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How do you build a modern news Web site that gives editors the tools they needs to serve San Francisco with in-depth reporting on important local issues — all without spending millions of dollars? You use Drupal.

That’s exactly what the nonprofit news organization SF Public Press did when it built SFPublicPress.org.

Although the startup focuses on the stories that other news organizations aren’t covering, it still has to compete for the attention of today’s tech-savvy readers who have many options for receiving news.

To do that, SFPublicPress.org offers much more than news articles on the Web. Among other things, the site features:

• audio and video to help convey what text can’t;
• an interactive media gallery that gives readers new ways to dive into stories;
• easily-accessible bio pages for reporters and editors so it’s clear who is behind each story;
• RSS feeds to keep readers informed as soon as news hits the site.

With all these features and more, it’s hard to believe that building the site took fewer than 60 development hours. (It’s hard to believe even for me — and I built it!)  But that’s the power of the Drupal content management system, and that’s why I recommend it as the platform for many of my clients’ sites.

How We Did It

Analysis: When SF Public Press was formed in 2008, originally as The Public Press, the staff launched a blog-style Web site on Drupal 5. By the time I met with them in Spring 2009, they had expanded their coverage and were ready to move away from the blog format.  They also wanted to add multimedia features so they could tell stories with more than just text. Read more »

Big news: The US government has relaunched Whitehouse.gov, its flagshipship Web site, on the Drupal content management system! This is a testament to Drupal’s stability, low-cost of ownership, and community-oriented DNA.

To read more, see Drupal founder Dries Buytaert’s post on the subject:
http://buytaert.net/whitehouse-gov-using-drupal

And see also the writeup at techPresident.com:
http://techpresident.com/blog-entry/whitehousegov-goes-drupal

I mistyped the name of a Web site I wanted to visit today and found myself staring at a custom Comcast error page laden with advertising instead of the usual Firefox “site not found” page.  That’s right, Comcast has started hijacking its customers’ spelling errors and using them to make an extra buck off advertising.

If you’re a Comcast Internet customer and you try to visit a Web site that doesn’t exist, you’re likely to get sent to a page like the following:

Want to opt out?  Comcast makes you dig up your modem’s MAC address and submit that along with your email address.  I’m off to go look at my modem.

One more than one occasion recently, I’ve found myself trying to explain to friends and clients what features the Drupal content management system provides “out of the box.”  As I quickly realized, it’s not easy to do because Drupal is so rarely used as-is out of the box. It’s a “platform” on which you build the Web site you want, not a Web site in itself and certainly not a strictly defined tool that only does one thing.

But telling an entrepreneur they should adopt an amorphous “platform” that they’ll have to “build on” before they have a working Web site is admittedly unconvincing.  And it doesn’t do Drupal justice.

Unfortunately, Drupal’s own documentation on features doesn’t focus as much as I’d like on the features entrepreneurs are most likely to be interested in.  So then, here’s my take on what Drupal provides out of the box — and, by extension, what makes Drupal so great for Web development:

Read more »

What started out as a solo quest to help a client fix a nasty problem has turned into a collaboration with several open source Drupal developers as we test, debug, and put together documentation for a nascent module.  It’s exciting. More later. I should be sleeping and there’s lots of work to do. But isn’t it great when you can say your work is fun?  This beats office politics, turf wars, and endless meetings any day.

Announcing the launch of another client site!  Need a technology PR and marketing firm?  Check out Affect Strategies, which just unveiled their overhauled Web site this past week.  The project was led by Tim Scott of THEM!.  I did the Drupal CMS engineering on the back end.

I’m happy to announce that Moon Travel Guides has just relaunched their site.  I worked on the project with Jason Salter and Eric Leland of FivePaths, an excellent Drupal consulting firm.  Check it out!

I’m excited about announcing the release of my first open source project: a major update to the Search and Replace Scanner module for Drupal.

The release builds on the work started by Tao Starbow of Starbow Consulting, which provided regular-expression-based search-and-replace functionality for CCK fields.  Version 2.0 adds an undo option, plain text searching in addition to regular expression searching, whole-word matching, and the ablity to limite searches to certain node types and nodes with certain taxonomy terms, among a half-dozen other features.

Many thanks to Jason Salter of awesome Drupal consulting firm FivePaths for co-writing version 2 with me, and to FivePaths for supporting development.

The module is currently listed as an alpha1 release, but we’ve been testing it heavily and it’s looking pretty solid.  I’m looking forward to seeing others use it and to getting feedback on what works, what doesn’t, and what we should add in future versions.

I’m addicted to Lala.com.  Since signing up about a week ago, the site is one of the first I load in my browser each morning.  And then I leave it up in the background throughout the day so I can listen to music as I work.

Without a doubt, Lala has replaced iTunes for managing and playing my music.  Why?

1. Lala lets me listen to any song in its entirety for free the first time I access it.  You can queue up an entire album and listen to it before deciding to buy.  ITunes only lets me listen to 30 seconds of a song.
2. Lala lets me see what other people are listening to, including those who have just listened to the same thing I have.  Chances are, we like the same music.  And if we do, I can choose to “follow” them and listen to new stuff they find.  This is the best use of online social networking I’ve seen so far.  I’ve already discovered five new bands I like.
3. Lala lets me “upload” my entire iTunes library to my Lala collection so I can access it from anywhere on the Web.  (You’re not actually uploading the files, just a list of them — Lala then streams their own copy when you access a particular song.)  ITunes limits the number of computers on which I can listen to my music.
4. If I like a song I find on Lala, I can add it to my Web collection for $0.10 and listen to it in its entirety whenever I want, as many times as I want.
5. If I do want to put a song on my iPod or burn it to disc, the cost is $0.89 — or $0.79 if I already paid the $0.10 to add it to my Web collection.  In comparison, iTunes songs cost $0.99.
6. The songs I buy at full price are totally-DRM-free MP3s.  That means I can burn them to disc as many times as I want, put them on music players other than the iPod, play them on as many computers as I want, and I’m not screwed if the service goes out of business one day.  Apple’s iTunes can’t beat that.

You should check Lala out.  And no, I don’t get any kickbacks for recommending the site.  I just thought you might be interested in what the future of music looks like.

Looks like a DNS problem this time.  Both apps.new.facebook.com and apps.facebook.com, the domains from which applications are initially accessed, have gone offline several times today — at least for Comcast customers — according to reports in the forums.  (I can confirm this too, and I’m on Comcast.)

It’s unclear if it’s a Comcast problem, a Facebook problem, or something else.  But Facebook does plan to get rid of the .new. subdomain now that the new profiles are rolled out, which would require some DNS modifications. And given the company’s track record, I’m not entirely ready to give Facebook the benefit of the doubt.