• Open is better than closed.
• Transparent is better than opaque.
• Simple is better than complex.
• Accessible is better than inaccessible.
• Sharing is better than hoarding.
• Linked is more useful than isolated.
• Fine grained is preferable to aggregated.
• (Although there are legitimate privacy and security limitations.)
• Optimise for machine readability — they can translate for humans.
• Barriers prevent worthwhile things from happening.
• “Flawed, but out there” is a million times better than “perfect, but unattainable”.
• Opening data up to thousands of eyes makes the data better.
• Iterate in response to demand.
• There is no one true feed for all eternity — people need to maintain this stuff.

The Zen of Open Data by Chris McDowall

Google will be sponsoring 20 Drupal projects as part of their Summer Of Code this year, that's a phenomenal result for the Drupal community.

Thank you to Google for the unbelievably generous support. This represents $100,000 worth of financial contributions to Drupal development, $10,000 of which will be donated to the Drupal Association.

A few of the projects that will be worth keeping an eye on are the Jabber/XMPP integration, RSS/Atom improvements, an SMS framework, and an automated staging environment toolkit.

Lullabot have just released Lullacons Pack 1, a set of GPL icons for Drupal and other Open Source projects. These are 8-bit PNGs with 1-bit transparency so they will work in Internet Explorer.

They've also given people access to the original Photoshop .psd files, so you can create your own derivative versions. As per the rules of the GPL, if you do use them to create a new icon set then you have to make your modifications available to other people.

Dammit, if their podcasts weren't groovy enough, now they go and do something cool like this.

Steven Wittens writes:

After a long wait, the awesome jQuery library has finally been committed to Drupal core. jQuery 1.0 will be part of the next major Drupal release, for which the code freeze is about to begin.

What is jQuery I hear you ask:

jQuery is a Javascript library that takes this motto to heart: Writing Javascript code should be fun. jQuery acheives this goal by taking common, repetitive, tasks, stripping out all the unnecessary markup, and leaving them short, smart and understandable.

This is a very exciting development for Drupal opening up a whole world of new user interface improvements. As an example of some of the things that can be done have a look at Steve's colour picker widget. Now that's some cool stuff.

There's more info on jQuery and how it will fit into Drupal in the Lullabot podcast with jQuery's author John Resig.

As part of their expanding developerWorks series of articles IBM have decided to use Drupal for a sample IT project entitled “Using open source software to design, develop, and deploy a collaborative Web site”.

They evaluated a number of different Content Management Systems/Frameworks including Ruby On Rails, Typo3 and Mambo, but in the end they went with Drupal.

We did have to invest some time to learn the Drupal way, and the framework just seemed to make sense. We also felt that Drupal provided the right combination of framework and flexibility to break out of the framework when needed to get the job done. With all things considered, we decided to use Drupal. The landscape of open source CMS is continuously changing, and in the future we'll revisit these and any new entries in the field.

Given the extremely high standard of the developerWorks articles I'm going to be keeping an eye on this. I'm always on the lookout for new ways to make Drupal jump through hoops.

Update: The second part of the series has been published, focusing on designing for an effective user experience.

Update: Here's an overview page linking to all 5 articles.

Drupal 4.6.1 upgrade done, spam filters in place, comments open. Let the fun begin.

Dave Hyatt has done it.

(More on the Acid2 test at the Web Standards Project)

In an interesting bit of news (via DrunkenBlog) it appears that Google has hired Ben Goodger, one of the lead developers on Firefox.

As of January 10, 2005, my source of income changed from The Mozilla Foundation to Google, Inc. of Mountain View, California. My role with Firefox and the Mozilla project will remain largely unchanged, I will continue doing much the same work as I have described above - with the new goal of successful 1.1, 1.5 and 2.0 releases. I remain devoted full-time to the advancement of Firefox, the Mozilla platform and web browsing in general.

Time to restart the GoogleBrowser rumours again? Given how much you can customise Firefox/Mozilla through the use of XUL, I wouldn't be surprised if Google has something much bigger than just a branded browser up it's sleeve. We just haven't worked out what it is yet. Front end to the GoogleGrid perhaps?

Bit different round here isn't it?

This is what's happening. The site has been upgraded to Drupal 4.5.2 (really nice release), and I've also taken the time to start on a new theme, hence the whiteness. I've taken it right back to basics and I'll be adding in more as I work out what direction I want to take it.

I actually quite like this minimalist look, but I do need to sort out links and headers. The navigation isn't too clear right now.

I've also killed all the content that's isn't blog related for the time being. Until I get the architecture and main navigation nailed, photos are now over at Flickr and everything else will be coming back shortly.

Title says it all really. Drupal 4.5 has been released, and drupal.org gets a makeover.

New Features in 4.5 include:

• Tab based user interface
• Configurable menus
• Multiple roles per user
• Document/image uploads
• Node-level permissions
• Improved locale support
• Anonymous comments
• Theme system improvements
• Customizable user profiles
• Usability improvements
• Configurable input formats
• Performance improvements

Here's more information on the new drupal.org theme by Steven Wittens. Very nice it is too. Although 2004 is turning into the year of the rounded corners.

Polytechnic will get upgraded when I find the time. Not likely to happen soon though, client work pays the bills (actually, my employer does, but you know what I mean).