Drupal has been attracting some really great writers recently, and I have a couple of serious Drupal crushes going at the moment. The first is the blog of Shelley Powers, author of a whole stack of tech books published by O’Reilly. Shelley wrote the first book I ever bought on RDF and has thoroughly documented her initial Drupal experiences. The second is the fantastic site of Sacha Chua whose writing melts my tech heart and gives me the digital butterflies. These two, and many other recent newcomers, have made Planet Drupal very rewarding in the past weeks. And before anyone starts getting jealous about my new blog loves, I promise to still be faithful to my romances of the past (I’m winking flirtatiously at you, Nick Lewis!)

Great job, Dmitri!

Working with Drupal and other open source projects has introduced me to some really brilliant and wonderful people. That's the part of contributing that has been the most worthwhile.

Screenshots: 

Fun and value can be found in aggregation. Using the Feed API, Emfield, and Feed element mapper, it becomes easy to create awesome video aggregators that pull in topic specific videos from multiple video sharing services. The Wall-o-Cello Videos shows hundreds of videos from YouTube.com, Blip.tv, MetaCafe.com and Google Videos.

Yahoo! Pipes (screenshot) is an ideal tool for creating custom aggregation filters. CelloRoller.com uses Y! Pipes to track specific cellists, pulling information from across the entire internet.

The Wordpress 2.6 Beta 1 is now available. Hats off to the Wordpress team. Here are some features that we should have in Drupal, too:

1. A new and improved image editing dialog that offers lots of control over the images in your posts: This is interesting and worth checking out. Whoever makes it easy to post images and integrate them into posts will attract massive numbers of users. Drupal lags here.
2. Better SSL support for the Admin: It should be easy for the (non-technical) admin to have either all of a Drupal site or just the admin and login portions go over https.
3. The ability to move wp-config.php out of your web root: This would be settings.php for Drupal and (optionally) moving it out of the webroot is probably a “Good Thing”

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.

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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