NowPublic.com is a Drupal powered site focused on changing the way the news becomes news. Imagine that you are walking down the streets of Manhattan when a trailer drives by with the group U2 jamming away. You use your camera phone to snap a wicked shot of Bono - but where do you send it? To your blog? To your friends? To a bulletin board? But how is anyone who doesn't know you going to find it? Instead, you could email it to news@nowpublic.com and let the world know that there's something cool going on. NowPublic lets you share your good stuff with not only your friends but with the world, while at the same time protecting your rights and giving you full credit. Here's an example of what I mean:

http://www.nowpublic.com/node/4291

Using Alexa, a traffic ranking service from Amazon, I compared drupal.org's traffic with the traffic of other Free and Open Source content management systems' websites. The term content management system is used broadly here as the list of projects include phpBB, Plone, TikiWiki, Wordpress, Xoops, Mambo, PHP-Nuke, PostNuke, Typo3, Xaraya and Drupal friend CivicSpace.

Popularity is compared based on Alexa's daily reach-metric, which measures the number of users. Here, foo.com and www.foo.com are treated as the same site because they reside on the same domain. The results are presented in pretty graphs (generated by Alexa) and included below. Of course, the results must be taken with a grain of salt as the popularity of a product's website is not necessarily related to the popularity of the product itself, or the quality thereof. So whenever I write popularity that really means the popularity of the website as measured by Alexa. Regardless, a number of interesting observations can be made ...

I've played with Drupal for a few days now, and while I don't have a public site up yet, I'm starting to get my bearings. So I thought I'd write a little bit about my initial Drupal experience while it's still fresh in my head.

I am somewhat proud to announce that a Drupal article written by me has been published by the German Linux journal Linux-Magazin. It's available in their Linux-Magazin Sonderheft 2/2005: Web Edition (a special issue about web publishing). Unfortunately the article is not available online, so you'll have to buy the magazine to read it.

My article gives a broad introduction to Drupal, covering the installation (and some troubleshooting) as well as the basic concepts like nodes, users, roles, permissions, themes, modules etc. I briefly introduce some important contributed modules, explain how one usually installs modules and give a short overview of what will be new in the next release, Drupal 4.6. There's also a tiny section about the history of Drupal, and I provided links to some interesting Drupal-stuff like Dries' homepage, the custom blocks repository (which has recently moved, so the URL in the article is wrong), the Drupal Theme Garden and the Drupal API documentation.

If you happen to have read the article, I'd be happy to get some feedback.

Update: The international Linux Magazine has published an English version of my article yesterday (May 6, 2005) in Issue 55 of their magazine (the translation was not done by me, btw). It doesn't appear to be available online, unfortunately.

I just found out today that main development by the original authors of HTMLArea has been discontinued. See the bottom of the Dynarch project page for some more details, reproduced here:

Update, March 8 2005. Some time ago, InteractiveTools expressed the will to take over the project. We provided some fixes that we made and were not in the CVS version and a RC2 was released at htmlarea.com; however, soon thereafter InteractiveTools announced the project closed and forums discontinued. Bang!

Our position on this is that the editor will keep going; we are actually making quite some progress in its development, but only in house at this time. We are still planning to release version 3.0, quite possible under a different name (so it might actually be a 1.0) but still free, at least for the core editor--some plugins might be released under a commercial license. We can't provide explicit deadlines, so please bear with us.