Humor of the Day

This is just too damn funny.  If you like fairy tales, fantasy or science fiction then you'll get this right away.  Thanks to Guy K. Haas for sending this to me. [_Go_]

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Very Cool -- Slipstick Added Inbox Buddy

For those who don't follow the Outlook world, Slipstick is a very prominent site focusing on Exchange and Outlook.  They just added Inbox Buddy to their list of Outlook utilities and I got some nice comments from their webmaster who pretty much immediately realized that we're more than just anti-spam.  Since that was always our goal, it pretty much made my day.  [_Go_]

Marketing 101 Tip: Getting Your Software Listed on a Website

Oh and if you're curious as to how to get your software listed with a site like this, its pretty simple -- ask.  Just contact the right person and point out how / why your software is appropriate.  Sometimes you'll have to be persistent but usually just being polite is enough.

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Two Great Events!  MySQL User's Conference and Open Source Content Management (OSCOM)

Well it looks like April will be a very good month.  There's:

• MySQL User's Conference -- April 10-12, 2003 [_Go_]
• Open Source Content Management -- April 16-18, 2003 [_Go_] 

Sigh.  No way to be at both and it looks like I'm probably a speaker on Drupal at OSCOM so it'll be less sql, more pages for me.  We're still working out what to talk about but I suspect (or hope at least) it'll be interesting.

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PHP5

Interesting how this writer seems so confident of the shipping date when most of the people I know in the php community that are very hands on aren't confident at all.

PHP version 5, expected to appear in beta form by March, 2003, and released in the summer of 2003, could change all that. Significant performance improvements and a much more complete object-oriented programming environment will allow PHP to provide a powerful Web front end for enterprise-class .NET and J2EE-based applications. [_Go_]

Still he's right about the importance of PHP5 -- I researched it in depth for my first PHP Journal column and it looks very, very good.

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Heh.  Now Here's A Way to Fight Back Against Spammers

Try installing SugarPlum, a spam "honey pot" which gives Spammers tons and tons of bad addresses to send to.

Sugarplum -- spam poison

 What is Sugarplum?

Does this answer your question? :)

Sugarplum is an automated spam-poisoner. Its purpose is to feed realistic and enticing, but totally useless or hazardous data to wandering address harvesters such as EmailSiphon, Cherry Picker, etc. The idea is to so contaminate spammers' databases as to require that they be discarded, or at least that all data retrieved from your site (including actual email addresses) be removed.

Sugarplum employs a combination of Apache's mod_rewrite URL rewriting rules and perl code. It combines several anti-spambot tactics, includling fictitious (but RFC822-compliant) email address poisoning, injection with the addresses of known spammers (let them all spam each other), deterministic output, and "teergrube" spamtrap addressing.

Sugarplum tries to be very difficult to detect automatically, leaving no signature characteristics in its output, and may be grafted in at any point in a webserver's document tree, even passing itself off as a static HTML file. It can optionally operate deterministically, producing the same output on many requests of the same URL, making it difficult to detect by comparison of multiple HTTP requests.

Sugarplum is free software, distributed under terms of the GPL. [_Go_]

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Technorati Top 100

How very cool -- thanks to Scoble I found the Technorati Top 100 where I am actually listed.  Still its based only on a sample of 15,190 blogs so once they expand to 30K ish or so like BlogStreet then I'll fall off the list like I did on BlogStreet (fame, thou art fleeting indeed).  My ranking on Myelin has fallen as well.  This brings to at least three the number of good Blogging ecosystem tools, here are the links to each for reference:

• Technorati
• Blogstreet
• Myelin

My thanks to all of these folks for building great tools.  Each is a little bit different so they are all worth checking out.

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Need to Send Mail from PHP?

I just found this, phpMailer, which seems quite good.  One of those fortuitious discoveries where you download something else, look at the code and you just see it and it works.  I'm starting to integrate it into a project right now.  [_Go_]

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Moving Movable Type to Drupal

Well anyone who's into blogging and more than a bit geeky would probably like this one.  It's a description of how one user moved from Movable Type to Drupal, step by step.  Nicely done !

Why migrate

I migrated my MT blog to Drupal. It wasn't easy to make this decision, because I became used to the ease of use that came with MT in terms of setting up, administering, and blogging. I simply found that MT was lacking in some of the features and scalability I need, particularly with regard to classification and news feed aggregation. Since I've been using Drupal for the past year and extolling its features, I decided to eat my own dog food and use Drupal for my personal site. This way I can contribute to its development because I'll be looking at it more from the back side.

Migrating was not exactly for the PHP/MySQL novice -- which I consider myself -- so I wanted to document my experience for others who might consider the same move. I encourage anyone who decides to go with Drupal to please consider becoming part of the development list and get involved with helping evolve the application. Drupal is a very programmer-centric application at the movement, catered to technical people, but if non-technical people or people who demmand ease of use and usbility begin to add their voice to the development list, perhaps the administration experience will improve. I hope to throw some time into making these types of contributions in the future.

So here's how I migrated (this is being updated presently): [_Go_]

It's definitely worth reading.  And I've added his blog to my favorites so I make sure to follow it.  His comments about moving to Drupal for the news aggregator are on point (here's a tutorial on it I wrote).  Beyond the news aggregator, an additional useful tool is that the blogroll is dynamic and shows you how recently the blog was updated.  That's often more than enough to tell you to read it.

His points about Drupal becoming more usable are definitely on point -- but they are a very big concern of the project and we're pushing to get them addressed.  This brings up a very good point about open source: we tend to like to make people happy.  Just like anyone else and the "squeaky wheel gets the grease".  If people start complaining about something (usability) then it tends to get addressed -- particularly if the project is user driven as is Drupal.  Our user base to this point has been more technical and that's affected what we work on.  Now its getting more end userish and that will be reflected.  I've talked with the one of the project leaders on this and he definitely gets it.

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PHP Based Contacts Tool: phpGroupware

Someone emailed me yesterday looking for a web based contact manager that also supported Vcard (VCF) output.  A little Freshmeat, a splash of SourceForge and voila: phpGroupware. [_Go_]  While I didn't install it and try it out, I did a) check the code and b) grovel over it and the online demo more than a bit.  It looks very nice.  I really like that they've abstracted the html from the php and used display templates through out.  That's a huge step towards long term maintainability -- if not the step.

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Quote of the Day

From Paul O'Neill, the secretary of the treasury, asked yesterday to resign (but I don't know when he said it):

When asked about his handling of the economy he said: "I don't know how to sort it out any other way, and it's what I'm going to do until I get fired or pull the rip cord. If people don't like what I'm doing, I don't give a damn. I'm working on the inside of what I think is right." [_Go_]

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