According to Drupal usage stats, over 40 sites are using the Multiforms survey/contest module I developed with the help of Geoff Burke and Miles Kier. That's not a huge number, but will motivate me to clean up the code and improve the documentation. I've definitely learned a lot about Drupal, and development in general, since I started the project a year and a half ago.

The Django databrowse application is an interesting piece of software that I've wanted to try out ever since its creator, Adrian Holovaty, demoed it in Vancouver last year. Its purpose is to allow you to navigate data, using a web interface, looking for trends and other interesting aspects.

Here's a simple script to monitor a web app hosted on a Centos/Red Hat server for the "white screen of death" that you'll get if PHP runs out of memory or you get a fatal error with error display turned off.

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.