It seems that Google is -more or less- 10 years old. To celebrate this, they have a timeline (more on that later ) and a project to do good; 10^100. Drupal.org was just around the corner, I registerd it in later 2001 it seems:

krokodil-boerland-home:~ bert$ whois drupal.org | grep -i created
Created On:26-Apr-2001 11:42:11 UTC

But the real drupal site was drop.org (after "dorp" -village in Dutch- as the myth goes) and it 2001 it looked like this. Yes we needed a redesign back then as well

Google also has the Search 2001 site up, where you can -ego- surf and find results from 2001. Try drupal, the results are from January 2001. The first hit is an article on the PHPNuke site. Yek... I actually used that before switching to Drupal in those days. 5 pages of Drupal hits, 5! And most of them porn. Now you will find a lot more and more relevant hits (Results 1 - 10 of about 22,100,000 for drupal).

Looking back is fun. Some things you can laugh at retrospective, some things you can learn from. For example, the mission statement at that time was:

To develop a leading edge open-source content management system that implements the latest thinking in community publishing, knowledge management, and software design. We value flexibility, simplicity, and utility in our product; teamwork, innovation, and openness in our community; and modularity, extensibility and maintainability in our code.

Long as it might be, it was exact to the point and right, better then our mission. And I hereby plea to let it be our mission again!

What do Apache, Perl, Drupal, the Linux operating system, Google, Novell, Acquia and Joost have in common?

Leaders of these companies / Open Source projects are now all on the advisory council of the OSUOSL as you can read on the advisory page at OSUOSL and Oregonlive.com

OSUOSL is -for those who don't know- the hosting and housing party of many open source projects, such as Linux (the kernel), MythTV, Mozilla, Apache, Gnome and yes... Drupal!

Dries on the advisory council is great recognition of his talents but more, important for Drupal. We -the Drupal community- now have a more direct line towards the OSUOSL, more the "just" on the operational level we now have a line towards a more tactical / strategical level. That and Dries (and thereby the Drupal community) now has an even better connection towards Apache, Perl, the Linux operating system, Google, Novell and Joost.

I have been in datacentre and Internet routing for a bigger part of my career and the service we get from OSUOSL is worth a couple of k's per month, and we get that for free! So you might want to sponsor rack 2 of OSUOSL and thereby getting even closure to Drupal!

Congrats to Dries (well deserved) and good news for Drupal as well!

If you are a member of the Drupal Association (and thereby helping the community and showing off you care about the community) you might want to check if you should renew your yearly membershipssfee! If it has been more then a year since you have paid, you should remove the cool "member" badges from your site! Or.... you could renew your membership at the association site!

Please do check to see if your membership is up for renewal and wear your badge with pride! Your financial support is important for the community.

This story start with a one dollar bill I found the last day during the DrupalCon Szeged 2008.

A dollar, I thought! This must be my lucky day! So I took it with me and decided it was my lucky Dollar. Little did I know.

We took the train from Szeged to Budapest at 10 a clock, 2 hours later we were at the airport and went for a small snack. We had plenty of time, yet - I am not going in details here - it was very frustrating to see the plane leave, to see the gate getting closed, with you at the wrong side of it. It became a very expensive snack, a bit more then a dollar.

We tried to get the next plane towards Amsterdam, it was fully booked. The next one was overbooked. So we got a flight to Vienna and then to Amsterdam. After checking in, going through customs again, waiting 2 hours, we found out it was cancelled. We got rerouted towards Muchen and then to Amsterdam. After 3 hours waiting the plane actually left the ground, one hour late. We missed our connection to Amsterdam and slept at an 4 star hotel nearby. Not that we enjoyed the hotel because we had to get up at 5 AM to catch the next flight. Only to find out ...

...it was cancelled. 28 hours after we left Szeged, we were at home. Most west coast Americans attending the DrupalCon were probably already in bed. It thought me however a couple of lessons. One of them I wanted to share. There was no single airline that was responsible for the chain of events or knew about it. Sabre

(the independent computer network that all airlines use) is great, they can realtime reroute any passenger over any airline towards any destination. Yet, it is not in use a trouble-ticketing system, airline B knew nothing about my history and when failing to deliver they happily transferred me to airline C. Nobody saw my complete chain of events, from A-Z.

This is a lesson I need to pickup; whenever you fail to deliver a service to a customer, try to place it in the chain of events the customer already experienced. It will not make the delivery better, but you will understand the feelings of the customer better.

Now regarding DrupalCon. Here is a small update. I really REALLY liked the conference. I talked to lots of people, attended more sessions then I planned, got active in a couple of BoF's and co-presented one with Larry and Dries. So here is a small update on stuff I found.

It is great to see that the -on the spot during DrupalCon Barcelona- made up number of 7% female is broken!

With 10% of XX chromosomes during the Con we do represent the number of females on Drupal.org versus the number of males. Sure, it should have been 50%, but as the great Rop Gonggrijp once said, if you are female and want to become a computer geek, you better start electrocuting your Barby when you were 5 years old. And not many girls do so hence the ICT sector could use some more females. With webchick being the co-maintainer of D7, the Open Source community also shows there is no glass ceiling for females.

But hold on, we might have hit 10% XX chromosomes, but can you see what is wrong with this picture?

10% female, but 99,9% white! I am not the pro-positive discriminating kind of person. But I think I saw 1 (one!) black person during the complete conference. If you want to break barriers, we really should look at this as well. 90% of all people active in Drupal are white males, 10% white females. So, lets make sure that the next DrupalCon will be more representative for the population using Drupal! After all, Open Source is there as the big equaliser; there are no secrets (only information that you dont have).

Some other thoughts on the DrupalCon. I really like the talk of Mark Boulton who will be doing the redesign of "d.org", see the video on the Association site. A right balance of humour and content can be very powerful. I loved the story Mark and Leisa Reichelt
pulled together. Leisa is however (see the video) very wrong on one part. And it is a classic mistake to make showing there is still a big gap between designers of code and UI.

Leisa claims that she was amazed to see that most experienced Drupal users typed the URL on drupal.org instead of navigating through the site with a mouse. Now, I am not claiming that the UI of Drupal.org is good, not at all. Mark and Leisa have lots of work to do to make it better navigable and we -as the community- a lot to keep it clean by having some kind of styleguide on how to address the user and a better policy on how and when to promote a story to the frontpage (if there is going to be a frontpage in the classical sense after the redesign).

However, graphical designers only look on how to navigate through a site within the site, this since they are CMS agnostic. What they do not count as usability is the browser chrome, you do not control it as a website and you do not need to emulate the browsers functions. However there is one small part of the browsers chrome that is related to usability; the address bar! It is used by the person on the site just as much as the mouse is, it infleunces the page and hence is part of usability. The fact that graphical designers -and this is not to bash Leisa in any way- do not think of it as usability only shows there is still a huge gap to be bridged between code and design monkeys. The address bar is part of usability and the fact that the functionality of a site is reflected in useful predictable URL's like /node/add shows this. We all have to learn here to help the user navigate what is best for him or her and we should be aware that most some people type faster then they can click: bofhmode]" The world's only useful point and click interface is a .44 Magnum" [/bofhmode].

BTW: someone wants a dollar? Free shiping!

Today I had some time to arrange a ticket and an hotel for the DrupalCon Szegged 2008, pftttt! Just in time. Then I had some time to nerd around so I created a Y! pipe for All Things DrupalConSzeged2008 related (assuming that that would be the tag?). Feel free to run, edit, copy, change my pipe over at pipes, Yahoo! ID !required! You can see geolocated Flickr images, tweets, delicious links and much more in many formats (for example an RSS feed. feedback in the comments please, I'll update the pipe to reflect your thoughts.

And yes, that is the reason I do not program, even the pipe! looks bad and is not that smart build