Inspired by Darren's boring site note—which I usually find interesting—about his trying out a new WordPress plugin to his blog, and a brief email conversation, I developed the What Would Seth Godin Do? module.  It uses code from the WP plugin written by Richard K. Miller, adding a block to Drupal 5 sites for the first few visits people make to the website, with a friendly message to that visitor.  The administrator chooses how many visits constitutes a few, and what the message might be, such as 'how to get started' or, currently, a link to the site's main RSS feed.  The block disappears after the number of visits set by the administrator.

The way it works is that it adds content to the enabled block if the visits are under the specified number, tracked through a special cookie, and if that number is reached, the block's content goes blank.  (Drupal blocks do not display if there is no content to display.)  The name of the module is inspired by a blog post Seth Godin wrote last year arguing that new users to a site should get a little more help than frequent visitors.

It took about a half day to write, test, create the project on Drupal.org, and re-learn the correct steps for checking it into CVS, and fix silly bugs like leaving in the dummy text during the initial checkin.  Oops!  I still have the module flagged as 'developmental', since I haven't done enough testing, and would like to make sure it works across browsers.  It's a pretty simple module, so I would love to hear feedback about it before tagging it for a 1.0 release.

Over at my personal blog, I've been writing Interesting Site Notes, the title an homage to those who call their mentions of what they change about their site "boring site notes".  First in the series is an article about taglines, or, rather, automatically setting the Drupal slogan to whatever you want based on a custom content type and a little bit of module magic.  For Bryght customers, it would require running a VPS, as while it makes use of CCK and Views, it also requires some custom code I wrote which, on saving a new item of a custom content type, picks out the title and stores it in the 'slogan', which appears in the title of the site and in the heading of most themes.

If you just want to subscribe to my Interesting Site Notes, then the 'changelog' tag is for you.

In October of last year, I wrote a couple of articles, one about openness with regards to open source documentation and another about learning to embrace not knowing everything about the software or service you're documenting. I argued that if you're committed to openness in the support process, then you're also committing to asking for help when you don't know the answer to something. As the support master for Bryght, I've been tasked with writing some documentation for new functionality we added for in our new Bryght Basic profile, i.e. the ability to route system messages to essentially anywhere. This will be part of core for Drupal 6, and it has been backported for our Drupal 5 VPS customers. (Boris posted the reverse bounty, and Khalid came through with a backport.) I've written some skeletal documentation on the new Syslog module, I've been able to figure out and document routing Drupal logs to a file, which you can run the Unix tail command on to get a live view of what's happening on the site:

In that screenshot you can see that I typed in two URLs I knew to throw a 404 error message, tried a URL I knew would get access denied, created a test blog post then deleted it. It contains a lot of information, like the date, the site in question, the URL accessed, and the error/status message.

Today marks the two-year anniversary since my official start at Bryght, easily the longest full-time job I've had, and easily the best.  (It beat out other jobs I enjoyed as well, which included teacher's assistant at an alternative high school in Surrey and the Internet training summers at a public library.  More on that in a bit.)  Thanks to Lance, James, Adrian, Roland, Colin, Kris, Boris, and, this year, Djun, Steven and Petrina (her last day today, so sad) for making this an enjoyable two years so far.  Because of Bryght, I've been to a few conferences and even met some of my online friends and, occasionally, heroes. Every day I learn something new about technology, business, and, importantly, myself. I've learned a lot about working at a small startup, supporting many customers at a time, improving my programming and system administration skills, and participating in an open source community that is Drupal.  I've been very impressed with the quality both of the code and the interaction between community members, not only within Drupal but between the Drupal community and other open source communities.

I hope in the coming months to be a little more active outside my "official" duties at Bryght (do I even have official duties?) such as maintaing the small modules I wrote and participating more on the Drupal.org forums, as well as contributing documentation to the handbooks.  I'd like to do more public speaking, something that, even though I consider myself an introvert, I really enjoy.  As a teacher's assistant, I didn't so much as public speak as help a dozen kids at once on some of the more technology-oriented lessons, and as an Internet trainer, taught the basics to a group of people, sometimes as large as 20 people.  Those numbers don't look so big, but I think they're about right for people to go to a session and have a good balance between lecture-style speech and question and answers, which I always prefer to have during the presentation, not after.  That way it's more of a conversation than a presentation, and I think people get more out of those than someone standing up, showing slides and waiting until the end to have only a few questions due to time constraints.

Those reading our posts at the Bryght company weblog today might think we've stayed up a few too many late nights.  Either that, or you already know it's Talk Like a Pirate Day, which means a lot of "yarr" and "matey" being spoken around the office. It speaks to the quality of the Drupal code-base and the developer documentation, our development process and open source development process that someone like me with an intermediate level of PHP coding experience can contribute to the Drupal project.

The day's almost over, and as coded, the filter should revert anything that appears as if it's in "pirate" back to its original contemporary English. For next year, though, check out the module and since I'm the official maintainer of the module (it's a side-product, since "I'm not a Drupal developer"), send in those bug reports and feature requests!