charity

Once again, I presented and helped organize a great Oxford Geek Night last Wednesday. The keynote talks were amazing, and both about trains. Trains, APIs and laser scanning: how good is that?

I did a microslot talk, as well as trying to hold the night together. It was on how you can turn Kindles into literacy, for those who might get a Kindle this Christmas and are feeling charitably inclined on St Stephen's Day. You can download slides and listen to the audio already, which is great.

If I don't blog beforehand - and it's unlikely that I will, let's be honest - have a great Christmas, won't you?

The Red Cross is taking donations towards the ongoing effort in Japan following the earthquakes, tsunami and now nuclear reactor explosions in the country.

You can give money to the British Red Cross, and the funds will be used by Japanese Red Cross workers currently helping with the crisis. Click here to donate.

Torchbox's Team Drupal has been working on Greenpeace UK's website for a couple of years now. One of the major single pieces of work we've done is to redevelop what was originally a separate PHP application for their network of local active supporters. Greenpeace's campaigning relies heavily on the enthusiasm of this network: promoting campaigns, raising awareness, even taking part in actions. So it made sense for them to want to move their supporters' site into the main Drupal site, and take advantage of the permissions framework and content management there to help active members become active online, and also publicize their offline events as easily as possible.

We built Get Active using Organic Groups and a sizeable amount of custom module and theme development. It was quite an uphill struggle, as Drupal 5's themeing isn't particularly flexible compared to what's demanded of websites these days. Also, OG is quite a walled-garden module, with a limited UI and (certainly before D6) very few easy inroads in terms of extending it. Still, we were very happy with the result and pleased that so many of Greenpeace's supporters, quiet before on the separate site, have become enthusiastic contributors in their new home.

So it was an extra accolade, a welcome if completely unexpected surprise, to hear that the Get Active site was made a Webby honoree in the "Activism" category. Although I was a (decidedly hands-off) technical lead, the real work was done by Garrett, David B, Sam and the designers, who should be really proud of this recognition. Nice one, guys: have a drink on me. Well, on James. Right, James?

People at Torchbox, both singly and as a company team, are committed to helping fight climate change. As a web company, we think we can help most (in our small way) by helping our clients, especially environmental charities, fulfill their potential on the web, and by encouraging green behaviour among our staff: cycling breakfasts, cheap-bike schemes, car sharing, not flying to meetings or on work jollies.

Still, fighting the good green fight can feel pretty lonely, and sometimes you forget not just how many people are on your side in the next office or town, but also of the billions of people who have something to lose to climate change. So as a bit of fun, and to remind ourselves what it's all about, we've recently given the green finger to climate change. Here we are, doing just that:

Want to join in? You can respond to the original YouTube video.