In another episode of my new All-Drupal-All-The-Time mandate... After downloading the latest build of Flock (Beta 1), I went to the Flock website to create an account to provide some feedback and suggestions.

And I realized that it looks like the whole Flock website is now powered by Drupal. It's not blatantly obvious - they're not using a stock theme, or anything like that, but you can see the DNA in some of the URLs, and in the CSS linked on many of the pages.

Flock hit beta 1 (or 0.7, depending on how you count) yesterday, and it seems like a really solid release. My favorite feature isn't even part of the core Flock code - it's got more Extensions enabled, including Mouse Gestures!

I'm hoping they nailed down the nasty memory leaks that plagued previous builds, and cleaned up the window opening code, which could take several seconds to spawn a new browser window. But it's definitely on the right track.

I've been a pretty hardcore iPhoto user since the app was originally released several years ago. It's a pretty clean app, and has done everything I've needed of a photo management app. But, lately, I've been feeling like it's a little constraining. The photo retouching tools are a bit simple, and the viewing tools require a fair amount of manual intervention. 

I made the mistake of viewing the Aperture online demo video over the weekend, and realized a more advanced app would really be nicer. My home machine can't run Aperture, so I downloaded the latest beta of Adobe Lightroom and imported all of the images I've taken with the XT.

I've been running this blog on Drupal for a while now, and am generally quite happy with it. The one thing I'd been missing from my days powered by WordPress was a transparent and effective spam blocker. I was so totally spoiled by Spam Karma 2 that everything else just seems like a kid's toy in comparison.

I'd installed the Spam module shortly after I switched to Drupal, but it never seemed to actually block spam. It is pretty handy at removing it, but the URL and keyword matches didn't seem to actually stop spam.

I went for a quick drive this evening, through the Bearspaw region/community just a couple minutes from my house at the far northwest corner of Calgary. I think this was the first actual dedicated photography expedition I've taken - certainly in the last couple of years, anyway. I wound up taking 46 shots in about 45 minutes, from a few locations spread over the Bearspaw community. After throwing out the shots that sucked, were uninteresting, or really badly exposed, I was left with 9 shots that didn't make me cringe .

More places I'd rather be...

I hinted at this in a previous post, but it wasn't "official" yet so I didn't provide any details. It's now official. The University of Calgary just finished the official CMS selection process, including input from ~140 web folks on campus and 6 presentations on 6 different CMS options. I was asked to present on Drupal, drawing on what we've done on some projects, and how it might fit into a larger community and workflow on campus.

Alan forwarded me a link to this really great presentation by Tim Lindgren at Boston College, documenting some pedagogical and instructional design applications of Drupal. I'm sure much of it would translate to other software platforms, but there are some detailed descriptions and case studies written specifically from the point of view of implementing this in Drupal.

Thanks Alan! And thanks to Tim for putting this together! 

A test shot taken with my new Canon Digital Rebel XT. The lense cap was on, and the Vt mode was selected with a 30" exposure. I count 14 visible bad "spots" (pixels?), but Photoshop's Histogram counted many (i.e., dozens/hundreds) of bright non-black pixels in the image.

This will make photographs of stars basically impossible, as there will always be bright blue/red/gray spots on every dark image.

I've been noticing that the search feature of this Drupal blog has been acting up for awhile - searching for "drupal" turns up only 4 items, but I've written many many posts mentioning Drupal. I didn't think it was a big deal, but I've actually been getting emails and IMs asking me wtf wrt searching.

So, I dug a bit deeper. Turns out, Drupal is refusing to index my content when cron.php is called. It's called every hour, but the /admin/settings/search status indicator is stuck at:

I've been helping to assemble some lists of modules that would be enabled by default for three "typical" website profiles that we've come up with at the TLC.

"Simple site" - a regular "static" department-ish website that is really just using Drupal as an easy way to share editing duties without requiring a geek.

"Community site" - akin to weblogs.ucalgary.ca - which may (or may not) be a superset of "simple site"