Cyrve

mikeryan — Tue, 26 Feb 2008 04:34:42 +0000

Cyrve mikeryan Monday, February 25, 2008 - 10:34pm

I'm pleased to announce that I am joining Moshe Weitzman in Cyrve. Our specialty is content migration and transformation - the grunge work of fitting old information into new holes.

Past projects of mine

XML -> Mobile-compliant XHTML

I produced a mobile-compatible website for delivering 2008 U.S. Presidential election results to hand-held devices. This involved modifying the Drupal FeedAPI module (at that time still in beta) to read custom fields in addition to standard RSS fields (patch submitted).

As a follow-up project, in two days I created a system to take XML feeds of raw election data and produce mobile-compatible XHTML pages to present the results, for live updates on Super Tuesday. This system included a templating system so the client could easily style it to their own needs (they reported it took half an hour with my delivered system to complete the theming and customization), and has remained in operation through subsequent primary elections.

SQL -> SQL (custom CMS to Drupal)

Migrated an existing web site containing articles, interviews, and podcasts to Drupal. The primary challenge here was in determining the best way to map the various "sections" of the original site onto Drupal concepts - some were best converted into categories, some into custom node types, some into node relationships.

SQL -> SQL (ERP data)

Two years ago I was involved in a major data migration project, moving a local teaching hospital from their old HR/Payroll system (ADP) to a new ERP (Lawson). Although not Web-related, the fundamental principles were the same - identifying the major points of divergence in organizational concepts, dealing with sometimes drastically different schema, analysis of the input data for self-consistency and exceptions to documented rules, etc.

Cyrve's approach

First and foremost, our experience in migration projects has shown us that just because we're holding hammers in our hands, not every problem is necessarily a nail. One of our tools will be the FeedAPI module, which provides a general framework for parsing data input and applying an array of processors to end up with Drupal content. We will be developing a toolbox of parsers and processors to deal with the diverse challenges brought to us, while remaining open to out-of-the-box solutions to unique problems.

I am looking forward very much to joining Moshe in meeting these challenges.

Business