We owe a lot to Tim Berners-Lee, whether you know him or not. In short, he is the father of the World Wide Web and the creator of the very first web site. Recently, as part of MIT's Decentralized Information Group's web site, he published his first blog entry with honest-to-goodness "blogging tools", explaining that:

All Drupal developers should plan to make their way to the west coast of Canada for the event to kick off your year: the Open Source CMS Summit and DrupalCon. As the event page says, this will be a developer-centric event focused on collaborating together on future directions and everyone's favourite topic -- APIs!

There will likely be some time for relaxing as well, with skiing being excellent that time of year on Vancouver's coastal mountains or even up at Whistler, for some of the best mountains in the world.

Chad Phillips and Angie Byron are the two main Drupal organizers, with Boris Mann and Roland Tanglao doing the Vancouver local organizing and helping with the summit as a whole. Please join the Drupal conference mailing list and/or check out the wiki to add your own ideas to make this a great gathering of Drupalites. Oh, and of course, flip the switch in your user profile to get listed on the attendees page.

With the release of 4.7.0 beta1, I will be co-sponsoring a bug hunt competition to be concluded with the release of 4.7.0. The prize will be a combination of 150USD from the Google Summer of Code and an additonal 200USD donated by me.

I will count the opened, non-duplicate issues marked as "CVS" or "4.7..." in the Drupal project issue's tracker between now and 4.7.0 are released. First place will be 200USD, second will be 100USD, and third will be 50USD. In reality, anyone using Drupal will be the winner as the more bugs found and fixed before 4.7.0 means a stronger build for every user.

We are pleased to announce that the first Drupal 4.7 beta release is available. It is available for immediate download at http://drupal.org/files/projects/drupal-4.7.0-beta1.tar.gz.

This beta release marks an important step towards the final Drupal 4.7.0 release, which hopefully will be released in 4-6 weeks. Drupal 4.7.0 will be our most exciting release to date, with some cool new features and many under the hood improvements. Some enhancements include; free tagging, contact form functionality, easier menu management, a better default theme engine (PHPTemplate), improved search functionality, theme-specific block regions, improved PostgreSQL support, themeable forms, a better upgrade script, better revisions handling and much more.

At the same time Drupal 4.7.0 will be a tad smaller (better code re-use, the queue module and comment moderation moved to the contributions repository) and a tad faster. Finally, to liven up your various Web 2.0 dreams, we sprinkled the code with AJAX in an attempt to simplify some administrative tasks. (Yes, it should degrade gracefully.)

I am pregnant (woohoo!). In six short months, I will be disappearing from active duty in the Drupal community for a good long time. I'd like to discuss a desire I've had for years and years, only reworked for our beloved codebase. In short: an HTML based browser role playing game, though ultimately an API.

Due to just some plain sillyness, I did a search for "THE" using Google. Why anyone would search for something like that is quite beyond me, but I try to maintain my sanity with this excuse: I wanted to search for a word in the English language that is guaranteed to get a lot of hits - got 9.5 billion hits for the word.