CivicActions

Here is an (incomplete) rundown of the various 'similar/related node' type modules:

	Manually entered	Parsed links	Search/analysis of title/body	Taxonomy	Same content type
Related Links	☺	☺	☺	☺
Related Block			☺
Similar by Terms				☺
Similar Entries			☺
Relevant Content				☺	☺

It should be pointed out that while related links is one of the oldest of the bunch, and has most features, it is not quite as flexible as people are looking for (which I think is the main reason for the other modules), and the UI is not always easy to understand.

Here is what I would like to see - a module that (on node creation/edition and also regularly refreshed on cron) provides a hook to allow various modules to add in some numeric factors for how that node relates to other nodes. These modules could have their own configuration (e.g. to only pull from certain vocabularies), and the central API would allow you to weight one module/factor against another (e.g. taxonomy similarity v.s. word similarity v.s. destination node votes or freshness).

It would basically then just dump this information into a table and provide it to views as a sort option (that would need to load a node from an NID passed in an argument to provide a 'relevant' sort). This would allow you to display it per content type or whatever. For bonus points there would be a way for Content Recommendation Engine or other modules with user specific input to add their influence to the final list.

Here are the slides from my Drupalcon session yesterday (open the PDF version if you want the LOLcats). The session went very well - there was some great feedback and lots of good questions asked.

A post about Drupal on the XO over on the Development Seed blog reminded me about a HOWTO and video demo I put together over a month ago and then got too busy to post. The Drupal on OLPC HOWTO is over on the OLPC wiki, and uses Lighttpd and MySQL for the stack.

From Al Giordano (via BB):

Texas Republicans have worked overtime to make it harder for key Democratic voting groups to vote and be represented fairly. The redistricting games they’ve played are infamous. And for the Prairie View A&M University precincts, they put the early-polling place more than seven miles from the school. So what did the students in this video do? They shut down the highway as they marched seven miles to cast their votes on the first day of early voting.

The scene reminds me of another famous motorway Reclaim the Streets party from 'back in the day' (1996 to be precise)...

It is often said that 3 things make a 'trend' in the modern world, so here are 3 very sneaky browser bugs triggered by 3 different Drupal modules that have crossed my path in the last few weeks, all (it turns out) quite likely related. Here they are, in the hope that if you see something similar you might be able to locate the problem a little more rapidly.

Here is a list of the sessions CivicActions has proposed (or co-proposed!) for Drupalcon Boston 2008. Also, CivicActions themer extraordinaire Stephanie Pakrul is co-chairing the design and user experience track.

Please have a browse, add any comments or suggestions to the session page and vote for any sessions that are of interest to you!

Now, close your eyes and imagine what we could to with a year out of Iraq.

I recently made a list of a whole bunch of modules I was interested in, and wanted to gain a quick overview of how they followed Drupal's coding standards. While this is obviously only one metric and there are many others possible (issue queue length, manual code review, simpletests etc), it is a useful and simple way to to get started.

...and Bush feels fine:

I have found that we always get sent a bunch of catalogs, without ever signing up for any (personally, I blame magazine subscriptions...but who knows!).

Anyway, this free service called Catalog Choice just launched that lets you unsubscribe from any catalog (without having to call annoying phone lines).

Bill Moyers has an interesting interview with one of the organizers of the project.