Los Angeles

Our 2011 Drupal Training Year in Review

Submitted by Christefano on January 1, 2012 - 12:02am

2011 was a big year for us at Exaltation of Larks. In addition to our regular consulting and development work, we kicked off our public training program in January of 2010 and have offered public classes on everything from Drupal fundamentals to back-end development and everything in between.

In 2011, we trained organizations in Los Angeles, Silicon Valley, Irvine and San Diego and our training clients are companies including LegalZoom, Disney Interactive, Thomson Reuters, The Annenberg Foundation and Warner Brothers; universities including UCLA, UCI and UCSB; and many Los Angeles-area creative and advertising agencies.

Training Scholarship Program

Our trainings aren’t just for big organizations, however. We want to help train as many people as possible, including unemployed job seekers and people in need, and help them become the developers, themers and architects of tomorrow. To this end, we started our training scholarship program in September.

In 2011, we gave away seats at our trainings worth more than $10,000 to our scholarship students and to local area Los Angeles Drupal user groups to raffle off at their meetups. This has been a tremendously rewarding experience for us and we look forward to doing more of the same in 2012.

Upcoming Trainings

Our first training of the new year is on Drupal Scalability and Performance and it’s at SANDcamp, the San Diego Drupal Camp, on January 26, 2012! If you’re interested in making Drupal go really fast, this training is for you. We’ll provide the servers you’ll get to optimize for performance and all you need to bring is your laptop.

Los Angeles Drupal trainings: From Drupal Fundamentals to Scalability and Performance

Submitted by Christefano on September 22, 2011 - 12:37pm

Tomorrow is the last day of Summer but the Drupal training scene is as hot as ever. We’ve scheduled a number of trainings in Los Angeles this Fall that we’re excited to tell you about, and we’re happy to publicly announce our training assistance program.

First, though, we’re sending out discount codes on Twitter and Facebook. Follow @LarksLA on Twitter, like Exaltation of Larks on Facebook or sign up to our training newsletter at http://www.larks.la/training to get a 15% early bird discount* toward all our trainings!

Here are the trainings we’ve lined up. If you have any questions, visit us at http://www.larks.la/training or contact us at trainings [at] larks [dot] la and we’ll be happy to talk with you. You can also call us at 888-LARKS-LA (888-527-5752) with any questions.

Beginner trainings:

Intermediate training:

Advanced trainings:

All our trainings are $400 a day (1-day trainings are $400, 2-day trainings are $800, etc.). We’re excited about these trainings and hope you are, too. Here are some more details and descriptions.

Drupal trainings coming this Summer in Los Angeles

Submitted by Christefano on May 31, 2011 - 11:02pm

We’re offering Los Angeles Drupal and Drupal Association members a discount code that’s good toward our June trainings in Los Angeles. Use coupon code TRAINME and get 10% off!

These two trainings, Drupal in a Day and Drupal Module Development, are being offered by the Drupal experts at Exaltation of Larks and Chapter Three and will be taking place at Droplabs, a new Drupal event and coworking space in Downtown Los Angeles. Droplabs was created this year for and by members of the LA Drupal community.

Here’s what we have coming up in June in Los Angeles:

Custom Content, Fields & Lists training on May 3-4, 2011

This two-day workshop will explore modules and configurations you can combine to build more customized systems using Drupal. You’ll create many examples of more advanced configurations and content displays using the Content Construction Kit (CCK) and Views modules.

The Drupal experts at Exaltation of Larks and Chapter Three will guide you through the complex User Interfaces that Drupal provides for controlling and customizing the many different ways to present lists and tables of your site’s content.

What you will learn:

  • Creating custom content types
  • Building RSS feeds
  • Allowing viewers to filter results
  • Building interactive tables
  • Displaying content in a grid
  • Adding a date field to your content, and sorting by date
  • Creating iCAL feeds and other date displays
  • Using views arguments to dynamically filter your results based on the URL
  • How other modules integrate with Views

Exaltation of Larks celebrates its first 5 years

Submitted by Christefano on November 30, 2010 - 2:24am

A few days ago, Exaltation of Larks celebrated its 5th anniversary. It’s been an exciting five years, and it doesn’t go without saying that we wouldn’t have gotten this far without the outstanding clients, colleagues and talented developers, designers and themers we’ve had the pleasure of working with.

In the United States, we recently observed the Thanksgiving holiday, and our 5th anniversary is a perfect time to take a moment and express our gratitude to everyone who helped us get to where we are today.

From small opportunities to great enterprises

Our first Drupal client was the Center for Bits and Atoms (CBA) at the MIT Media Lab. The CBA is best known for Neil Gershenfeld’s FabLab program, which freely shares its open source recipe for workshops built around rapid prototyping tools like laser cutters and 3D milling machines.

The site we built helped unite MIT’s numerous FabLabs around the world and included online courseware, a busy discussion forum, project photo galleries and a downloads section for the open source hardware drivers related tools. It was also the Media Lab’s first Drupal site.

We enjoyed working with the CBA and were inspired by its vibrant culture of experimentation, high technology, modular design and open source software. We value those principles more than ever today.

Doing things that haven’t been done before

We like technical challenges and one project that we’re particularly fond of was successfully integrating a third-party facial recognition library with Drupal. Multifactor authentication systems aren’t new, but we were the first to build a biometric/facial recognition login system for Drupal.

We demonstrated this technology at a Boston Drupal meetup and a video of that presentation is included below. It is also available on blip.tv in several video formats.

Things to do in Boston

Submitted by Christefano on July 14, 2008 - 5:08am

When describing Boston, many people who’ve lived there for a time have told me things like, "Boston feels like a small town" and "Boston has the rudest, most suicidal drivers I’ve ever seen” and, regardless of whether or not they’re one of those drivers, “Be careful when entering that intersection!"

That’s really just the beginning.

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