Drupal

It is a known fact that US missiles made their way to Al Jazeera offices in Kabul, Afghanistan in 2001, and Baghdad in 2003.

What is making the news these days is an alleged leaked memo that Bush wanted to bomb Al Jazeera offices, but Blair disagreed. The source is The Daily Mirror, which is mostly a tabloid.

The White House denies that there was ever such a plan, and the ever so eloquant Blair said it is a conspiracy theory. 

Al Jazeera officals have requested a meeting with Blair to discuss the issue. Staffers at Al  Jazeera have started a "Don't Bomb Us" blog!

Some time ago, I ran across this lengthy humor article on how to write unmaintainable code.

Look at this gem:

Capitalisation
 
 Randomly capitalize the first letter of a syllable in the middle of a word. For example ComputeRasterHistoGram().
 

How many times did you see this CamelCase notation in code on Words? Too many times!

I did some Drupal consulting work for www.telecentre.org, a grassroots community technology initiative co-funded by Canada's IDRC. That included some more consulting for wsis.telecentre.org which is about the World Summit on Information Society.

I was recently approached by a client who wanted a custom Drupal module.The module was supposed to be a clone of Drupal's "Who's New" and "Who's Online" modules, but with user defined input. The specifications were that would be an admin defined list of users, and the module will select some of them at random. There would also be a user defined list of how many users to show online at a certain time (how many registered users, and how many guests). In other words, it would give a fake sense of the site being a very busy one.I politely told the person who requested this module that this amounts to deception. Their answer was it was like the opening day of a restaurant when it is packed with guests, but all of them are really relatives and friends of the owner who invited them for the opening night.

The World Summit on Information Society has started in Tunisia.Watching Tunisia's Satellite TV on Telstar5, coverage is almost exclusive on this event. No wonder since it is good publicity for the country and tourism. I did some consulting work for telecentre.org, who also have a dedicated web site for WSIS. The official beta launch for Telecentre will be at the summit on Thursday.

Here is a new module that allows a web site  admin to track external clicks, such as ad campaigns and links in a newsletters. The idea is to pass external sites a special link, and the module will keep track of when this link is clicked. It keeps daily, weekly and total statistics per node, as well in groups.Download the click module. 

This module is an Extended Tracker module for Drupal. It has all the functions of the core tracker module  (the module  that provides the "recent posts" menu in the navigation block), and adds a few features:

• Ability to restrict the listing to certain taxonomy terms.
• Ability to list node scores (as assigned by the nodevote module)
• Ability to sort on any column (title, author, score, number of comments, last post date, ...etc.)
• Ability to change the number of nodes per page displayed.

The taxonomy feature works well in some themes (e.g. CivicSpace) but not others (Bluemarine). See  the README file that comes with the package for more details.