Belgium
Craving a taste of home: Belgian lunch
I've been living in the US for over a year now but am currently in Belgium for a short vacation. For the past year, I've been craving a taste of home; not all Belgian food is available in the US and even when it is, it can taste differently.
When we arrived in Belgium this weekend, my mother prepared us lunch. It tasted so good. Nothing like eating at home. The foodie in me was reminded of all the things I miss, and the photographer in me wanted to take some pictures to remind myself once we're back in the US.
Which foods do you miss from your home country or home town?
Drupal Developer Days Brussels 2011: call for speakers
We co-located the very first DrupalCon in 2005 with FOSDEM, now Europe's largest open source developers meeting. The first DrupalCon was an instrumental moment in the history of Drupal that has set the tone for all other DrupalCons and DrupalCamps. Ever since, co-locating a Drupal event with FOSDEM has been near and dear to my heart. In keeping with this good habit (e.g. 2008, 2009, 2010), I want to call upon the Drupal community to consider speaking at the Drupal Developer Days in Brussels.
Registration is now open for this free-as-in-beer event. It takes place from Friday, February 4 to Sunday, February 6 in parallel with FOSDEM. On that Friday there will be a code sprint. On Saturday and Sunday at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel (VUB), you can enjoy two days of presentations and workshops on everything that is happening and exciting in the Drupal world.
A large part of the program is defined by the attendees so you are encouraged to propose sessions. So, register and submit your ideas for sessions. Even if you don't present a session, you'll enjoy yourself and learn more about getting the most from Drupal. Plus, you'll be able to see where DrupalCon got started.
Telenet using Drupal for knowledge base
Telenet, the largest provider of broadband cable services in Belgium, wants happy customers, and customers are happy when they can solve any problems or answer any questions concerning a company's products on their own, or by simply calling a friendly helpful client advisor.
Telenet recently decided that their proprietary knowledge base -- known as the "Rolls Royce" of knowledge bases, was too expensive, hard to use, and that the vendor behind it was slow to respond to change requests or to fix bugs. Taking matters into their own hands they decided to develop the new knowledge base using Drupal.
Enlisting the help of Dataflow and Acquia, they managed to not only recreate the functionality of the old knowledge base, they enhanced it to have new features as well, such as awesome faceted search powered by Apache Solr. In fact, the new Drupal based solution was developed and launched using just the budget that Telenet had set aside for maintenance and bug fixing for the former proprietary knowledge base software!
One other cool feature is that Telent's client advisors use one copy of the knowledge base inside the Telenet firewall, and have special permissions to see extra inward facing content, while Telenet's customers access a copy of the site that lives outside of the firewall. You can check out the external knowledge base at http://onlinesupport.telenet.be/ .
Telenet is happy enough with the new website that there are more Telenet-built, Telenet-hosted Drupal sites on the way.
N-VA using Drupal
The New Flemish Alliance (Dutch: Nieuw-Vlaamse Alliantie, abbreviated as N-VA) is using Drupal for their website: http://www.n-va.be. The N-VA is a Flemish political party. They became the largest party in both Flanders and Belgium in the 2010 federal elections a few weeks ago.
Leffe using Drupal
Leffe, one of my favorite Belgian abbey beers, is now using Drupal for their main website: http://leffe.com. Cheers to that!
Belgian breakfast
