/ WORLSEERIESCHEIMPSWE’LL [CRACK!] BEE!”, all over Friday Night Lights guitars run through the NASCAR-mosh filter? Oh, it’s summertime, friends:
Ambitious dunk contest participant somehow, someway winds up with half his leg submerged in the basket. You want to talk about mainlining social media — note the immediate cameraphones-to-ladders ratio once everyone realizes what’s happened.
The citizen journalism impulses of today’s youth? Flourishing.
Maybe now that football’s over, the internet’s jock/nerd balance has swung the unsportsy way. For whatever reason, this week’s 3BT is by far the nerdiest yet. If I knew any Star Trek quotes, I’d drop one here; you couldn’t even stop me.
Your socially awkward links:
How nerdy was the fifth week of the ’10s? Barbie’s a computer engineer now. Guess math’s just not as hard as it used to be! Either way, this dad approves. Smart Barbie has the green light to hang out with my daughter. (Barbie: biggest dark horse nerd since Vin Diesel? [X-Files quote].)
Splitting up the U.S. into seven cliquey regions, based on data pulled from Facebook. Here’s the data source thing you can use to see which Facebook fan pages are most popular in your city and which other cities your neighbors are most connected to. Also, you’ll learn that Taraji P. Henson is apparently one of the most popular people in the world. Had no idea! [Lord of the Rings quote], know what I mean? Ha ha!
This nerd conducting a live screencast clicks to watch himself conducting his live screencast, and hell follows after. At the :31-second mark, the Nerd Hall of Mirrors soars into the Nerd Hall of Fame, [Monty Python quote].
Watching football is a big waste of time. The average NFL game features only about 11 or 12 minutes of live gameplay content. The rest is replays, crowd shots, loitering, promos, and so on. But is this really a problem? When watching a game by myself, I can play with my daughter, read blogs, work (as I’m doing right now — Hi mom! — there’s 6:16 to go in Cowboys-Vikings!), etc. without really missing much, and lots of people Tivo games anyway. When watching games with friends, there’s plenty of breaks in the football we can use to discuss football. Who really loses in this arrangement? ELSEWHEREINSPORTS:Calculating Charlie Brown’s Wins, Losses, and Other Pitching Stats based on one man’s Peanuts extrapolatin’. No, not this Charlie Brown.
Regarding the strange and unreadable Esquire thing about Jay-Z… Oh man. Plenty of writers had problems with its content, while others focused on its baffling syntax. (FULLDISCLOSURE: I liked that “campefire flickers” line.) I’m not sure which part of this messy, messy article qualifies as a “Best” anything. It’s the most forced writing I’ve ever read — it reads like it was written by a suburban 15-year-old boy who always looks for chances to remind his teachers that Mos Def is poetry. Maybe it’s the article’s amazing music-writer-unifying properties, as the spectacle of rap writers rallying to shoot it down was inspiring.
Jimmy Kimmel lays into Jay Leno on Leno’s own show. Around 1:40, Kimmel dings Leno and Leno refuses to play along. You can see Kimmel’s eyes light up, as he realizes he gets to tee off on Leno for the next four minutes. Jay loses his audience, and all he can do is wait it out. I don’t watch any of these shows, so I don’t really have a dog well-trained competitor in this fight, but Leno is impossible to like at this point.
“Why would anybody ever wanna leave Baltimore? That’s what I’m askin’.”
The new trailer for Treme, the upcoming series by The Wire’s creators:
I’m sure many people caught the dichotomy between the New York Times’ puff piece on scammy Facebook gaming company Zynga (aka the people behind FarmParty or whatever) and TechCrunch’s super truth-diggy journalism on the same subject. Fake Steve collated the whole story well, so we’ll roll with his perspective.
You know when you hear those stupid woe-is-us “91% of American high school seniors have never heard of Thomas Jefferson, Barack Obama, or God, but they know all the words to every rock ‘n’ roll song by Lil Diddy” things? You know how common sense always tells you that can’t possibly be true? Somebody finally put it to the test: Yes, the kids are allright. Of course they are. I mean, they have freaking Wikipedia to fall back on.
The Yankees’ payroll is larger than the payrolls of several other teams combined. This may be possible to repeat often enough, but Joe Posnanski isn’t taking any chances; in fact, he’s written the perfect antidote to watching the Yankees try and squeeze into Everybody Doubted Us hats and We’re Just Having Fun Out There shirts.
Your socially awkward links:
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