It's a baby beta named Ægir - say "eager"

Today, Drupal rockstar and the  Raincity Studios super-developer and South African Emissary, Adrian announced the release of Ægir 0.1 Beta1. Named for the Norse God of the Seas, this evolution of Hostmaster is a critical part of Bryght's hosting environment.

The hardwork of Raincity Studios and Koumbit software engineers, and other contributors, is helping take mass Drupal hosting to the next level and you can join the fun - start at the Ægir hosting system group.

Added this release:

• Drupal install profiles - can be localized to provision sites in various languages
• Improvements to the comprehensive inline documentation
• Installation wizard to modify and/or simplify the user interface

User-interface refinements, non-critical ancillary features, and a Drupal 6 version are on the immediate roadmap.

Designed for Campaigns

No matter which side of the USA/Canada border you live on, it's impossible to ignore the political campaigns in full swing. Regardless of your leanings, no doubt the campaigns with polished social media strategies are enjoying advantages. Indeed, this is the first election cycle which 'Web 2.0" tactics are mandatory rather than merely optional or an after-thought.

Because Google (and the other search engines) efficiently index mostly all the pages within a site, visitors can obviously enter a site via hundreds of different on ramps. While this means the visitor may easily find the information they seek, the organization's time-sensitive objectives might not receive enough attention.

To rise above the noise, the savvy campaigner needs to transmit their message in a method in which people will receive and react to it with a clear and easy call to action.

New Drupal tool

A new module developed by Raincity Studios' Makara Wang will help the many politico sites using Drupal to harness their Google-juice and funnel their visitors to a desired actionable task.

The module is called "Roadblock" - a term which usually denotes a unwanted traffic snarl, but in this case, the roadblock is designed to focus the visitor's participation and funnel them towards a specific action.

Return to the Bay

This weekend is the 2008 iteration of Bay Area Drupal Camp held at U.C. Berkeley, Saturday and Sunday, October 11th and 12th.

Along with the info at Badcamp.net, the schedule is Google-doc'ed and will give you a sense of what's in-store.

Notably, Earl Miles creator of Views, Panels will kick off the learning fest with a keynote on Saturday morning.

My pal Dmitri is presenting on Simple Test (along with Florian Lorétan), CCK and jQuery (along with Amit Asaravala), Tao Starbow will show you how to make your own Wikipedia, Chris Bryant discusses managing site configurations and Keiran speaks about the Acquia buzz.

Alas, the event is full so if you slacked, you are almost out of luck, ...  in true Drupal fashion, some geeks are organizing an overflow event so everyone goes home happy.

BAD Flashback

Last year Francis, Erik and I (DaveO) headed down to enjoy some autumnal California sun and learning.

I recorded a handful of podcasts with some interesting Drupalists {William on accessibility, Dmitri on module making and Colin on innovative projects}. Plus annotated a few presentations from the academic halls of the impressive campus and back to Vancouver.

Bryght en Français

Continuing on with Raincity Studios' efforts to spread Drupal around the world, the Bryght Drupal hosting platform is now available in French!

From the order form to the install profile, Francophones around the world can now order, configure and host web communities in their preferred language.

Stop by Bryght.com/fr and sign-up for a 30 day free test drive and/or choose a no-cost/ad-supported site en Français or ... of course, choose English or Mandarin Chinese.

Bryght adds Mollom

The Bryght news doesn't stop with the French release! The scourge of junk comments is now obliterated with the addition of Mollom, a community filtering system designed to thwart unwanted comments.

This technology (developed by Drupal founder Dries Buytaert) is baked-in all new Bryght sites and will help content publishers avoid the hassle of gardening their comment queue.

Grant Event on Monday

Raincity Studios is hosting the Vancouver stop for NewsChallenge -  a project by the Knight Foundation. The event is at the RCS HQ at 1 Alexander St. in Gastown on Monday, October 6th from 7-9PM.

The event features web veteran Susan Mernit who is driving the NewsChallenge project for Knight. Follow knc08 on Twitter to get micro-updates on their tour.

To attend, you must RSVP so check out the NewsChallenge Meetup Facebook event and/or Upcoming listing for NewsChallenge to express your attendance.

Get a Grant

Basically, this is a worldwide campaign to grant $5 Million to digital media experiments and which will innovate journalism. Certainly, Drupal, CMS, RSS (and other acronyms) are all part of the mix of tools which contemporary journalist use to spread their message in an engaging and participatory manner. The press release tells more about the big picture.