Drupal

I've set up a new site, http://gigs.exodusdev.com, as a way to showcase my Drupal Classified Ads module. All Drupal consultants or developers are welcome to sign in and create ads for their services. If you are looking for a consultant, there's a category for that, too.

I want to put the classified ads module through its paces, so, if you offer or need Drupal services, please drop in at http://gigs.exodusdev.com and give it a try!

OpenSearch Plug-ins for Drupal.org, Drupal 4.7 API, Drupal 5 API, and Drupal 6 API

I've created some Drupal-specific OpenSearch plugins for Firefox (and IE7, too!). They provide Drupal.org and api.drupal.org search integration in browsers supporting the OpenSearch search plugin protocol.
They are useful when searching for Drupal API routines or other Drupal development subjects. Install them as you would any other OpenSearch plugin...

I've created a simple MyBlogLog module for Drupal 4.7. This module provides the following features:

• Inserts the MyBlogLog tracking javascript into generated pages - no need to hand-edit your template's page.tpl.php file, or manually create a block to inject the tracking javascript.
• Provides the "Recent Reader" widget block
  (includes configuration options - color, width, # rows, etc.)
• Disable visitor tracking for Administrators and other users on a per-role basis (prevent skewed stats due to admin or other roles' visits.)

... and more

When I'm viewing Drupal administration pages, like referrer logs or other time-sensitive pages, I like to know the time of the last 'refresh' (and therefore how stale the page content is).

So, here's a quick and dirty Drupal block definition. (The javascript is not very idiomatic, but it'll do for now until I can update it. In fact, I plan on making it a pure client-side javascript widget, but that's another post for another day.)

It will display the date and time the page was last loaded, and the 'age' of the page in seconds - it uses a javascript interval timer to update this every second.

Here's a useful Drupal module that tweaks a node's body or teaser to insert an inline AdSense ad, when a node is rendered on a full page or teaser list.

This allows site administrators to enable automatic insertion of an AdSense ad into the page without the content editor having to insert inline [adense] filter tags, or having to edit a site's template.php (or other template files.) This offers a big advantage, as you can change the ad format, group, and channel on the fly without hand-editing each node (which is the only way I can think of doing it if you are using inline filters). Another advantage is that you can enable/disable the inserted AdSense with just a click of the mouse - no need to edit each node.

On Christmas Eve day, several of my sites were 'visited' by what I presume to be a bot, all from the same source IP address.

The attack consisted of attempts to register many new user accounts, each having a username containing the term 'DVD':

Soccer DVD, DVD Immature, Underworld DVD, Adult DVD, Enigma DVD, DVD shrink, Blues DVD, Trick DVD, Portable DVD Player, DVD Decryptor, Federation DVD

The email addresses were all unique of course - since the bot attempted to register multiple user names on each site. The sites were configured to include a text field user profile, so that users can share interests, etc.

The spam bots were stuffing URLs and text ads for DVDs into the profile fields, in an attempt to generate search engine "link love", or so it appears.

Now hosted on Drupal.org CVS/Project repository.
Please visit the Drupal.org project page for latest releases, bug/issue reports, etc.

I've been working on a user notifications module (and underlying API module) for Drupal.

This is initially needed for for use with my classified ads module but it can be used by any module that needs a well-defined method of alerting users to various events.