November, 2008
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Christmas Market in Plauen, Germany
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My grandma just made friends with me on Faebook. I have the coolest grandma in the history of grandmas.

Grandma D on Facebook

What is this setup good for?

Drupal's developers are constantly fixing bugs and striving to make our Drupal installations as safe as possible - there have been 6 security updates of the 5.x and 6.x branches so far in 2008. If you have several sites, the maintenance work can really cut into your time.

I'd like to share with you a little trick I use in my server setup to streamline the upgrade process when a new core release is available. It not only makes core updates quicker and safer to implement, it also leaves the previous version ready to use on my server in case there are problems with the new Drupal core version.

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During a meeting about training today, one of my colleagues and I were discussing how the same taxonomy could apply to several different “bodies of knowledge” about Acquia and Drupal. We’re envisioning a taxonomy that could organize a “Drupal Body of Knowledge” collection (akin to the PMBOK), training curricula, a certification exam, and a knowledgebase.

Got inspired by Denmark and made this Viking Drupal logo.

Vikings are like Nordic pirates! Yay!
Looking forward to presenting a little bit tomorrow and doing some hot Update-on-Site action here.

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There has been a lot of hand waving about the semantic web, RDF, and Drupal. This is good, and it is important for there to be excitement about the possibilities that this opens to us. Now the first concrete plans are being laid and the first patches are being written and evaluated. If you’ve ever wondered about this semantic web business, or if you thought microformats were a good idea, or if you’ve been secretly (or publicly) coding your own RDF tools for Drupal you’ll want to be a part of this conversation.

A lot of hard issues will have to be solved. XHTML document designers (ie web application builders and Drupal developers) are not accustomed to working with XML namespaces. The inclusion of RDFa is wholly dependent on the theme layer so it is important to build tools that handle this without further burdening Drupal themers. The basic data storage mechanisms in Drupal are all based on relational databases, not RDF, thus it will fall on tool builders and module authors to ascribe semantic meaning to data and to actively use the new tools to generate RDFa markup.

Furthermore, the addition of RDFa and supporting technologies like GRDDL introduce very new and somewhat complex workflows that greatly depart from the server->browser lifecycle of our current XHTML documents. Drupallers will have to learn about this in order to understand and utilize the potential benefits that RDFa can bring.

Example of GRDDL workflow

Here are some places to watch and participate in the coming months as Drupal makes this very important transition:

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Keith Olbermann addresses the ban on gay marriage with the most clarity and eloquence.


WSJ travel columnist Scott McCartney offers his plea for how President-elect Obama can simplify the lives of business travelers by splitting the FAA into two different arms—one for regulation and the other for air traffic control and management.

He recommends that President Obama work to create the latter entity as a quasi-government organization or a non-profit corporation like those in Australia, Canada, and the UK.
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I just finished listening to Karl Susman on Sound Policy with Denise Howell. A worrying trend that Karl points out is that homeowner’s claims related to blogging liability were being paid out for some time, and now there aren’t any being paid out. As an insurance agent, his take on this is that blogging, podcasting, and other online participation are no longer covered by homeowner’s policies. Of course, there are now some custom policies available for bloggers.

Earlier in the cast, he mentioned that blogging and related activities are also entering into corporate policy negotiations. Most of the corporate liability policies he’s working on (in CA) explicitly do not cover liability related to online publishing activities—or offering very minimal coverage.

Commit #151029 by robertDouglass at 14:37
Apache Solr Search Integration: /modules/apachesolr/contrib/apachesolr_lang/directory NONE
Directory /cvs/drupal-contrib/contributions/modules/apachesolr/contrib/apachesolr_lang added to the repository
--> Using per-directory sticky tag `DRUPAL-6--1'