Aranfoolcaytar

In the past few weeks, I've worked pretty instensively with Drupal every day. The result, as always, is that I'm amazed by what it can actually do, as well as disappointed by the great number of things it can't - or that are exceedingly inconvenient.

I realized that this will get lengthy, so instead of putting it all in one post I'll make a new post for each of the modules I'd like to see.

1. Make a node-based forum

The current core "forum" module is a joke. It's basically a disguised multi-user blog with posts sorted by their last comments.

Did it again: An hour or so of desperate procrastination yielded a small search engine with built-in auto-suggest feature.

This one does a look-up of HTTP status codes. Seasoned web developers know how often you need to know the meaning of a certain status - both for programming a server response and for understanding it when building a site that fetches or aggregates remote content.

I got two very nice books this year, the first of which I'm almost done with.

After my last post, I once again visited Clusty (which I'd ignored for the last couple of years, since Google has a better interface and better results), and did what people have been doing since search engines were conceived when they couldn't think of a search term: I goog--- sorry, I clustied myself.

And the results were a bit disturbing. Because, you see, Clusty has a whole category devoted to results for "arancaytar" that aren't me.

According to PC Advisor and numerous other sources on news.google.com, the Quaero project initiated by France and Germany is falling apart.

The code base that powers my Drupal sites has today been updated to 5.0 RC1, which was released on 2006-12-15. From now on, I'll only update on a new milestone release, since the constant mucking about with the CVS head takes more time than I have.

In the process, I've also chucked out the Slashdot-lookalike theme that was here before. It's still enabled, but the default is now the standard Garland theme from Drupal, which may seem a bit bland but is a lot smoother and also more compatible with the new version.

Half a year ago, I wrote two short guides on how to use PHP to get "clean resource identifiers" for your website. A "clean" address, in this case was considered a sensible, short and memorable name that could be easily printed on paper or dictated, which did not depend on the location of the files and which (importantly) did not have a file extension like .php or .html.

Google now offers prints from Picasa Web Albums. On one hand, this is great and very convenient (I probably won't use it, but still). On the other hand, these don't even need to be your photos - you can have anything printed provided it's hosted on Picasa Web.

The BBC article on Mugabe extending his reign - sorry, presidency - until 2010 has given me the opportunity for a little chuckle. So here's your World Politics Quote Of The Week:

Mugabe himself has decided to come clean about his succession. He basically has decided to succeed himself. (Johnathan Moyo, former Minister of Information, to the BBC

Something that used to be a perfectly normal part of the Web and HTML specifications has been turned into quite a privacy problem: External resources.