Simple message storing with ActiveMQ

I have been doing some digging into monitoring queues on ActiveMQ and pushing the messages into a message store for what ever reason. The main reason for doing this would be monitoring error messages and giving developers and operations a way of exploring what is happening in a queue if data at a recipient system […]


Attending the Open Humanities Hack

I’ve just come back from a couple of excellent days of Humanities Hacking, organised by the King’s College, London Digital Humanities department and the Open Knowledge Foundation. To be fair, it went slightly differently than I thought it would. After an interesting start trying to find the room we were in, a few of us […]


A new project

Helsinki, Finland. OkFest. I had just come out of the Hans Rosling talk (or seeing it on a screen) and was talking to various openGlam people about it and we were rather excited. The conversation started off innocently enough. It started small enough as well. As these things do, it grew slightly. One Sunday (and […]


Thoughts on the Drupal Ladder, the Oxford day and communities

I went to a Drupal Ladder event organised by Torchbox just north of Oxford. I had a lot of fun and learned a fair amount.  The ladder itself is a community initiative which is aimed at getting more contributors pushing patches back to the Drupal core, especially Drupal 8. It also serves as a way […]


Communities, hackers and curators – some thoughts on parts of the openGLAM meeting

I was fortunate enough to get invited to the OpenGLAM expert meeting (at which I felt a slight fraud – but you get over these things quickly) on Building the Cultural Commons as part of the OKFestival. James Harriman-Smith and I had attempted to do something similar with Panton Principles for Humanities and Literature a […]


Looking at mentions and users in a Twitter message

I was preparing for the recent OK Festival and discovered that the Weird Council was taking place; a conference on the awesome China Miéville. As you may guess, I am a bit of a fan. Unfortunately I was not aware that it had taken place so I watched it on Twitter. Whilst on my travels, […]


Aping Google Spreadsheets with Drupal Entity Forms and Droogle

One recent small project which I worked on was the integration of Entity Forms with Google Spreadsheets. In porting the corporate site, we had the challenge of having to provide some existing Google forms on to the new Drupal platform. Since Entity Forms are used, a nice integration was fairly assured with the Rules module. […]


A quick overview of Entity Forms on Drupal

I’ve dived into Drupal’s entity forms project recently to build a series of forms, some of which re-use the same fields. In the past, I’ve used Webforms which allows you to build a form quickly but not reuse the actual fields. I found that it also has issues with the integration in that it appears […]


Altering the SugarCRM UI to highlight areas

Recently I have been looking at ways of highlighting certain feelings of information in SugarCRM. I use the community edition at work and have been working on a few modifications. A recent task has been looking at highlighting some fields to a user if a certain field is activated, or showing a message to the […]


Reading in remote data sources into Drupal 7 part one – the custom code way

I’ve been looking at integrating a variety of different data sources in a Drupal project for various reasons but generally from the perspective of pulling data from existing sources. These do not necessarily go into the same system and equally, only parts may be required for by differing systems. In a way, I am trying […]