Mike Cantelon

Two projects I am watching with a lot of interest are Pinax and Drupy.

I just committed a Drupal input filter for Haml to Drupal.org: http://drupal.org/project/haml. It depends on phpHaml, which in turn depends on PHP 5.

I'll be doing a talk this Friday at the sold-out Drupal Camp Vancouver on the fast and elegant Sphinx search engine. Sphinx is open source, straightforward, and used by folks like NowPublic and The Pirate Bay to provide scalable search.

Using CSS sprites is a great way to increase site response by lessening the number of HTTP requests needed to fetch a page.

Updating sprites can be tricky though. Browsers will cache an image containing sprites which makes adding new sprites tricky. The easiest way to get a browser to recache an image containing spites is to change the filename.

On May 9-10, Vancouver will see its second ever Drupal conference, Vancouver Drupal Camp 2008. The event will feature multiple tracks and will take place at two downtown locations.

If you're interested in helping organize or sponsor, let the organizers know how you'd like to contribute on the wiki page!

After working with the Georgia Straight for a little over a year, it's satisfying to finally see our web team's vision unleashed. We've launched a redesign that combines a new look with a new navigation scheme. In the previous version, content over a week old was only accessible through the "back issues" interface. In the new version access to content is more blog-like. Content flows in reverse chronological order for each topic and can be subscribed to via RSS.

At the Georgia Straight, we've implemented our first contest based on user generated content and user content rating. In partnership with the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, we're offering a $1000 makeover to the highest rated contestants who submit their photos. By rating the submitted photos, our users get to decide who should get a makeover.

When testing different user roles in Drupal, there is a handy trick that leverages Gmail's ability to pass information in via your email address. For example, if your Gmail email address is "fakeemail@gmail.com" you can pass additional information by adding a plus sign before the "@" and the additional information after the plus sign. For example, "fakeemail+extrainfo@gmail.com". When creating test users with different roles, the role can be specified in the email address using this technique.

The good folks at the Vancouver Drupal Users Group allowed me to make a presentation about my open-source contest and survey module for Drupal, Multiforms.

Oct. 2007 Presentation for Vancouver Drupal Users Group (PDF) viewable online here

Update: This problem persists after an upgrade to Drupal 5. I just ran into a weird issue with a Drupal 4.7 installation on Centos 4 with PHP 4. In the Audio module I had to comment out the "ob_end_clean()" line in the audio_file_transfer function to get downloads and streaming to work. I tried this on two similarly configured servers and got the same issue on both. Odd.