Southern Ontario has been enjoying a nice few weeks with mild weather. Not only has the snow on the ground thawed like it sometimes does in mid January, but the mild weather has spanned the good part of three or four weeks. What is unusual is that the thaw started on the first day of winter (Dec 21), before which we got three snow storms in a row very early in the season. In Mississauga last Wednesday, there was no snow on the ground to be noticed at all. Toronto is enjoying record mild temperatures.

This is both good and bad news to web site developers and theme designers.Many of us have read the phrase: "First impressions are the most lasting" on fortune cookies in Chinese restaurants, or heard it elsewhere. While it seems unfair to judge a book by its cover in a second or two, research shows that humans mentally rate web site by their looks in less than half a second, and often less than that.

Update 2006-02-01: User Referral Module has been released for 4.6. Get it from Drupal.org.A client recently commissioned a user referral module whereby an existing user of a site can refer another user and get some sort of credit for it.The module is conceptually similar to the affiliate module, but instead of a "site-to-user" model, it is a "user-to-user" model.Users in designated roles have a referral link that others can click on to register to the site. Once the new user registers, a database link is recorded as to which user referred them.

An interesting observation about the local race for federal representation in the local riding: none of the candidates for the mainstream parties are Canadian born!

Liberal candidate Andrew Telegdi, a career politician, and the current incumbent was born in Hungary.

Conservative candidate Ajmer S. Mandur is an India-born Sikh who came to Canada as a teenager.  He owns two small businesses

NDP candidate Edwin Laryea is from Ghana. He worked as a teacher, and is a newcomer to politics.

Of course there are other small players who have no parliament presence so far, such as the Green Party, who is represented by candidate Pauline Richards (born in England as well). The religious Christian Heritage Party did not field a candidate locally. The only Canadian born candidate in the riding is Julian Ichim, running for the  Communist Party of Canada (Marxist-Leninist).

Exactly one month ago, I posted on how many sites run Drupal. My estimate using "node/feed" in Google yielded 54,000.Today, the same query shows 58,400.Is it plausible to have 4,400 new Drupal sites in one month?

It seems that Ariel Sharon's stroke is being attributed to the Pulsa DiNura ("lashes of fire") that was placed on him by extremist Jews for pulling out of the Gaza strip. Pat Robertson seems to agree on this, saying that this is God's punishment, and noting that Yitzhak Rabin was assassinated.

Bloggerparty.com launched yesterday. They use Drupal, the Adsense module I wrote, and the new revenue sharing features that were recently sponsored by Bloggerparty.Brenda, the owner of BloggerParty, is elated with the success so far, in just two days. Read about it on her post on the first day.

On a recent post on Drupal.org, a few people were asking for the devel module for 4.6. I don't understand why it is not branched with every release, and let for those who need it. Anyway, since I happen to have a copy of the 4.6 module, I am attaching it here. Enjoy ... Update: The module is already branched for 4.6, and you can get it from drupal.org.

The user points module has been updated for Drupal 4.7.Get it from the Drupal.org project page. 

The Drupal  Adsense module has been updated to allow revenue sharing.

Some technical details for the curious:

• The site admin can assign a certain percentage of ad views to be assigned to  the node author's Google AdSense client ID.
• The node  types are also configurable, so the admin can only enable it for specific node types (e.g. blogs).
• The revenue sharing only  applies to the full node view, not the teasers. These go to "the house" (i.e. the site assigned Adsense client  ID).
• The path /blog/uid also has revenue sharing enabled.
• A specifically named profile field has to be filled in by the user to get credited with the ads.
• When revenue sharing is enabled, adsense caching is disabled.
• The percentage is determined based on a random number generator. So it is basically tossing dice from 1 to 100, and seeing if this page view should be awarded to the author or the site. I did this so that I dont have to keep a running total in the database, which would slow things down.

Benefits

This is a great community building tool.