PurplePaste

The Berkshire chapter of the Appalachian Mountain Club is using Drupal for their web site. I think they did a pretty nice job of adapting the Garland theme -- I don't love the garish, bright blue links, but overall it's got a unique, "foresty" vibe.

After spending a few minutes on their site, it also made me appreciate how an information-rich site can be much easier to navigate when you understand the underlying structure of the content -- and the site maintainers have established a useful taxonomy that makes it simple to locate related content.

The DigitalBicycle web site was linked to from Slashdot last night, as Phil Shapiro had previously bestowed upon us the honor of his Noble Piece Prize.

In usual Slashdot fashion, there was a great deal of squabbling over the proper use of grammar, the definition of humor, and very few comments of any actual substance.

However, we continue to receive feedback from new visitors to the site, and as of this post, we've gotten over 41,000 hits since the Slashdot article was posted. The server never missed a beat.

I've released the first version of my Creative Commons licensing module for Drupal. This module allows users to assign a Creative Commons license to their content when they create a blog post or a story, upload files, etc. It also allows a site administrator to assign a license to the entire web site.

This module uses the Creative Commons API and can automatically update when new Creative Commons licenses are available (for example, the more recent sampling licenses). Admins can restrict the licenses available to users, as well as require specific metadata be included.

There is an official release for Drupal 4.5.x, and the current CVS is testing and working under 4.6. Download the latest version from Drupal.org and let me know what you think.

I've relaunched PurplePaste using the open-source CMS Drupal on the backend. This makes sense, as I've been using Drupal as the framework behind the DigitalBicycle project, and have become pretty familiar with the code. Rebuilding my own personal site was a good experiment, and will give me an opportunity to play with some new ideas using Drupal. Also, it may motivate me to update this site a bit more frequently.

I did run into one major glitch -- the image.module was causing me some headaches and so the photo galleries will be unavailable until I get that working.