It’s been our pleasure to work with distinguished author Neil Baldwin over the past several months.  Canary redesigned www.neilbaldwinbooks.com and created a custom content management system utilizing the  Drupal platform and a grid-based custom theme.

Neil was kind enough to send us the testimonial below.  For more from our clients, check out our testimonials page.

“I was petrified when www.neilbaldwinbooks.com began to receive its makeover from Canary. Intuitively I felt that I knew what I wanted, but despite — or perhaps because of — being an author, I had trouble expressing these needs to Mason, John and the Canary team. Of course, from the moment they came back with slate blue and earthy brown as the basic colors for the site (I had never even told them that blue and brown were my favorite colors), I was in the right hands & never looked back. I also admit that I was even more petrified when Mason told me — once my new site was built — that he was going to teach me (omigod, as they say…) how to go into the invisible infrastructure and make changes on my own. Yet again, John and Mason patiently talked me through the looking glass, and, before too long, I got used to the subversive nature of what I was doing. We literati develop an intense ownership over our work. Canary ‘gets’ this obsession intuitively and respects it as well. The best attribute of Canary? They combine cutting-edge creativity and inductive reasoning with infinite patience — and they are always there when I need them.”

We just had our first Drupal Camp here in Philly last Wednesday (Nov 19, 2008), and it was a surprising success. I say surprising because we really put this together in a very short amount of time. There was certainly a chance that we’d have a couple near-empty rooms and a very full buffet table. But Drupallers around here are hungry, and they showed up in droves!

We had a Beginner and an Advanced track, and I was happy to see people at both sides. I led the Intro to Theming session with my friend Jody Hamilton from ZivTech where we outlined the possibilities and tools available to a Drupal themer. My main goal with the session was to open it up to questions as early as possible and we did get to a lot of people’s questions. We tried our best to be clear and offer our best advice, so I hope we didn’t steer anyone wrong! There are usually many ways to accomplish your goals in theming and the rest of Drupal and you can’t go over all the options in a setting like that.

We at Canary were happy to help sponsor and organize the event, but the bulk of the credit and praise goes to Nate Gasser of Rock River Star. He did the bulk of the legwork and paid out the bulk of the cash to put us in such a great venue. We’re planning to do these regularly so look out for the next on sometime in Spring.

(more photos)

We woke up bright and early this morning to get 15 singers from the First Person Festival’s Complaint Choir over to CBS 3’s studios for a live performance.  Watch it here.

You can catch the full performance and a post-show discussion about the project tonight at The Painted Bride (230 Vinet St) at 6pm.  And it’s FREE!

Great post from Convince & Convert on social media and why you should be using it, even if you’re not an expert right off the bat. Do you think you - or your clients - don’t really understand social media so you don’t need to be using it as a marketing tool?  Then read The 6 Dangerous Fallacies of Social Media.

And while you’re at it, follow us on Twitter:
twitter.com/canarymegan
twitter.com/canarymason