It's things like these that are leading me to work on a Drupal book for the non technical, for producers and editors. I'd love encouragement, recommendations and book deals. :)

After dropping boiler plate language into a proposal regarding design and templates I recently had a great conversation with the proposal's recipient on what exactly a design was, what a template was, and how they related to pages in a Drupal site. Here are some thoughts on what templates are and what they offer.

Scheduler is a great little module to schedule when content is published and unpublished.

You can use it for seasonal content, to promote a live event, an to make your content publishing more regular.

Among the many things you need to check out with your Drupal site is it's RSS feeds. While RSS feeds might still be an unknown to many of the visitors to your site you can safely assume that will change sooner than later, and to those who know it, it's their way to monitor what's happening on your site on a daily basis.

LinkedIn is a social network that focuses on connection, as opposed to subject, activities, friends, etc. Connection in this sense does not really refer to you connecting to old friends or coworkers. It's really about connecting through your friend and coworkers to their friends and coworkers and so on. Think six degrees of seperation.

Printer friendly pages, meaning pages without the navigation or other items that are unnecessary on a printed page and would lower the usefulness of a print out of the content, are a standard feature of any site that as a client you should expect and as a developer you should expect to include.

XP was tolerable. Performance wasn't too bad. Being a vector for viruses wasn't fun, but if you watched yourself you could usually get your work done. When my elderly laptop died I bought a nice refurbished HP desktop that came with Vista. There are no shortages of rants on Vista, so I'll be brief. It seemed to be a RAM hog and applications froze and died on it just too much - even Internet Explorer. Man, at least the software made by the same company that made the operating system should work.

Over the holiday season we got the opportunity to do some QA testing that epitomized the type of work our QA team is set up for. Development of a 100 page static site was going over schedule, and wouldn't be ready for QA until days before delivery was due - and delivery was January 2nd. We set up a plan and on 12/30 we got the URL to test and jumped in. We had a site map and some screen shots of what the site should look at. The client had not had the time to put together a testing plan or setup an issue tracker. Our team was to test against 4 operating system/browser combinations for a total of 64 hours of testing.

I recently asked on my company's blog, InteractiveQA.com, and on LinkedIn and on various lists "What's your social network strategy?" Specifically, I asked if people were on multiple networks, setting up their own, or participating at a corporate level on an existing network. The following is the result of those questions and my own thoughts and research.

A social network is simply a highly internetworked and active community. Frank Diana, Chief Product Officer at Aelera called it "an evolution of collaboration technologies."

Scott Wickham’s blog post “Social Networking and Buffy the Vampire Slayer” brought my attention to the post on TechCrunch “Bear Stearns: Yahoo Must Form A Social Networking Strategy.“ In short, the TechCrunch article summarizes and discusses a Bear Stearns Internet analyst’s view that Yahoo needs to get into the Social Networking space by acquiring someone like Facebook, different valuations of Facebook, and the reality that it might actually be Facebook acquiring Yahoo. Scott’s post questions the logic of Yahoo needing to acquire a social network, but more so, he’s really questioning what social networks bring that email and bulleting boards and the basic building blocks of the web don’t already bring us. 

Scott, Robert Peck (the Bear Stearns analyst), and Michael Arrington, the author of the TechCrunch post are all right in some sense. Yahoo needs to keep playing catch up to keep people using the services their empire offers. Yahoo needs to let people know they care about social networks. Facebook should leverage the valuation of their company by either being bought or acquiring. And, just like Web 2.0, the term Social Network, is really short hand for a number of things that have been out already, and there really isn’t one precise definition. 

Just as years ago, when the Web and the Internet were getting noticed beyond the early adopters we saw standardization and interoperability. Email systems could communicate with each other. Bulletin boards or forums, while different, were not as vastly different as they once were. And we came to understand what certain basic features were and the metaphors used to represent these features in the 2D not exactly real time world that is the Internet. Social networks offer this. We’re more connected to each other, and our friends, contacts and colleagues can keep track of what we’re doing. Some social networks even actually interoperate. The Facebook API offers ways to use Facebook authentication so you don’t need separate user names and passwords everywhere. Drupal, the open source content management system we use to build social networks has ways to allow authentication to work across sites. Others will share information on what you’re doing on your site or blog or even other networks. 

Is there value in acquiring an existing social network? Sure. You get an already active community. But in Yahoo’s case, they already have an active community and lots of features that draw users. Enhancing the connection between their properties and adding features might be enough. I’d encourage some restraint on their part, though. If you use Yahoo Mail I think you’ll understand my concerns of over using available technology.  

What about Facebook’s valuation? Just as with so many other players over the brief history of the Internet, there is a point for each niche when the valuation of top players hits an amazing high. I think this might be Facebook’s point, and they could really benefit from capitalizing on that. 

What about those who can’t afford to buy a $7 billion company, or don’t have the vast programming resources of a company like Yahoo? Amazing things are possible to those with significantly smaller budgets by using open source software like Drupal. We’re always excited to talk about what you could do with Drupal, so give us a call. What's your Social Networking strategy?

I often compare Quality Assurance (QA) testing to janitorial services - it's not high profile, can seem tedious to some, and in many cases could be done by outsiders (like us).