Every day or so I try to browse so modules that might be of use for customers. Not that my team is afraid of building own modules. Not at all as the Hansel module for example shows. A rather cool module for developers to make better breadcrumbs that we build for the NCRV.nl and was donated by them. Not afraid to make own modules that make "awesomeness happen". But using Open Source means building on the shoulders of giants and no matter how tall you are, there is always someone taller then you. So despite being 2 meters tall, I always look for smarter people writing interesting code/functionality.

So the other day I came across the Drupal anywhere module that uses twitters anywhere service. Anyway, clicking the demo link brought me to... drup.al!

And this is what I wrote about that domain-name back in 2006:

If Drupal would have started in 2005 and Albania would have had a real NIC, we wouldnt have claimed drupal.org but drup.al.


But we arent followers, not here to be hip and we were twodotooo before Tim could spell it out. So we are Drupal.org, rocking without being Beta Two Dot Oooh!

And I still think it is true today. Even if Time gave an excellent keynote at DrupalCon SF. Drup.al is a funny domain-name. Demoing a nice module, that is all it is. And when the Albanian NIC was any more open back in 2001 when I registered drupal.org I am sure I would have looked at drup.al as well. Nice domain name, but search engines are the new DNS, Google is the new Bind. Funny name, drup.al. But most outsiders already think that the name Drupal by itself is funny enough.

I love my iPhone and I love Google. And the combination of these to leads to a nice user experience; when an iPhone user visits Google with Mobile Safari. Google reads the user-agent string and gives the user a page optimized for the user experience on the phone. As stated before, it is not the user that should change and go to m..example.com but the site that adepts to the user('s browser).

This leads to an optimized situation, one can swipe through images in Google images and has the least HTML overhead when visiting Google.com. There is however one thing google can do better. Spelling. Okay, there is also one thing I could do better, but that is not my point :-)

If google reads a search string and a user-agent, they could guess if the user/iPhone made a small error on the keyboard and hint to that word, just like the iPhone itself most of the times does.

So when I would search for "Ftupal" Google should see this and even though the word Drupal has only a few characters the same, changes are that I wanted to press the D next to the F and the R next to the T.

Doing this makes Google smarter then the iPhones' OS. And better at spelling and syntax as me are. For sure.

(Woordenwolk / tagcloud van de troonrede 2009. Groter op flickr. Volledige tekst van troonrede oa op ad.nl.)
Ik blijf me afvragen waarom "traditionele" media dit soort nieuwe technieken van visualisatie online niet meer toepassen. Zie ook Regaeerakoord 2007 in een woordenwolk en de krantenoplage in een tagcloud.

U bent minder grafisch ingesteld en wilt de raw breakdown (noisewords deleted)?

---

27 regering
15 zijn
13 worden
12 wordt
11 ons
11 mensen
11 meer
11 burgers

---

10 land
10 kunnen
10 jaar
9 zal
9 wil
9 dat
8 zorg
8 onze
8 2009
7 vertrouwen
7 niet
7 nederland
7 krijgen
7 goed
7 daarom
6 samen
6 nederlandse
6 komt
6 groei
6 goede
6 economische
6 deze

---

5 wij
5 vergroten
5 veiligheid
5 u
5 samenwerking
5 onderwijs
5 nodig
5 leefomgeving
5 kinderen
5 jongeren
4 werken
4 vrijheid

---

and this is how you do it:
cat troon.txt | tr -d ',.' | tr [[:blank:]] '\n'| tr [A-Z] [a-z] | sort | uniq -c | sort -nr | head -20

update: ik bedoelde natuurlijk: troonrede /voor/ 2009, niet van 2009

The Drupal Association has two main goals:

1. To facilitate the Drupal community
2. To protect the Drupal community and her assets

Communication and hence promotion is an important part of making sure we get closure to reaching our goals. And for that, we write press releases for important Drupal (community) events, for example the release of Drupal 6.

I am not a big supporter of the idea that the Association has to do payed press-releases, for example pay a news agency like PRNewswire to spread the word. IMHO we should use the power of the community to spread the word, the quality of the product to speak for itself and use mouth to mouth for getting our product out there. I know that the Association is not a community and in fact more "a corporate" but we (the Association) should align with our biggest asset: the community. Not with some press agency; our proprietary friends can do that better and the commercial Drupal shops will as well. In fact some of them have been making lots of waves with the press releases.

But with press releases like this one from Mediacurrent the Drupal Association has a lot less work to do. I quote:

Drupal's powerful taxonomy system, fine grained security, and distributed architecture made it a natural choice to capture the in-depth functionality Carlos was looking for.

and

...the Drupal CMS will now allow Emory administrators to seamlessly update and edit content within their site.

The release looks more pro Drupal then pro Mediacurrent or the site they made.... hold on... there is not even a link towards the site they have been building? And as a logo, they did not use their client's or their own, but have chosen our Druplicon?

So thank you Mediacurrent for choosing Drupal and promoting it. You might as well join our marketing team. Really

BTW: Did anyone else notice that the Pagerank of Drupal.org went down from 9 to 8? Oooh my, the sky is falling.

BTW2: My official function within the Association is now Rabble Rouser, "see" podcast 58 from Lullabot. Thanks Earl! :-)

At the very successful -or at least I think so- first Dutch DrupalJam we made our first steps in translating the upcoming Drupal 6 release. While there is no stringfreeze yet for the language being used in D6, we just wanted a head start to make sure that the Dutch version would be the first 100% translated Drupal version. Thanks to our friendly neighbors in the South -the incredible KrimsonKrew- we have a server where you can help translating with a very low barrier, all you need is a browser, being able to read English and write Dutch and visit (the L10 server of Krimson Krew.

Even if you are a spellinggod, dont be afraid, Erik still has to commit all the work and will go through it to make sure the translation is by his high standards and consistent. And no, we are not going translate "widget" to "dingetje". :-)

Be sure to read:

1. Vertaalinfo, woordenboeken, richtlijnen en vertaalsoftware
2. Drupal woordenlijst
3. Translation guide

And now all Dutch readers should visit the KrimssonKrew: go to Welcome at the l10n-effort at DrupalJam (to be translated)