The IA Summit, an annual gathering of Information Architecture specialists, ended on a high note with Whitney Hess's closing plenary. Taking Whitney's advice before she gave it, the past 12 months I've gotten involved with several different communities, namely the awesome Drupal community. It was my first IA Summit so I guess that makes me a Newbie. There were things I would have done differently, both at this conference and others in the past:

Newbie Mistake #1: Not putting yourself out there

I've been to only a handful of local UX/web events, so I didn't know many people at the IA Summit. If you're horrifically shy like myself, putting yourself out there is a tough one, but you have to speak up at topic tables or in the hallways, otherwise, how will anyone know how...

In 2008 I was really fortunate to fit in a lot of travel: the week in the Gambia (West Africa), a week in Melbourne (Australia), ten days in the US (Minneapolis, Chicago, Colorado, Utah and California), and five days in Germany (Hamburg and Berlin). These were entirely vacation trips.

2009 was a lot different in that none of my travel was vacation (unless you count a weekend at a friend's house in Vermont). Not that I'm complaining, exactly. I moved from Old England to New England, traveled to Paris for Drupalcon, roadtripped to Montreal for Drupalcomp, and had five days in New Orleans for Do It With Drupal. But during 2009, but I experienced a financial crisis known as Not Enough Freelance Work (part and parcel of starting over in a new country, I'll bet!)

2010 travel...

What's the Soup (whatsthesoup.net) is live! It's an online directory of restaurant listings to help people find soup varieties in their local area, as well as a food blog. You might feel hungry after spending time on the site!

The site is updated by many people. In addition to the site owners, Ed and Heather, several restaurant owners and bloggers also have their own user accounts.

The site was originally built in WordPress, but I rebuilt it in Drupal 6, in order to be more flexible and powerful as the site grows. For the overall look and feel, I used Acquia...

Last week, I had the pleasure of attending DrupalCon Paris, held at a beautiful venue south of Paris city center. My attendance was made possible thanks to receiving one of the scholarships from the Drupal Association.

If you saw me there, I was one of those people running around in a red volunteer T-shirt. As a volunteer, duties varied but usually included the registration desk, and answering questions like 'Where is the Isobar room' or (in French) 'What is this conference?' Other duties included assembling bags and badges, tidying/restocking refreshment tables in the public areas, moving chairs and tables, as well as monitoring the session rooms...