therickards.com

Welcome to therickards.com.

I am using the site as a testbed for Drupal development, particularly the MySite module, which I maintain.

If you'd like to test the MySite module, you may login as user demo with pass demo or you may register a new account. Then click on My therickards.com.

Update: Due to recent spam attempts, if you wish to create a test account, you must enter a valid email address and validate your account.

For more about me, see Second Goose.

Please don't make a mess.

Caesar

In the interest of equal time, here's a photo of Caesar.

Mina

This is Mina, stalking her brother in the backyard.

Click image to enlarge.

Taken with my new Canon PowerShot S3. I think I'm going to like this camera.

Christmas 2006

Merry Christmas

It's been a busy year. A good one, too, as the pictures below suggest.

We started the year with a trip to Vancouver, BC. A great city, even in February. Ken was there for work, but we took four days of vacation, too, and got to hang around the city with some friends.

In Vancouver, Ken met up with the folks from Drupal.org, which is an international software project.

Amy graduated from Leadership Augusta this year, and is now a proud and active alum.

After working much too hard, we took a quick anniversary trip down to Savannah. Highly recommended, though maybe not in June.

The highliight of the year was our 16-day European vacation. Here's the big list of cities that we saw:

Antwerp, Brugge, Brussels, Ostende, Liege, Namur, Durbuy, Bastogne, Arlon, Luxembourg City, Remich, Echternacht, Vianden, Clerveaux, Maastricht, Utrecht, Rotterdam, Den Haag, Delft, Amsterdam

Ken had never been to Europe, and we're pretty sure we'll go back. Really good food, nice people, great art, and lots of excellent beer.

A long day in Mumbai

On our first day in India, we overslept, ate Paper Dosa Masala, got caught in the monsoon, missed going to Elephanta Island, found the Gateway of India on foot, fell victim to the ear wax scam, danced in a Ganesh festival parade and covered with red dye powder and white confetti, and had my Nokia phone knocked out of commission by a Bluetooth virus.

Tomorrow we head back to Mumbai's thoroughly awful airport to fly to Goa, a former Portuguese foothold down the west coast.

Going off the grid for a couple of weeks

I'm about to go off the grid -- mostly -- for a couple of weeks. Friday morning I'm pulling Paige, my 15-year-old daughter, out of school and heading for the airport, where we'll board a flight to Atlanta. From there it's on to New York, then a long flight to Mumbai, India, where we'll arrive after 10 p.m. Saturday.

By Monday we'll be in Goa, the old Portuguese settlement on the western coast, where I'm speaking at a publisher and CEO conclave organized by Ifra. After the congress we'll fly back to Mumbai, then take an overnight train to New Delhi, where we'll stay five days. We'll hit the obvious tourist attractions, including the Taj Mahal, but we'll also do what we can to experience local culture.

The Internet, collapsing space as it does, has transformed India into a source of low-priced labor for everything from call centers to software development. However, that doesn't translate into affordable mobile phone and Internet service, so we'll be limited to occasionally connecting from hotels and cybercafes. To save on weight, I'm not even taking a laptop. We'll make do with my Nokia N800, which gives me email, the Web and Skype when I can find a wi-fi signal, but it'll mostly be turned off.

The trip will be good for my daughter, whose worldview will undoubtedly be broadened by the experience. She'll have to write an extensive report for school about what she sees, and self-publish a photo book through Shutterfly.

But it also will be good for me. I can no more turn off the pseudo-news channels on cable TV than I can pass up a Chick-Fil-A sandwich. And neither one is particularly healthy. The U.S. presidential campaign has, sadly, deteriorated into the same lopsided barrage of lies that we saw four years ago. I've noticed that yelling at the TV doesn't seem to make it any better.

A fork in the wire-service road

Jeff Jarvis is back, and observes that the Newark Star-Ledger put out an edition without any AP content. Tim McGuire writes that Politico's move to syndicate not only content, but also advertising, "could create a marketplace for ad hoc solutions to the newspaper’s need for supplemental material."

It's clear that we're coming to a major fork in the road, one that could profoundly reshape the way nonlocal journalism is created and distributed in America. What's not so clear is what's down that road, or even how many forks we're going to face.

Doing without AP isn't as radical as it sounds. I did it in the early 1980s in St. Louis, when the Globe-Democrat went ex-AP to cut costs and survive a little longer. The Globe was a 220,000 circulation metropolitan newspaper, but it was overwhelmingly focused on local news. "Making do" with UPI, Reuters and a couple of inexpensive supps wasn't all that much of a hardship.

The issue isn't so much whether paper X or paper Y can get by without the AP. It's really a matter of whether the AP can continue to be a positive force in a world in which it's moved beyond its old newspaper base.

And what kind of journalism will it -- and the various "ad hoc solutions" -- support? Hard news? Breaking news? Analysis? Long form? Short form? AP traditionally has been the primary provider of news that's as dull as oatmeal, middle of the road, not particularly deep, and offensive to as few as possible.

What I've seen coming from the AP Washington bureau recently has been painful to watch as the AP lurches around trying to figure out how to do meaningful analysis and instead churning out amateurish opinion.

And what's right for newspapers to run? There's not enough conversation about the question of whether printed newspapers ought to focus on long-form "sink into this warm tub and soak for awhile" journalism or chase the bright-short-timely model. My own preference is for the former -- but if I were in the UK, I'd be reading a national broadsheet and not a "red top" tabloid. Where do the numbers lead us? Is it just a business question?

Training days

Last month I described how we're working to build a next-generation news website management system, based on the Drupal platform. Much of that system has been built out and configured on a development server at work, but there's quite a bit of work remaining.

All this week I'm in daylong training sessions with 10 site developers from three Morris newspapers and Morris DigitalWorks. Many are new to Drupal, so we're covering basic site administration, configuration and operations. They're learning the power that comes with the Views, Nodequeue, Panels and Content Construction Kit modules. They're learning how the templating system gives them total control over presentational details.

When we're done, this will be an innovation platform, not just a content publishing and community platform. They'll be able to take an idea into production quickly.

For example, about a week ago a couple of us were talking about Twitter. The Florida Times-Union has a Jaxdotcom account on Twitter that's very active and rapidly gathering followers. Wouldn't it be great to include it right on the new website? We took that from an idea into a finished product in a little over an hour, using the FeedAPI RSS aggregator, a custom content type, an a custom output template for that type. To add some polish, we whipped up a custom output filter that links Twitter-style usernames like @jaxdotcom directly to their accounts.

Open tools and open platforms are great for developers, but what we really want to do is place this kind of power directly in the hands of content producers. They won't have to know a programming language, or how databases work, or even HTML to create special presentations based on database queries. Need a new XML feed? Point and click. When these folks get back to their respective newspapers, they'll become trainers and resources and spread the knowledge.

A new approach to handling blog spam

A friend of mine expressed great frustration at not being able to post a comment on my blog the other day. Because of blog spammers, I have grown progressively less comment-friendly, requiring CAPTCHA tests and moderating every post.

I just signed up for Mollom, a new Web service from Dries Buytaert, founder of the Drupal project. This lets me turn anonymous posting back on, and remove the mandatory CAPTCHA challenge. Mollum performs content analysis and, if it "thinks" a post might be spam, it intervenes with a CAPTCHA challenge. Mollom also tries to detect obscene and violent language, and over time it'll get smarter about that.

Like a lot of Web 2.0 services, Mollom "learns" from its users. If I mark an item as spam, that data gets passed back to the big Mollom brain to help everybody else. Mollom benefits from participation, and low-volume service (which is plenty adequate for personal blogs) is free.

Currently, Mollom claims to catch 99.69% of spam attempts, and it reports that 77% of all comment postings are spam.

The toughest challenge is a subtle one. A lot of spam today is human-written by people who have read something about SEO and go around posting plain-vanilla, meaningless comments like "good job" and "I want to know more about this" -- and then slipping in the URL of the site they're trying to pump in the Google pagerank. It will be interesting to see how Mollom handles this problem. I suspect that a couple will slip through, but one they're marked, those URLs will get the Mollom death penalty. I will enjoy that.

Netvibes like behaviou - code sample for you if needed

Hi,

As a big fan of Mysit, I am waiting the Netvibes like behaviour. If usedful for you, just pointing a resource not very known by the community, where you can find open source code to mimic Netvibes or Google Start page.

http://www.portaneo.com/solutions/en/opensource.php

Example:

http://www.portaneo.com/portal/index.php

Great work, keep the force :-)

Dennis

Industry Standard using Drupal

The Industry Standard, aka thestandard.com, is using Drupal. The Industry Standard features news and analysis that covers emerging technologies and companies, venture funding, acquisitions, site launches, and other developments in the internet space. This system is built as a prediction market, intersected with a reputation-based social network. The site is part of the IDG network, which includes sites like Computerworld, Infoworld, JavaWorld.com, Macworld, PC World, and more.

Like most big Drupal sites, they use CCK, Views, memcache, and a master-slave database configuration. Two noteworthy items are the fact that they use Apache Solr for search, and Mollom as their spam deterrent.

Hagen's Drupal 6 book in the mail

Hagen Graf has written his second German Drupal book: Drupal 6: Websites entwickeln und verwalten mit dem Open Source-CMS published by Addison-Wesley. The book also comes with a German Drupal 6 training video. And for every copy sold, 1 EUR is donated to the Drupal Association Thanks Hagen!

@Hagen, next time take a picture of your book on my website? ;-)

The book talks about Mollom!

Building powerful and robust websites with Drupal 6 book

Building powerful and robust websites with Drupal 6 is an update to David Mercer's two year old book Drupal: Creating Blogs, Forums, Portals and Community Websites.

Just like David's previous book, this book is geared towards people who are new to Drupal and that have little or no experience in website design, PHP, MySQL or HTML. If you want practical advice on how to get a Drupal site up and running, this book is for you. Unlike David's first Drupal book, this book also caters to the intermediate Drupal user as it talks about Drupal's content construction kit, actions, triggers and even jQuery. Reading this book won't make you a Drupal expert, but it will give you a solid base from which to build.

Learning Drupal 6 module development book

Matt Butcher's Learning Drupal 6 module development book an great introduction to begin developing on Drupal. It is not for the die-hard developer, but it looks like a must have for new Drupal developers. Thanks for for putting this book together, Matt!

State of Drupal presentation (August 2008)

Last week at DrupalCon Szeged I gave my traditional state of Drupal presentation. The video of the presentation is provided below, and you can download a copy of my slides (PDF, 11MB) as well.

The presentation discusses the results of the recent survey that I conducted; the survey ran for 30+ days and collected more than 1300 responses so it should provide a good idea of the community's current thinking. I'll provide more color and details about the survey results in a number of follow-up posts.