In case you haven’t heard, BuddyPress is the latest addition to a series of grassroots social networking software. BuddyPress is no more than a few months old, and just recently out of beta. The concept of a Stony Brook social network has been around almost as long as BuddyPress. I spent months looking for the perfect solution to host a robust campus event system, much like the events application on Facebook. After looking seriously at Drupal, Joomla and Wordpress, I found that there is no particular piece of software made for this purpose, but most content management systems have event plugins available. The other social networking solutions, such as Ning, do have event components, but the software itself is unbearable.

   I found BuddyPress completely by accident after already choosing to work with Joomla. I was looking around for better event plugins for Joomla, and I stumbled across a BuddyPress site that was using a primative Wordpress events plugin. On that day I decided to switch to BuddyPress, and soon after someone began developing the events component I was looking for.

   BuddyPress 1.0 was released just a few weeks ago and it’s already getting a lot of attention. It is stable and awesome enough for VW to base its cool new TankWars website on BuddyPress. TankWars disables most of the features of BuddyPress, but they have made very similar design modifications to the ones I have made on sbulife. They only allow sign-ups through Facebook Connect, and they have removed most of the redundant navigation. This means that not only is BuddyPress officially awesome, but that sbulife is also awesome, because we have made BuddyPress even more user-friendly. And the highly paid developers at VW can back me up on that. So, where is my check?

A few years ago at a retreat, students and faculty came up with this idea of a free period of time each week that clubs would use to host major events, and the campus could connect at a personal level. They were addressing the issue of campus community, an issue that has faced this campus for as long as we have been here. Many colleges have similar issues, so they throw money at it, and people are content. We don’t have such luxuries, so we need to be a little bit more creative. I love the idea of “Campus Lifetime,” but they have forgotten one important detail; you actually need to tell people about the events you are hosting.

A student rally during Campus Lifetime

It is 12:30pm on a Wednesday today, just a few minutes before campus lifetime, and I am sitting in the basement of the union writing this article. I would be leaving for my physics lab that is scheduled during campus lifetime, but we have the week off, so I am looking for something to do with my day off. I started looking in my own calendar, nothing until Rev. Billy tonight. Then I went to Facebook, same results. I looked at all the Facebook events for today, and I only found some kind of career fair for liberal arts people. Finally the University has a little secret “Student Life” calendar. I won’t link to it, see if you can find it yourself. I use this as a last resort. It is usually full of junk from the fitness center, as it is today. I found out that there will be a table for Alternative Spring Break, and an SAB event. That’s funny, I had no idea there was an SAB event. I didn’t even find that on Facebook. Well it doesn’t look interesting anyway, but at least I know about it now.
I checked SAB’s Facebook group for it, and it turns out that it was rescheduled for April 15, although the official Student Life calendar hasn’t been updated to reflect that. Turns out there is a Baseball game against Hofstra after campus lifetime, so I might go to that.

So here I am, and it is almost campus lifetime, with no plans. I have been talking to some friends as I write this, and they also don’t know about any events going on today. Almost everyone is out of class with nothing to do. I am sure there are plenty of club meetings, but I can’t even find a current list of clubs no less their meeting times and locations. We have a serious problem here folks.

What we need is a central location for students and clubs to post events. Stony Brook needs a social network, and I think I just may have the solution. I started developing http://sbulife.com a few weeks ago with this grand vision. Clubs will create profiles and post events in one central location that students can check at any time. It works almost exactly like Facebook, and you can even use your Facebook account to connect with it instead of creating a new account. It’s not out of beta yet, but sign up now if you like the idea. We are still working on design and branding, so I am very open to ideas. Feel free to comment below.

First, two simple facts of life:

1. Software changes.
2. Facebook is software.

Once you have accepted that, then we can continue. I must stress that I do not intend to waste your time by telling you to suck it up and deal with the changes, although that might be the best thing for you to do. It seems that every time Facebook releases an update to their software, a ton of angry groups and status messages pop up around facebook in opposition of the changes. I rarely ever see anyone in favor of the changes, or even a specific reason why the changes are so bad. From what I can tell, apparently facebook got it right the first time, and every change they have made since then is making it worse and worse. People now threaten to leave Facebook and go back to myspace (who has also been making a lot of changes).

There must be something about the new Facebook that you like, or at least you will like it once you get used to it. Most of what I see is complaints about being lost, or just a dislike for the new layout. These are only temporary issues that aren’t worth mentioning. Suppose there is actually something specific about the new facebook that you don’t like. Instead of inviting all your friends to some anti-facebook group and complaining, you should tell the developers specifically what you have a problem with. They are always open to ideas and suggestions, they want your feedback. If you think you have a better idea, please share it!

This is how software works. A relatively small group of people plan and develop it based on their own ideas and user studies, and then that software is released to the user base. Ideally, that user base should come back with suggestions and ideas, and the developers use that feedback to make small updates to the release. If the developers are flooded with messages like “I hate the new facebook” or “Bring back the old facebook,” that doesn’t help them at all. The entire facebook community might hate it, but that wouldn’t change anything. If the entire facebook community came back with specific ideas and suggestions, we would have almost a Utopian facebook.

So my question to you is; are you going to keep hating facebook and wishing for the old one, or are you going to do something about it and make positive suggestions? Until you make up your mind, please stop bothering me about it. I do not hate the new facebook, and I will never join your stupid group of over 9000 idiots who think the same way as you.

My current email address is webmaster at [firstlast] dot net, which is nice, but I really always wanted [first] at [last] dot com. Mazza, and even David Mazza is a popular name. It’s estimated that around 7500 people have my last name. David doesn’t help make my full name any more unique because it is the sixth most common name in the US. It’s so popular that even Anonymous has taken it on as an alias; “David Davidson from Davidsonville.” Apparently 96 other men in the US share my full name.

Mazza.com may be taken, but that wasn’t going to stop me from finally getting the email address I’ve always wanted. I finally decided to search again for other options and found that Mazza.me is still available. I purchased it, making mazza.me the shortest domain I own at only 7 characters. You can now find this website at http://david.mazza.me/ (or just mazza.me) and you can send an email to david at mazza dot me.

HowManyOfMe.com

There are 96 people with my name in the U.S.A. How many have your name?

I have a late winter break this year. My last final was on December 23, and I still have 2 weeks left. I decided to spend my break doing freelance and volunteered web development, as well as looking for a summer internship. I am still working on THiNK Magazine’s Drupal website, which became a much larger project than I expected.

We started in september deciding between Wordpress, Joomla, Movable Type and Drupal. I’ve known about Drupal for a while from old hosting clients, but this was the first time I actually worked with it. It isn’t as easy to start using Drupal as they claim it is, and using it for a magazine presents a unique set of challenges. A magazine is focused on strategically placed articles and imagery. Drupal is not inherently good at handling article placement or featuring images. Both require a wide array of modules. Behind the website there also needs to be separation of issues and a special hierarchy of users. Luckily I found an installation profile developed at RIT called “Innovation News.”

I had a lot of hope that Innovation News would make the project easy, but the project grew to be much larger than I expected. I am facing layout problems that I thought would be very simple. I haven’t touched the CSS much yet in order to keep it simple. The other main component we want is a “slider” on top of the front page to showcase the featured articles. This requires some information to be dynamically exported to an xml file, and there really isn’t any module written to do that. There is one that is similar for Drupal 5, but I am using Drupal 6. I have decided to take the module and modify for my needs with Drupal 5, and then try to upgrade it to Drupal 6. If anyone has suggestions please leave it in the comments.

I’ve learned how a team could really help to complete this project. I would love to bounce ideas off of people, and also handle the project in parts. It would be easier to look at the big picture that way. Sometimes I get lost in the details. I don’t have access for a project like this that was supposed to be small. On top of that, I am volunteering my time for it, but it has been fun to learn more about the concepts of a CMS. I’ve jumped right into the fire, what a mess…