RobsHouse.net

This very useful Drupal partly Drupal site is also a good place to go if you are a Drupal freelancer looking for work or a Drupal contractor looking to hire. It isn't limited to Drupal, but there are lots of listings for Drupal jobs and Drupal service providers.

UPDATE: Looks like only the community section is running Drupal.

Here is the second part of the interview with Jay and Dries of Acquia. The first episode can be seen here.

Yesterday I made this screencast to demonstrate three awesome new themes for Drupal 6. Of course I was excited to share it with people, so today I embarked to do something I had not yet done: upload video to the Internet. Yeah, I know, everyone is doing it, am I behind the moon or something? Not anymore. In fact, my inaugural "first time" provided a great opportunity to test as many video sharing sites as I could find. The best is Blip.tv. Aside from the great quality I especially liked how I could customize the embed code to fit any size I wanted. Here is the video, served by Blip.tv, and below are links to all the other copies, 13 in total (assuming Revver gets their act together and actually publishes it), so you can compare the quality on each of them.

• YouTube
• MetaCafe
• Vimeo
• Veoh
• Crackle
• Eyespot
• JumpCut
• Blip.tv
• Google video
• Daily Motion
• MyVideo.de
• Break.com
• Revver

Spike.com Spike.com rejected the video as spam. A HOWTO screencast about open source softare. So Spike, you want to compete with YouTube? How's that workin' for ya?

For those of you who might be wondering about my new job at Acquia, and what the company is up to.

Overcast - The Music of Ed Partyka Performed by the Sunday Night Orchestra Featuring Efrat Alony
I am a long-time fan of Ed's music, but I've chosen to share with you a short sample of the only arrangement on the record, an eight.minute (!) version of "Time" by Tom Waits. This number really gives me goose bumps. I suppose I should also post a sample of Ed's music, too, since that's the actual point of the production ...
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This is the fourth movement of this so-called 'symphony.' This whole work is a fairly harmless, but charming bit of Baroque fluff, two slow movements, two fast movement, nice harmonies, 4th species counterpoint and all that. The arrangement is by the organist Hans-André Stamm from Leverkusen. This was recorded this week in St.
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This is a funny little piece from the Gallant period. It looks back to the Baroque in the beginning and then gives a nod to the coming Classical epoch (and even early Romanticism). This was recorded this week in St. Severin Church in Severin Strasse in Cologne, where I am playing a concert there with the organist, Gert Schmid on this coming Saturday, April 26th, 2008 at 11 a.m. I captured this on my mini-disk player to see what was going on with the acoustics, my playing and so on.
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This is a recording I made this week in St. Severin Church in Severin Strasse in Cologne. I am playing a concert there with the organist, Gert Schmid on this coming Saturday, April 26th, 2008 at 11 a.m. I captured this on my mini-disk player to see what was going on with the acoustics, my playing and so on.
read more

I spent the morning today documenting the practice development activities for Acquia services. I started out working in Project X which I decided to try after seeing the icon in Andrew’s dock. It turned out to be a terrible time to try a new tool, since the ideas were coming too fast and I was handicapped by the learning curve. I thought of switching back to OmniPlan, which I’ve been using since it came out.

All those men were there inside,
when she came in totally naked.
They had been drinking: they began to spit.
Newly come from the river, she knew nothing.
She was a mermaid who had lost her way.
The insults flowed down her gleaming flesh.
Obscenities drowned her golden breasts.
Not knowing tears, she did not weep tears.
Not knowing clothes, she did not have clothes.
They blackened her with burnt corks and cigarette stubs,
and rolled around laughing on the tavern floor.
She did not speak because she had no speech.
Her eyes were the colour of distant love,
her twin arms were made of white topaz.
Her lips moved, silent, in a coral light,
and suddenly she went out by that door.
Entering the river she was cleaned,
shining like a white stone in the rain,
and without looking back she swam again
swam towards emptiness, swam towards death.

Some images of seal hunting. More information.

Some of the things I’d like to achieve:

• The steps that are taken during indexing (and later during query parsing) should be made atomic and chained, similar to input formats and filters. This would combine the preprocess hook with text transformations that already happen (stripping punctuation, lowercase, etc.) I’ve considered building a prototype with the current filter system.
• hook_search(‘name’) needs to return more metadata. Ideally modules could provide multiple searches and allow themselves to be configured (such as adding elements to the search form, or defining their own search form). Perhaps other $ops are needed.
• The type column in all search tables should be removed and each type should maintain its own tables.
• The keywords should not persist throughout the request in the form of a string, but rather an object that handles adding fields, removing fields, cloning etc. I have such an object that is very near general purpose use in the ApacheSolr module.

Drupal has been used on several popular and professional sites. One of the most notable is The Onion, the satirical news publication, as well as MTV's Web site in the United Kingdom. In its latest iteration, version 6, it has added support for drag-and-drop, OpenID logins, and an editor that can be tuned to suit both left, and right viewing cultures.

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1. refactor search node\_rank with hook\_node\_rank scoring factors: Node module's content search allows four different runtime scoring factors, including keyword relevance, recency and number of comments. This patch replaces the hardcoded scoring factors with a hook that lets any module inject similar scoring factors.
2. Path module should add URL alias to update index in nodapi.: Currently, the URL alias of nodes doesn't play any role in the keyword relevancy of Drupal search. This might be the #1 reason Google still beats us at searching Drupal.org.
3. Add spelling suggestions to the "no search results found" page.: When no search results are found, this patch looks at the query, looks at the words in its index, and uses the Levenshtein algorithm to make a spelling suggestion that might be what you intended to search for.
4. Patch To Add User Profile Search: User search is useless in its current form. Being able to search user profiles would be a huge step forward in making search/user into something special.
5. search_index hardcodes boosts to html elements. Should be configurable.: <h1> gets 25 points, <a> gets 10, and <em> tags get 3; wouldn't it be nice if this were configurable?
6. Exclude node types from search index: Sometimes you don't want certain content types to be indexed. This adds an administration configuration for that case.
7. Optional Exclusion of Taxonomy Vocabulary from Advanced Search: For those of you with HUGE taxonomy vocabularies, this will make the advanced search form usable again.
8. Indexing options for taxonomy: Administrator gains the ability to say how strongly taxonomy terms should weigh in the indexing process. Synonym support included.
9. Add scoring factor controls to advanced search form
The administrator can adjust runtime scoring factors on the site configuration -> search page. Why not let the end user decide how important each scoring factor should be by using the advanced search form?
10. Fix search index link handling for non-existent nodes
Esoteric bug with an RTBC patch (waiting for just one more review) that fixes the case when someone links to a not-yet-created node.
11. Showing result count and result range in search results: This is really a feature request for the pager. Why don't we have something like "Showing 10-20 from 500 results" on our search pages?
12. Replace "blue smurf" in no search results message: The quintessential bike shed argument. What two words should replace "blue smurf"?

Please help review and refine these patches. All of them need SimpleTest cases written as well.

Today I released Beta 2 of the ApacheSolr module, the module responsible for search on Robshouse.net. There are some bugfixes, some performance improvements, and a usability improvement, but most of all there is a new feature. With this release it is possible to sort search results. If you search on this site you will notice a block inviting you to Sort by, and your options are Title, Author, Type and Date. Author doesn't make much sense on this site since there is only one, but I think the other sorts will be useful to people who want to find things like the first post I wrote here about Drupal.

I'd also like to encourage people who are using the ApacheSolr module to send me links to their search pages and I'll start compiling a showcase.

Commit #111751 by robertDouglass at 14:14
Apache Solr Search Integration: /modules/apachesolr/apachesolr.module 1.1.2.12 @ DRUPAL-5

Commit #111740 by robertDouglass at 13:46
Apache Solr Search Integration: /modules/apachesolr/apachesolr.module 1.1.2.11 @ DRUPAL-5

Commit #111737 by robertDouglass at 13:13
Apache Solr Search Integration: /modules/apachesolr/apachesolr.module 1.1.2.10 @ DRUPAL-5
#248882 Fixed problem with indexing when no solr instance available

Commit #111735 by robertDouglass at 12:58
Apache Solr Search Integration: /modules/apachesolr/apachesolr.module 1.1.2.9 @ DRUPAL-5Apache Solr Search Integration: /modules/apachesolr/apachesolr_search.module 1.1.2.5 @ DRUPAL-5

Commit #111720 by robertDouglass at 09:28
Apache Solr Search Integration: /modules/apachesolr/apachesolr.module 1.1.2.8 @ DRUPAL-5
#248552 add explicit check for required field nid

In an article titled The Business of Startups Is Business, Businessweek interviews Dries Buytaert and names him one of the top innovators for 2008 who are 30 or under. This is a really exciting milestone for Dries. Drupal and Acquia get all the attention in the article, and Mollom isn't mentioned. Just shows that nobody can keep track of everything Dries is up to =)

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