Adding Understanding

Catching up on some blog reading today I picked up on a thread Dave Winer's been writing about. He's using ImageMagick to resize images and produce thumbnails. Throughout the thread I kept thinking this sounds a lot like a standalone version of the Drupal imagecache module. Perhaps, I thought, the answer could be setting up a Drupal site to do the conversion. Nah that's too much I said to myself.

However, the more I thought about it the more sense it made. Then I got to today's post where Winer mentions a small web server for doing the work. "I'm still bugged that: 1. It seems slower than it should be. 2. A window flashes every time it creates a thumbnail," Winer says in the post. OK this is the prefect situation for building a one-off clone of imagecache. The next paragraph says, however, that he doesn't want to build it in PHP as it's another language to pick up.

While heating up some naan for my lunch the plan came together. Build a small website using Acquia Drupal and have imagecache do the work for you. The beauty of the solution is that it doesn't take learning PHP. It is a PHP-based solution of course, but one with no coding necessary. So why use Acquia Drupal specifically? It has a couple of advantages in having the necessary modules already bundled with it. The modules are all available on Drupal.org but for somebody who hasn't setup a Drupal site before having them all together is handy. There's also a good Getting Started guide that makes it easy for users to get a site setup.

At the risk of starting the vim vs. emacs sort of flame war I'm curious what folks think about Komodo IDE vs. Coda for general use. I've been using Komodo for about a year and liking it but faced with two pretty equal prices for upgrading vs moving to Coda I'm starting to look at how I really use Komodo.

While doing some overhaul this weekend I had a plan to put a feature story on the front page of my blog and link to a number of shorter items in a series of blocks across the bottom of the page. This got me to thinking that James Walker, aka Walkah, had done something similar. But it turns out it's much cooler.

For the second year running Drupal won Overall 2008 Open Source CMS Award in the Packt Publishing 2008 Open Source CMS Awards. With many great open source projects and several very good open source content management systems the award is even more meaningful.

"To win the Best Open Source CMS Award two years in a row is quite an achievement for Drupal," said Damian Carvill, Packt Spokesman. "In what were extremely close categories, with high quality finalists, Drupal's strength and power shone through for the judges. Particular praise was reserved for the development team's dedication to improving Drupal alongside building a loyal and passionate community, that has enabled its growth, adoption and advocacy. Congratulations from Packt both to the development team and to the community!"