Friday March 19 (9:00-18:00 CET) the Dutch Drupal community will organise the 6th "DrupalJam".

A DrupalJam is a place where anyone interested in Drupal can get together to discuss about one of the best Open Source CMS-es out there. A friendly palce where users, coders, business people as well as people interested in web technologies. This time the Jam will be helded at the StayOkay hotel in Amsterdam, Timorplein 21. More information about the StayOkay location can be found on Maps as well. We expect over 200 people (up to 300!) visiting the DrupalJam and we will have attendees form over four countries.

It only seemed like yesterday.. The first DrupalJam I co-organised was in a basement with 50 or so people (top left). Not unlike the second DrupalCon, held in Amsterdam (right).

And now, 6 editions later we have reached the scale of the third DrupalCon in Brussels as can be seen on Dries' site. And this is a global trends. While DrupalCons get bigger and bigger, there is also a trend to localise DrupalCon's that are reaching the same scale as DrupalCon's were only a a few editions ago. And with that the global DrupalCon problems get local as wel, continuity, professionalism en sponsors.

I am proud to say -not meant to toot my own horn- that the organisers of the DrupalJam so far did an excellent job. The very healthy ecoshere around Drupal in the Netherlands made that we have the following premium sponsors; Microsoft, Radio Radio Netherlands Worldwide, Dutch Open Projects, Internet Unlimited, KPN, NCRV, OneShoe and Sogeti. Other sponsors include VLC (gold), Lucius, Acquia, Synetic, Wizzlern (silver) and Merge (bronze). Looking at this list there are at least two key things to note. The first one is a classic one, the distribution is skewed to the left meaning we made the premium sponsorship to cheap.

The second one is more important. The ecoshere around Drupal grew and outgrew the standard Drupal implementers. KPN (fortune 500, telephone, mobile, ADSL, high end webhosting), NCRV (public broadcaster using Drupal a lot), Radio Netherlands Worldwide (public broadcaster using Drupal, see Dries' site) and Microsoft are not the "standard" sponsors of an Open Source project. It shows that the market around Drupal is maturing and that parties that have an indirect stake are willing to invest and give back. And we do thank them for that, as well as thank our other sponsors!

Dries once told me he wanted to have local DrupalCamps in every city around the world. We are not there yet. But I do think there is a (bi-)yearly DrupalCamp in every free country around the world right now. And when these will become too big, there will be a DrupaCamp in every major city around the world by 2015 for sure.

Drupal is coming home in 2015, your home! But if you can not wait that long, sign up for the DrupalJam in Amsterdam, look the sessions and propose a session (login required). Please do contact me or Bart Feenstra if you have any questions. DrupalJam will rock!

(source flickr, no it is not me)

In a recent post I joked about willy (this site) former hardware being the oldest server on the net. Well, it turned out that it might have been one of the slowest, but not the oldest. At least, there is actually a C=64 serving webpages with this ethernet board and it can be found on http://www.c64web.com/.

And yes, it seems it is actually running on a C=64:

krokodil-boerland-home:~ bert$ telnet www.c64web.com 80
Trying 58.6.118.18...
Connected to c64web.com.
Escape character is '^]'.
GET / HTTP/1.0
HTTP/1.0 200 OK
Server: Contiki/2.2.2 http://www.sics.se/contiki/
Connection: close
Content-type: text/html

So do not be surprised when I move this webserver over to my old C=64 running Contiki. :-)

I finnaly moved this website from my 15 year old pentium 166 with a load over 20 to some better iron, some decent 3 year old hardware. The new machine had a newer PHP version and my /ancient/ Drupal install was fine with that. However, I was unable to log in. Took me some time to see if this was caching or Cookie related but found it, adding
register_shutdown_function('session_write_close');
to the sessions.inc did the trick

So this website should be more stable now, and faster. I will get a new ADSL line in a couple of week upgrading to 20Mb so should be even faster in some time. With some downtime however, I will get a new IP address as well and need to change my zones when I know what this address will be.

Thank you bas for giving me "havenmeester" (aka tug) 5 years ago. Even at that time dated hardware but served me well. It is just that the fan of the CPU makes an enormous amount of noise now.

shutdown -h now.

We salute you Tug, the oldest webserver on the net :-)

A someone who has been "active" in the Drupal community for over 8 years, it is shocking to see that only in the last 3 years Drupal was really picked up by the mainstream press. This is not due to the quality of the code of Drupal of the community, as much as it has to do with building momentum and a shake out in the CMS landscape. So this story about Drupal being in the "Top 10 coolest Open Source products" (yes, it is that time of the year again) comes as no surprise to anyone how knows the code or the community.

The real power of Drupal however is that 5 (!) other Open Source projectsof the top 10 products use Drupal as a platform to deliver their tools, empower their community. That is the real power of Drupal. 6 (including Drupal self) of the top 10 Open Source tools according to CRN.com use Drupal:

1. Ledger SMB (a fork of SQL ledger)
2. DoJo (they hacked Drupal core to get the DoJo in and JQuery out :-) )
3. Ubuntu (Linux for humans, with their famous bug 1)
4. Firefox, the best browser chrome :-) )
5. OO.org, word!

Drupal power. "We, the Drupal community" are proud :-)

Begrijp me goed, ik ben absoluut tegen huiselijk geweld, elk geweld. Maar ben ook voor goed gebruik van internet En deel van dit goed gebruik is dat je namen neemt voor sites die zinvol zijn. Zo zijn er in het verleden talloze domain namen geweest waarover men 10 seconde langer had moeten nadenken voordat men submit drukte.

Een paar voorbeelden? www.kidsexchange.com is minder handig, "Who Represents" als URL geeft www.whorepresents.com. En Pen Island geeft natuurlijk www.penisland.net. Leuk hoor, zo'n Power Generator company in Italie; www.powergenitalia.com . En deze lijst is erg veel langer.

Een aantal van mijn klanten zenden uit op de radio, vele klanten hebben advertenties op de radio. En de meeste foute URL's zitten in het verschil tussen zien (typen, TV, print ad) en horen (gesprek, radio commercial). Mijn klanten willen dus en example.com/over-ons maar ook example.com/overons omdat de "dash" niet goed bekt op de radio. Prima, het ziet er niet uit maar als je beide doet, prima.

Maar wie verzint er nu een Fully Qual Domain Name steunpunthuiselijkgeweld.nl. Prima op TV. Maar in een gesprek of de radio klinkt dit toch echt als:

steun . huiselijkgeweld . nl, niet helemaal denk ik wat de makers bedoelden?