Event Plugins and Schema

If you work with a performing arts organization, you might very well use WordPress for your website. And if so, you might use a common plugin for ease of managing your concerts and other events. At CAPACOA, through the Linked Digital Futures project, I wrote an article to those that are interested…

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Future of Technology in Public Legal Education

Last summer, I co-wrote a research paper with some colleagues on the future of technology. While the full report hasn’t been released, I wanted to share how recent advances in technology offer new avenues to engage and educate the public.  Our research team conducted an extensive literature review and contacted…

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Digital Engagement and why you should care

The digital world has impacted every area of our lives, and design is no different. Imagining design today without digital tools seems impossible to consider. From computers to the software running on them, much of our work is tied to the computer. While we work on illustration and life drawing…

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Creative BC Spotlight Story

“Creative courage for me is about having the right partnerships—it’s a powerful way to inspire creativity so that we can be courageous together.”  Article excerpted from 2015/2016 Impact Report from Creative BC. Jai (Phillip) Djwa has always had an issue with fairness. From a very young age, he noticed things happening…

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Optimizing Your Campaigns

There is an exciting change happening in the world of web design and it’s impacting the relationships people have with their websites. Clients no longer think about their websites as an online space to “design and dump” information. It used to be the case that organizations would launch a website…

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Track Your Digital Media Projects Like A Pro

In our last blog post about our process for optimizing websites, I mentioned some of the tools we use to measure metrics. In this post, I will go into more detail about these tools. (Note: This won’t cover all of the testing tools we use in a full cycle of…

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Making Creative Digital Media Campaigns

It is increasingly clear that non-profits struggle to attract attention to their causes. Despite the web having unparalleled reach and efficiency, it has actually become harder at times to get your message heard by constituents and followers. Why has the cost of acquisition for new members and supporters increased (sometimes…

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Planning Stakeholder Engagement, Part 1: Getting Started

I love facilitating gatherings for stakeholder engagement. It’s a key part of the Deep Listening phase in our methodology. When we talk about Deep Listening, it really means understanding what internal and external stakeholders are thinking about. Stakeholder engagement is a very necessary part of our methodology of Deep Listening….

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The Mysterious World of Developers: Version Control

Have you ever heard developers using terms like “Git,” “SVN,” “revision control,” “version control,” or “repo,” and wondered what they were talking about? If you’re hearing these words, it’s usually a good thing. The processes they’re talking about in those mysterious terms save time and money by allowing developers to…

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How to Kiss Your Competitive Edge Goodbye

No matter what business you’re in, there will always be someone who comes along claiming to do the same thing, but better. We posted an article a while back, called Using Customer Personas to Develop a Competitive Edge, looking at how to build websites based on the nuanced goals of…

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The Age of Engagement: Youth Online

Recently, I had the opportunity to spend time with my teenage children and some of their friends. We were watching TV, but of course everyone had their phone and there was a constant conversation back and forth about various facts gleaned from movie database IMDb and the general playing of…

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Getting Recognized for Passion and Creativity

At Agentic, we’re privileged to continually work with truly talented and creative people. With these people, we work hard and strive to continue to push the innovative envelope. Well, we’re proud to announce that some of our collaborative hard work has been recognized and that we’ve won some awards! Most…

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Planning Your Project: Thinking About What Can Go Wrong

Premortems Are Vital to Our Process Talking about risk with new clients isn’t always glamorous – but neither is collecting the broken pieces of a failed project. When taking on a project of any scale, failure is always a possibility, but it’s one that we work hard to avoid. Risk…

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How to Rock Your First Year as a Web Designer

With the constant growth in the New Media and Web development industry, it seems that many post secondary institutions are in a race to offer the quickest digital skills training programs that they can. “One year to gain certification in web design” sounds fantastic, and nine months sounds even better…

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The Age of Engagement: The Tech Divide

Jenna* has been in foster care since she was 9 years old. She’ll be turning 18 next month, and as she sits cross-legged, listening to her boyfriend talk about his experience aging out of care, her eyes are glued below the edge of the meeting table. She’s texting. She has…

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Drupal vs. WordPress – What’s Best for Me?

What is a CMS anyhow? Both WordPress and Drupal are Content Management Systems (or CMS for short). A CMS is online software that allows non-technical people to manage a website and edit its content (this means text, images, graphics, calendars). Ease of Installation:WordPress is easier to install. WordPress is effective…

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2015 in Review

It’s been another great year for the team at Agentic. We launched many projects, won a number of awards, spoke at several conferences and Phillip even managed to sneak in a month-long sabbatical. One project we launched that we are most proud of is AgedOut.com. This was one of the…

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2014 Visual Trends

Here’s a great image that makes sense of the Top Visual Design Trends for 2014, courtesy of iStock. I think it’s bang on. I’m even interested to note the multiracial faces emerging more as well as creative collaboration.   Author: Phillip Djwa

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Using Customer Personas to Develop a Competitive Edge

Looking to understand how human beings impact website design? It’s something we do every day. Make sure to leave us a comment if you like this article. Here’s a quote from Dorie Clark’s article on “Using Customer Personas to Develop a Competitive Edge”: It’s human nature: When we design products,…

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Making Digital Sexy Part 2

(This is a continuation of my previous blog post if you want to read the first part, Making Digital Sexy Part 1) Well, OK, you say, but how else can you get buy-in? One way to think about it is to realize that you have to take a longer run…

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Transmedia Reflections

As the transmedia experience is overtaking the entertainment, advertising and non-for-profit world, educators are re-thinking how to guide students in the skills of storytelling. Recently, I’ve been asked to present my take on the latest media buzzword at several conferences and university panels. I start by asking my audience, often…

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Impact Producing

Agentic sponsored the VIFF Impact Award with Story Money Impact. This year’s winner was “Just Eat It: A Food Waste Story” from filmmakers Grant Baldwin and Jenny Rustemeyer. If it’s not apparent, we believe that storytelling can be a powerful agent of change. Despite being hit every day with provocative…

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Katherine Dodds on Mobilizing Audiences

The name Katherine Dodds has been synonymous with documentary filmmaking since before “impact producing” was a word. Kat seems to have written the textbook on how to successfully change minds using documentary film as her tool. As the founder and creative director of the independent social communications initiative Hello Cool…

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Digital Green Gift Guide

Let’s face it: gift-giving can be daunting. You want to give your friends something they want, something they’ll use, but also something that you can feel comfortable giving. You don’t want to give something they’ll only use once, but you also want them to have something concrete to unwrap… So…

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We’re Hiring! Technology Lead

[[{“type”:”media”,”view_mode”:”media_large”,”fid”:”187″,”attributes”:{“alt”:””,”class”:”media-image”,”height”:”450″,”typeof”:”foaf:Image”,”width”:”820″}}]]ÊAn exciting new opportunity for Agentic is now Êup! I’mlooking for a Technology Lead to work with us here in Vancouver.The Technology Lead position is a key position that develops clientand internal projects through strategy and planning; implementing anddeploying; and providing operational support for the Agenticmethodology. This is a full-time…

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Spring is coming

Spring is coming. Feels that way with the flowers in Vancouver just starting to appear. What a busy winter it’s been. We moved in December to a new space in the historic Dominion Building in downtown Vancouver. It’s been great to have a switch after seven years in Railtown. I…

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My Website has been Hacked! What Now?

You’ve just discovered your website has something on it you didn’t put there. Perhaps your front page now declares the “l33t” skills of a script-kiddy, or Google or your hosting provider has flagged your site as being compromised. You realize your site has been hacked! What do you do?Time to…

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Making Digital Sexy Part 1

Ok, imagine you are a digital strategist in a not-for-profit organization, and you’ve been working hard on a proposal to bring to your senior leadership team. It’s finally time to really use digital in a transformative way, and your proposal just rocks.ÊBut when you finally pitch your ideas, and even…

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National Blog Action Day Oct 16th, 2013

Today is one of the days that I appreciate how lucky I am to be free. Free with much more than the basic necessities. I guess with Thanksgiving this past weekend in Canada, it gave me a chance to reflect on that. How the fact that I am not faced…

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Web Design Trends for 2013

As we look back on 2013, here are some of the trends we’ve noticed.Many of the organizations we serve struggle to achieve a higher ranking on the search engines. Even searches for your organization name may not lead to your website. Search engines can make or break the chances for…

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Opinion: Facts are meaningless

I recently made a controversial statement during a presentation: facts are meaningless. The audience responded with nervous laughter, probably wondering how to digest this remark. But in our business of working with social change, this landscape means that we need to consider our work in this context.When I talk about…

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Working with Social Change Orgs

One of the things that we recognize at Agentic is the increased specialization that we have in working with social change organizations. These are typically not-for-profit, but can be government departments or societies. We’ve done literally hundreds of projects with organizations like this.From a communications perspective, these kinds of organizations…

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Drupal Business Summit

ÊThe Drupal Business Summit is the perfect opportunity for Vancouver-area firms and organizations to discover what Drupal can provide for you. It’s a chance to hear and talk to many people that are actively using Drupal today, as well as hear case studies that cut to the heart of why…

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Core Driving Platform

As a digital media agency, our social change business and organizational clients are no longer coming to us with one or two websites, but with a handful or more. We strive to make these sites part of a seamless digital ecology. This means that the different parts of an organizations…

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The BIG list of Lorum Ipsum Generators

One of the most important parts of the website development process is content generation. It’s key for us to have copy on the page in order to complete the design details that make a site look polished.We’ve often found this to be a challenge for our clients. Sometimes it’s hard…

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FCKeditor and Firefox 15 – content creation issue

One of our clients reported an issue creating content in Firefox last week and we’ve determined its a conflict within the newest release of Firefox, version 15, and the FCKeditor. The two signs of this issue are:- You do not see the “Switch to plain text editor” link when creating…

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Major IE security exploit

Many of our clients use IE as their browser of choice, as do many of their site visitors. We’ve noted in the past that the Drupal admin interface is optimized for Firefox, that is certain admin features work better in Firefox than IE. Another major incentive to switch browsers came…

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WYSIWYG: how to Get what you want

WYSIWYG editors, those buttons on a web form that look like a word processor’s interface, are very popular with people editing content on the web, and for very good reasons. For one thing, they allow you to add text styling when editing a page. WYSIWYG editors (ideally) help to create…

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Tools of Change

The theme of this year’s Web of Change was “Winning!” and one of the sessions I found most interesting had to do with the tools organizations use to support, promote and manage their work. While ideas are the foundation of change, nothing can be implemented without the use of digital…

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How to determine your web budget

Sometimes we will receive website requests for proposals from organizations that do not post their budget. This is a problem for us because it makes it very difficult to respond appropriately to the request. Why? If you think about asking a general contractor to complete some renovations on your house,…

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10 Search Engine Optimization Tips for Non-Profits

Despite the explosion in social media and other online distractions and communication tools, search remains one of the most common online activities, cutting across all demographics. Young, old, rich, poor, all over the world – everyone searches.Ê And in the moment when they enter a query into a search engine…

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Why our methodology is like brain surgery

Imagine that you have the need for a brain surgeon. Horrible I know, but imagine you do for the moment.Ê Then imagine that before your surgery, you said, “Listen, I know my brain pretty well, and I’ve met a lot of other brains in my life. I think you need…

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What makes a great client?

Recently, ÊI was thinking about how does an organization be a “great” client in order to move a web project forward? It came up because I had to laugh at a recent post of comments that graphic designers in Ireland have received from clients that theyÊturned into posters (the polar…

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What makes a great client? Part II

In my previous post, I talked about what makes a great client, andÊI thought I would return to the subject as it is always an exchange of information that happens when we work with clients. You can readÊPart 1 of what makes a great client.One issue that I thought would…

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A Bright New Year

Quite delighted to start the new year with a number of successful projects and general good news. Chief among them is that we have received word that we have a successful grant application for a Canadian television show and digital media component!Ê It will keep us busy all through 2011.Ê…

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Digital storytelling in the awkward years

The structural transition facing traditional media can certainly trigger a lot of anxiety. As a recent journalism graduate, I experienced much of it in J-school, where the prevalent feeling around the online platform was apprehension: declining newspaper sales, lack of online monetization models, the rise of citizen journalism – it…

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Spring Updates

Spring is finally here in the air, with the cherry trees in full bloom. It’s a good time to take stock as we head finally into some warmer weather.We’ve had a number of great projects lately, with many of them taking some very interesting new dimensions to our work.We’ve launched…

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Summertime update

ÊVancouver has been a cold and wet place this summer, apparently with the most rain in 20 years! Still, we’ve been working away and are happy to welcome a number of new projects, including a web redesign for the Writer’s Union of Canada, a strategic creative engagement for the Coquitlam…

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Siege biscuits: You really can eat just one

ÊToday we’re celebrating the launch of our Battle Castle flash game and teaser site with siege biscuits!These not-so-tasty treats were carried by armies as they prepared for the long siege ahead. The hard, twice-cooked bread was resistant to mould and made from whatever scraps of grain, fat and salt that…

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BC Self Advocacy Foundation Case Study

A recent project that we’ve had a chance to work on was a project for the BC Self Advocacy Foundation.ÊThis organization assists people with developmental disabilities to become full participating citizens in their own communities.ÊAgentic was hired to work with the staff at the BCSAF to develop a new web…

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Why We Still Build Websites

It’s become increasingly clear that a number of firms are changing their work direction to focus more on strategy as opposed to web production. This means they are tackling the first steps of planning an online campaign and working to develop recommendations on strategy without executing the actual build. Then,…

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PNW Drupal Summit Presentation

Presented yesterday at PNW Drupal Summit in Portland on Drupal UIÊTweaks and UX/UI considerations in the products we deliver.http://pnwdrupalsummit.org/sessions/drupal-ui-tweaksSlides are on slideshare, or you can download the PDF   Author: Darko Hrgovic

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White paper: Failure and the Client-Focused Approach

Nobody wants to fail. Failure is something we naturally try to avoid. But what happens when it occurs?ÊAs agencies, we don’t often talk about it publicly, but of course we have failures. And within our failures lie deep insights and answers waiting to be uncovered. These insights can provide us…

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Web Trends for Social Change Organizations in 2012

On Thursday, November 24, I had the pleasure of hosting a group of social change innovators for a breakfast presentation on top Web Trends for Social Change Organizations in 2012. Despite the early hour, we had a good crowd. I was pleased to present the top trends that I see…

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White Paper: Interactive narrative – An emerging form

In a sense, all narrative is interactive. When someone is watching a film or reading a novel, they are interpreting the story and thus co-creating its meaning. Online, an interactive narrative is a form of narrative where there is a higher level of interaction than most narrative forms, between the…

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Drupal 7 eaccelerator issues

http://drupal.org/node/606304 disabling eaccelerator in .htaccess lets D7 work php_flag eaccelerator.enable 0 php_flag eaccelerator.optimizer 0 otherwise, we get the error: PHP Fatal error:Ê Class ‘FieldException’ not found Thanks to axper   Author: Darko Hrgovic

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Taxonomy image, views, getimagesize 401 error

I created a view today with a taxonomy_image field, which complained with a 401 Authorization Required error, something like this: getimagesize failed to open stream: HTTP request failed! HTTP/1.1 401 Authorization Required Took a hint from here:Êhttp://drupal.org/node/518794 Because our site is behind .htpasswd during devel, we need to add the…

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IE Bug fix clashes with Drupal Views Cycle

We’ve just solved a highly perplexing issue on a recent project.Ê Mysteriously, our lovely transitions on a Views Cycle banner rotator were not happening in IE7 and 8!Ê Instead of smooth dissolves, the images transitioned suddenly with no effect. Sounded like a javascript issue, maybe a conflict? But Darko disabled…

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Podcast: How can your company leverage Web 2.0

How can your business or nonprofit leverage Web 2.0 strategies to deepen your engagement with customers, win new fans, and position yourself for explosive growth? Marketing strategist Dorie Clark interviews Phillip Djwa of Internet strategy and development firm Agentic Communications. In this interview, you’ll learn the most common mistakes organizations…

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PHP 5.3.x . . . The Drupal Killer

A host that we refer a number of clients to recently decided it was a good idea to upgrade to PHP 5.3.x on one of our client’s VPS’s without informing us.Suddenly, clicking through to a content page was WSOD, but only for certain content types. Frantic debugging begins, and of…

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Innovation

Agentic’s primary business is to create websites for clients in the not-for-profit sector using the open source Drupal CMS framework. A big question we regularly ask ourselves is whether we are “innovating” in our day-to-day work.Because Drupal comes to us so fully formed, it is easy to think that we…

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Value of Strategy

Important to many clients is the notion that their website should be built quickly, efficiently, and take into account as many future trends as possible.ÊYet most of these projects take place in a larger context. Understanding this context and placing the website within it is what we would refer to…

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Web Ecology and an Organization’s Digital Footprint

As Agentic has built its expertise in working with larger organizations, many items arise that are similar in nature.ÊIn many of our clients, the notion of a single website for their organization was something that they often started with in the past.ÊFor example, ten years ago, many organizations did not…

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Menu active trails for views paths with arguments

Had an issue today where menu_block module wasn’t showing when clicking a link to a view with argument.Example:Êcreate a view with path ‘my-view’ and add a node id argumentcreate a link in a menu to my-view/1ÊÊ (or whatever node you want to link to)create a menu block on the menu…

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Web of Change 2010

This year, we are supporting Web of Change as a Title Sponsor, which is a significant change for us. But it’s reflective of the real importance this gathering has had for us, both as a business and, more importantly, as a social change enterprise.The people we’ve met and the issues…

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Fall approaches!

Wow, the summer has flown by and the fall is coming!ÊWe’ve been really busy this summer, working on a great new project with the Anti-Discrimination Center in NYC on a new journal; helping a new Climb for Change organization with their brand new website presence; building an ecommerce and new…

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Digital Ecology on NTEN.org

As part of their digital footprint, Mercy Corps, a prominent NGO that acts to alleviate poverty and suffering throughout the world, has seven major websites, including their main site, campaign sites, and regional sites in the UK, China, and even Mongolia. They have a Facebook page with 18,000 members, a…

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Melting Silos 2010

We’ve launched the new 2010 Melting Silos program, which is a development project for five innovative narrative projects. Melting Silos is supported by Telefilm Canada and by partners NFBÊand Praxis Screenwriters. We matched 5 ideas and their creators with 5 digital media companies, including Agentic as one of them. The…

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A Very Merry New Year!

It’s a new year and it promises to be a busy one! We’re quite pleased at the number of recent projects that will keep us busy for a while! We’re happy to be currently working on new websites for MOSAIC, Western Canada Wilderness Committee, Granville Island and Coastal Jazz, including…

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BC Nurses Solutions Microsite

We were able to help the BCÊNurses Union in quickly putting together a fast and simple website to promote their new ad campaign. See it here at BCNursesSolutions.ca.   Author: Phillip Djwa

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Remix or Rewrite: Star Wars Fans in the Digital Era

Last week, I had a chance to be on a panel with some fantastic folks, facilitated by Sue Biely. It was a lively discussion about what is happening Ôout there’ on the web as new technologies catapult media makers into a whole new world of thinking about their creative product….

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Create a select box from a nodequeue

We had the need to make a select box from a nodequeue in Drupal 6. Don’t ask me why, as selects aren’t the best UI, but that’s a different discussion. There’s probably a way easier way to do this, and niftier with jQuery, etc., but project budgets are what they…

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Drupal 6 – Expand Advanced Search fieldset if no keywords

Add this to your helper module:ÊÊ /**ÊÊ * Implementation of hook_form_alter().ÊÊ *ÊÊ */Ê function agentic_form_alter(&$form, $form_state, $form_id) {ÊÊÊ switch ($form_id) {ÊÊÊÊÊ case ‘search_form’:ÊÊÊÊÊ if (!arg(1)) { // if it’s only /search and no keywords, expand the advanced search fieldsetÊÊÊÊÊ $form[‘advanced’][‘#collapsed’]=FALSE;ÊÊÊÊÊ } ÊÊÊÊÊ break;ÊÊÊ }Ê }Ê   Author: Darko Hrgovic

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Drupal expand teaser to full body

We had the need to expand the teaser to full node body on click.We created a view with both teaser and body, then we swap them with a bit of jQuery in the footer of the view:Ê [+] read more   Author: Darko Hrgovic

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Roosevelt Institute

Exciting work ahead this summer anchored by the Roosevelt Institute’s new website and campus network. Based in New York City, the Roosevelt Institute continues to focus the legacy of Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s progressive ideas forward, through developing a new think tank of progressive thought in the United States. We’re pretty…

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Acquia Partnership

We’ve recently been certified as an Acquia partner and we’re looking forward to the relationship. First of all, it means we’ve acheived another certification in how Agentic is perceived in client support and ability. And for us, Acquia provides 24 hr commercial grade support for Drupal. So they work with…

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Social Tech Training (Toronto)

Social Tech Training (STT) returns to Toronto’s MaRS Centre, June 10th – 12th, 2009. Join me and many other amazing trainers for our second hands-on Web 2.0 oriented learning intensive for people learning mastery in the social tech and social change sector. In 2009 the business case for online and…

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League of Kickass Business People

A new community for innovative business professionals is launching inVancouver on Thursday, May 28th @6-9pm.The League of Kickass Business People is a collection of opinion leaders,tastemakers and rainmakers who live, work, play and think ahead of themainstream. A the inaugural event, I’ll be facilitating a fantastic 2010 opportunitiespanel that will…

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Drupal namespace collisions

Why does my newly created clientname_block() hook kill all the blocks on my site?ÊBecause we also have a theme named clientname, which causes a namespace collision. Changing the module name to clientnamemodule (and all function names) fixes it. http://drupal.org/node/375674#comment-1560314   Author: Darko Hrgovic

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Agentic Defined

Came across this new definition of Agentic which I think is so fantastic: A “perspective that views people as self-organizing, proactive, self-reflecting and self-regulating, not just as reactive organisms shaped by environmental forces or driven by inner impulses.”(Wikipedia) It just means to me that people have human agency to make…

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Agentic Sponsorships this Year

Wow, looking back this year, I see we have sponsored quite a few projects and organizations. By far our biggest sponsorship was the TDÊCanada Trust Vancouver Jazz Festival this year, but we also sponsored Barcamp, DrupalCamp, Web of Change, Nootka Fine Arts School, BCÊCancer Foundation, Duncan Hospice, and contributed time…

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Web of Change 2009

This year, I’m really looking forward to Web of Change and not only because we’re a sponsor. It’s a chance to connect with peers and learn more about what’s what in the world of non-profit and technology. It’s a way that we learn about new techniques, ideas, and ways of…

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Date format on our blog

Just had a question about the date format on our blogs, so thought I’d share with everyone. Not sure if our developer (no longer with us) borrowed the technique from another source, but if she did then kudos to the other source. A code snippet in node-blog.tpl.php and some css…

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