General discussion

I'm writing a book about Drupal and the final section of the final chapter pauses to reflect on the great community that makes Drupal so special. Help me write this part of the book by sharing your perspective. Here are some of the points that I've come up with:

     Building a successful online community is a challenge. How will you know when you've succeeded? 
Regular statistics from your server logs aren't going to tell you a thing. There are plenty of sites on 
the internet that get thousands of visits a day but couldn't be considered communites. Likewise, you 
can't measure your community based on how many posts or comments there are on a site. I've visited 
many sites and left comments, never to return and read another article or see if someone has replied 
to my comment. And there we have the first clues as to what makes a successful online community; 
can I participate? Do I want to come back? Am I interested in seeing how others in the community 
react to what I've said or done?
     The vibrant and growing Drupal community is one that spills over the confines of drupal.org. There 
is no doubt that drupal.org plays a central and crucial role in forming and defining the Drupal community, 
but there is so much more; anybody who writes about Drupal becomes part of the community via 
aggreagator sites like Technorati.com; drupal.org subscribes to all feeds on technorati that mention 

i am trying to incorparate Sparklines to Drupal -another fan of E. Tufte out there? :)

there is a PHP library for sparklines
http://www.sparkline.org/

'What Are Sparklines?
Sparklines are "intense, simple, wordlike graphics" so named by Edward Tufte. In lieu of a more detailed introduction, Professor Tufte's site has an early release of a chapter on sparklines.'

I vision there can be possible usage of this elagant feature for Drupal

possible internal usage
- Drupal's core and contrib module development process
- stocks.module
- stats
- showing image and media status integrated to each module (image.module, media.module)
- user activity stats
- and possible others

-external data stream usage
i guess any statistical info with xml can be integrated to Drupal site
try the sample on http://www.sparkline.org/ US deficit
which uses the xml output on;
- http://www.whitehouse.gov/omb/budget/fy2004/hist.html
or another usage integration here
http://www.wikispaces.org/ (showing Active Spaces on the block)

I am not a coder but i attempted to integrate and test the idea as below;

1- I have Downloaded the Sparklines PHP lib
http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=122936

2- Shortened the directory name to 'sparklines' to simply

3- upladed the Whole directory to Drupal directory
drupal/files/sparklines
so what I got there

drupal/files/sparklines

In drupal, An user register to a new account, he must provide an email address, and get the passwd.
What I want is, after user registering, the account is active auto.
any other method?

Who can answer me a simple question:

why doesn't the search work in rss feeds?

learn-php

We all know the trouble with web spamming from poker-, game-, roulette-, discount sites and so on.

At my site learn-php i put the following code at the top of index.php of the core drupal
code:

$server = getenv("HTTP_REFERER");
$ip = getenv ("REMOTE_ADDR"); 
if (preg_match("/cash/i", "$server")or preg_match("/loans/i", "$server")or 
preg_match("/buy/i", "$server")or preg_match("/credit/i", "$server")or 
preg_match("/discount/i", "$server")or preg_match("/randppro/i", "$server") 
or preg_match("/allkinds/i", "$server") or preg_match("/texas/i", "$server") 
or preg_match("/roulette/i", "$server") or preg_match("/black/i", "$server") 
or preg_match("/yunza/i", "$server")or preg_match("/hawai/i", "$server") or preg_match("/doctor/i",
"$server") or preg_match("/low/i", "$server") or preg_match("/epraha/i", "$server") or
 preg_match("/poker/i", "$server")or preg_match("/casino/i", "$server")or preg_match("/gambling/i", 
"$server")or preg_match("/game/i", "$server"))

{
    
header("Location: " . $server); // send them back

exit;
}

Of course it's a hack. But it works well on my site. As a result i get a far more realistic statistic.

I could imagine that the redirect to the "spam server" header("Location: " . $server)is a possible way to beat them with there own weapons. If we all do it this was.

Hello; I'm using the goffy theme at http://www.gopokeronline.com
. How can i made the width of the blocks more narrow? i've been playing with the percents in .theme file, but nothing seems to work, here is what didn't work: