One of the tasks that seems to persistently find its way to my doorstep is building calendaring systems. Always maddening, incredibly frustrating and never as easy as it seems it should be, building a system that deals with events and dates and times is a rite of passage for many developers. You can always tell who has had the mind-bending pleasure of dealing with timezones and daylight savings time. When presented with the subject they often develop a far away look that only those who have peered into the depths of pure insanity possess.

How do you promote deeper participation from your web membership, collect valuable demographics from them, and avoid triggering common negative reactions to data collection?

With a clear set of objectives for your web site, and some new ways of structuring features, you can help guide your members to action on behalf of your organization; all while collecting the information you need without turning off supporters with scary data-collection forms.

Thank you all for coming. Here are some brochures. Now please leave.

When setting up various services you will often be required to provide a subnet mask for the ip address you are configuring the service for. Sometimes you need to input the mask in the form xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx/xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx, sometimes in terms of a mask width, or bits, in the format xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx/ww, where 'ww' is the mask width (also called a CIDR mask). This conversion is something I always have to refresh my memory on and am often frustrated because I always forget the very simple relationship between these two ways to express a netmask value.

I have this knote on my desktop that I use to keep track of commands I use often, but not frequently enough to remember by heart. Its gets fairly long, and is invaluable for me in my daily internet building tasks. I occasionally clean it out, removing things I never use, have found better solutions for, or I just remember now without a reference to prompt me. I decided this time I should share some of these items so that others may reap the benefits of my collecting. Enjoy!

Goal:
To define features in Drupal that are missing to effectively run a campaign/community site, develop an implementation roadmap with input from the core Drupal developement community, and create the technology in a focused development session. This effort will be sponsored by Drupal development firms and other interested parties. All products resulting from the effort will be contributed back to the Drupal community.

Scope:
The area of feature development centers around how to improve user management (registered or not), user related actions (volunteering, email list signups, donations), and metrics relating to these areas.