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As of Sept 16 2008:

It's over a year since I updated this page. It's not a terribly important page, not many people see it or care about it. Things have gotten done anyway, although I haven't had nearly enough time to do it all. There have been new installations of interesting applications, incremental improvements, inconsistencies ironed out, small battles won.

But ... I'm cycling around to administration and planning mode again. I'll be deleting some of the umpteen sites I have set up on my hostmonster account. For some reason, the number of distinct websites and installation of software packages had multiplied beyond reason. What you see here is the tip of the iceberg - there are over a dozen unlinked CMS installations stashed away in various locations within my hostmonster account ( drool over that, spammers ! ). I'd like to see if I can whittle it down to six installations or so.

One important addition will be the Sphider-Plus search engine. I've been playing around with it as a localhost and in fact have it installed on this site ( in a secret directory ). I think I will be able to use it to implement one of the best, most focused business rule search engines on the web. On the other hand, I'm also keeping an eye on the new community-driven search engines such a wikia, which may catch fire some day and be a better solution in the long run.

The big news of the last year is that the Semantic Web seems to be taking form in a number of important areas. I'm particularly interested in the "Wiki on Steroids" direction it is taking.

I'll be adding to this page in the coming weeks ... more to come.

As of June 12th 2007:

First, the task of importing the old "Tutorial" content into the new Drupal Content Management System is still progressing slowly, but at an accelerating pace ( that is accelerating progress, not accelerating slowness, which is the usual state of affairs ).

Some interesting projects are arising from the Drupal Community. Drupal performance is a fairly hot topic and I may do a short section on resources and "lesson learned". The focus seems to be on caching issues ( a very important topic of course ), but it may be more fruitful to investigate more efficient designs and use of modules for Drupal sites, maybe utilizing some sort of Drupal Design Patterns.

One of the more promising offshoots of the effort to achieve better Drupal performance may be a better scheme for publishing and integrating static HTML pages from within Drupal. A combination of templates ( such as JSON or Smarty ) and Javascript functions might provide hooks back into the Drupal environment for more efficient handling of comments and user interaction.

A large and ever-growing topic is importing and exporting content between multiple Drupal sites. It is an inherently difficult task, that is, synchronizing several different streams of content involves merging fairly complex data structures, which is an inherently complex task. In fact, it's an algorithmic nightmare ( a pure joy for some people, i.e. David Orchard's A Theory of Compatible Versions ). More to come on the topic ...

To Do List

• Keep pushing on Drupal tools and capabilities ( managing customizations, multiple installations, synchronization, integrating and publishing static pages, etc. ).
• RDF inference example within the Drupal CMS framework ( Relationship Manager, ARC RDF Store ? ).
• Drupal and Javascript ...