As I am writing to you today on 1st January I thought I would share with you how I plan to make 2009 a more productive year for myself than 2008, and how you can too.

Culling Time Wasters

The first place to look in becoming more productive is where you waste the most time.

My definition of “waste” in this context is activities that do not add much value but take considerable time. Spending time with my family is not a waste of time because we get value from it, while solitary “Tower Defense” web based game playing is likely adding zero value and just eating up precious time.

In the closing months of 2008 I took careful note of where my time was going. I worked out there were several areas I was spending time that could have been made more efficient. Keeping a time diary, even just scratched onto a scrap of paper or scribbled on a whiteboard can help you uncover where your time is going.

I found my biggest time leak was unscheduled interruptions.

For 2009 I will save time with:

• Turning off the instant messager - IM conversations are fun and valuable, but not when at the expense of work
• Scheduling telephone/skype calls - I am no longer going to be available on demand, the telephone will be on answer machine and skype will be off unless I have set aside to be available.
• Smarter email - I just spent hours clearing my inbox down to zero from around 1,800 by setting up folders, rules, unsubscribing from unnecessary lists and ruthlessly deleting - Inspired by @BillT on Twitter
• Focused Social Media time - Talking of Twitter, I found my rhythm with social media and now have worked out a social media schedule (which was stretched over the holidays, but you have to bend the rules sometimes!)

Spam and Unwanted Email

Email turns out to be a big part of my day. I don’t want to go the Tim Ferris route; I take pride in answering my own email and having good turnaround times. So rather than outsourcing, autoresponder or support ticket system, I am working on reducing my inbox clutter as much as possible.

A big load on my inbox is newsletters. For many services or products you have to supply an email address, and of course you do not know which will turn out to send you junk and which will be good, so you can’t use a temporary address in case it is the latter. I am taking the advice of my friend Damian who has a catch-all email forwarding set up on one of his domains and signs up to each with a unique email address in the form “list-name@domain.com”. If I get spam to this unique address I will know where it came from.

My email list from address is changing, as is my contact form. I am also moving my family and friends email to a different account so work is split from home. Each source of email will be isolated and easier to prioritize.

Another way I am handling email spam or junk messages is when a newsletter asks for my first name I am using a particular variation of my name, so any messages sent to “Hi _______” will be fitered off to a folder before I even see it, so I can go through them at my leisure, if at all.

Work to Your Rhythm

I have discovered I am most productive for certain tasks at certain points in the day. The problem is I have actually been working against these patterns.

My normal routine was to get up, make coffee, check my email, then work through anything the email demanded, followed by my task list for each day, with phone calls scheduled according to the other parties convenience and taking account the appropriate time zone math. Of course my body and mind were telling me that was a bad way to organize things.

Check your mood, motivation and output when performing certain tasks during the day.

• When are you most creative?
• When are you better at communicating?
• When does your energy droop?
• When are you easily distracted?
• When can you find “the zone” most easily?

I found between certain hours I could output hundreds of words of writing, while others it was a struggle. At some times I could communicate easily and fluently, while others I wanted to hide from the phone. Logic escaped me at certain times and I just wanted to sleep, whereas at others I could solve problems that seemed impossible hours ago. Telephone calls, as mentioned earlier, saw me working at 2am because the other party was based in a far away time zone. Red Bull and coffee can only go so far.

Just by juggling my schedule I will get far more done.

Your body and mind will tell you when you should do certain things, listen to it!

Got Suggestions?

How can we make our 2009 more productive? Please share your tips, thoughts, experiences, ideas and comments …

It is that time of year again. Time to reflect on 2008, and to put on my Drupal Nostradamus hat and look forward to 2009. But first of all, thanks for 2008! It's been a pretty crazy ride.

Drupal

My personal Drupal highlights for 2008 include the Drupal 6 release (the best Drupal release ever!), both DrupalCon Boston and DrupalCon Szeged, the Drupal.org redesign that is in progress, and, of course, beating Joomla and Wordpress at the Packt awards. ;-) As I predicted last year, more than ten books were written about Drupal, compared to a single book in 2007. The increase in Drupal books is another highlight as I actively helped connect authors to publishers. I truly enjoyed being part of the Drupal community in 2008.

My personal low for 2008 is regret that some key modules lagged behind the Drupal 6 release. The majority of these modules have now been released, and Drupal 6 is finally getting on the fast lane now. The message is clear: we'll continue to see tremendous growth and adoption in 2009.

Why?

1. Drupal 6 is easier to use, runs faster, and comes with many great new features. The work we did on Drupal 6 throughout 2007 and 2008 will pay off in 2009.
2. Economic pressure will help accelerate Drupal's growth, and that of Open Source in general. More site owners will discover that with Drupal, you can build a better website cheaper than with many of its proprietary counterparts.
3. Social publishing (blogs, forums, wikis, social networks, etc.) will become more pervasive and continue to make inroads in organizations seeking to facilitate collaboration between teams and departments. These applications, while nothing new, make many aspects of business better, are here to stay, and will mature over time. Drupal continues to be in that sweet spot.

I'll continue to have a software love affair with Drupal in 2009. At the moment, I'm very excited about the community's growing interest in the semantic web -- and all the related interoperability and decentralization technologies. The seed of what I hope will become a strong marriage between Drupal and semantic web technologies was planted in my DrupalCon Boston 2008 keynote in February (with the help, hard work and preparation of many others), and will continue to grow in 2009. Drupal continues to be a technology pioneer in 2009.

I predict that Drupal 7 will be released in the fourth quarter of 2009. The two most exciting features in Drupal 7 core will be custom content types and radical improvements in usability. To reduce the risk of important modules falling behind in support or update path, a significant portion of the Content Construction Kit (CCK) related modules will move to core and we'll pave the way for the Views modules. The same holds true for other important contributed modules, including token module, path auto module, and image handling functionality. In 2009, core becomes bigger, not smaller. The Drupal 7 code freeze will be longer than expected regardless our new continuous test framework, and the upgrade path to Drupal 7 will be more painful than hoped for. But like always, we'll come out stronger than before ...

Despite Drupal being loved by many, we'll have to work hard in 2009. The thing that holds Drupal back is failure to execute many of the ideas and plans that we have. As a community, we need to grow more mentors in 2009, and we must all make sure that they are set up for success rather than failure. The community's responsibility to itself should be to remove barriers to participation and single points of failure. Alarm bells should go off when there is a desire to introduce red tape, unnecessary hurdles or dependencies, or when we fail to collaborate and make progress in key areas of the project. At the same time, we need to help more Drupal companies figure out how to contribute back to Drupal in substantial ways. Contributions are gold, talk is silver. Helping people contribute must become platinum.

Last year, I predicted that we would see the first signs of consolidation in the Open Source CMS market. I believe that prediction was correct. The "big three" (i.e. Wordpress, Joomla! and Drupal) continued to grow in 2008, while many of the other systems faded into the background a bit. I think that trend will continue in 2009. In the long run, the winners will be platform providers that enable people to connect, create and share value in different ways -- and that do so with the lowest barrier to entry. Expect other systems to (continue to) attack Drupal from both below and above. We're the best platform today, and others will have to move in to stay viable.

Oh, and IBM starts to embrace Drupal in 2009!

Acquia

I'm proud of Acquia. Acquia is the Drupal company that I started with Jay Batson. We announced the start of Acquia at the end of November 2007, and we announced our funding just before the end of 2007. People had a lot of questions about Acquia early in 2008, but throughout the year we demonstrated over and over again that we're committed to Drupal's success and that we want to do what is right for the community. We built a great team and grew from 2 employees early in the year to 30 people today. In September 2008, we launched our first products and started to offer commercial support for a defined software distribution called Acquia Drupal. Today, 3 months after we opened to doors for business, we are serving customers. We worked hard and made our milestones. It has been fun to see a new business take off. I also racked up way more frequent flyer points (i.e. air miles) than what is generally considered healthy.

The first thing you learn when selling in tough economic times is that you must figure out how to give customers exactly what they want and you must do it fast. It didn't take long for us to realize that people wanted more than Acquia Drupal: they wanted support for everything Drupal 6.x -- all modules, themes and custom code. The good news is that Acquia is a nimble company so the last weeks we worked on changing our support model to address customer demands. Starting tomorrow, we will support everything Drupal 6.x -- not just Acquia Drupal but all modules and themes available on drupal.org as well as custom code. I'm still a firm believer in Drupal distributions so Acquia Drupal still has a role as a packaged on-ramp for people getting started with Drupal. However, anyone will be able to connect any Drupal 6.x site to the Acquia Network -- helping us achieve our goal of helping people build and operate great websites with Drupal. Keep an eye on acquia.com if you want to learn more about these changes.

We're passionate about getting our value proposition right, so expect us to continue to tweak and extend our current offering in 2009. We'll also launch a number of new products. Some, like our hosted search service, we've already talked about, and I think we'll finally be ready to talk about a few others in the first quarter of 2009.

Regardless of the down-turn in the economy, I think that Acquia's business will continue to take off nicely in 2009. My heart and gut are convinced that Acquia has a tremendous opportunity to do well, and to do good. I believe (and hope) that Acquia will have the success it takes to continue to invest in Drupal.

Mollom

Together with Benjamin Schrauwen, I also launched Mollom, a web service whose purpose is to dramatically reduce the effort of keeping websites free of spam and the quality of user-generated content high. Mollom is a self-funded company and nowhere near the size or scope of Acquia (Acquia is my full-time commitment) but nevertheless, a lot of progress has been made. We announced Mollom in March, and opened the doors for business at the end of September 2008. Today, we're actively protecting 4,500 websites of which 75-100 have paid subscriptions. Mollom has caught almost 21 million spam messages since it started.

In 2009, I predict that Mollom will continue to experience steady growth and that we'll introduce a premium subscription (i.e. "Mollom Premium" in addition to "Mollom Plus" and "Mollom Free") with enterprise level features. I also predict that our efficiency in blocking spam will raise from our current 99.88% (i.e. 12 in 10,000 spam messages were not caught) to 99.95% or more (i.e. 5 in 10,000 spam messages or less were not caught). While this might sound like a marginal improvement, it actually means we make 2.4 times fewer mistakes.

Mollom has a ton of potential and is great fun, so I have all reasons to believe that 2009 will be a good year for Mollom. If fact, I predict that 'good' will be an understatement.

Conclusion

2008 was a great year, and continues Drupal's great run. The economic realities of 2009 will present challenges, but also opportunities. I believe Drupal's success will continue -- and accelerate -- in 2009, though we'll have to work hard. I predict we'll do exactly that.

Dries

[EN] ActiveSite – Administrative-oriented theme. This theme is based on the theme nRebuild (but does not depend on it).
The idea - Activemedia.by (Activemoda.ru)
Realization - Lynxlab.net

[RU] ActiveSite – Административно-ориентированная тема. Данная тема основана на теме nRebuild (но не зависит от нее).
Идея - Activemedia.by (Activemoda.ru)
Реализация - Lynxlab.net

bz

Talking to friends and family about their winter commutes makes me think about how tough it is for people who work in offices this time of year, many unnecessarily.

There are many jobs where you have to be physically present, but there are also many jobs where you could just as easily work from home given the right technical setup. I am wondering if more people had the opportunity to work from home, it might help the environment and the economy.

What are the advantages to teleworking?

• Carbon Footprint - Think of all the greenhouse gasses put out into the world but daily commutes, flights to meetings, heating huge offices, and so on.
• Costs - When I worked in an office I would spend over £100 a week on fuel alone, and that was before diesel was £1 a litre. There are costs to businesses to house and equip workers too, over and above the basics needed to do office work.
• Productivity - Each morning I can be at my desk within seconds because my office is downstairs from my bedroom. When I worked in an office it would mean driving for an hour or more, getting more and more stressed, through roadworks and traffic jams. Many times I would get to the office only to have to hop back into transport to get to a meeting, so my entire day would be spent traveling all apart from a 30 minute catch up meeting with a client 300 miles away. Video Conference calls would just require those 30 minutes, without all the travel time.
• Oil dependency - OK, I might overplay this one a little, but perhaps fewer unnecessary journeys would reduce dependency on oil?
• Family flexibility - Many work days are lost through to having to leave work due to family commitments, but in many cases you could quite happily get work done if only you were available at home rather than stuck in an office.

Obviously many companies worry that if there employees are not watched 24/7 they will not do their job, but in fact many organizations in practice have found this is not the case providing obvious checks and balances are implemented. Working remotely doesn’t have to mean out of touch.

All this doesn’t take much in the way of expensive technology either, it’s the kind of stuff most families will either have or be getting in their house:

• Decent spec computer - Doesn’t have to be top of the range, just enough to run Microsoft Office
• Broadband - This can be a sticking point for people in rural areas, but I imagine if they are within commutable distance of an office the majority will have broadband capability
• Webcam - Most computers come with these now but they are cheap if not
• Headset - To make conversations clearer it is useful to have a Skype headset, prevents background noise and echo.
• Software tools - Lots of virtual assistants now get by just with Google Docs, but of course it all depends on the work you will be doing. In terms of cost savings in IT, it helps if these applications work in the cloud or remotely so home IT visits are not required.

So there would be fewer gas-guzzlers crowding up the roads spewing out toxins, happier and more productive workers, and companies could save some money in a tough economy … Am I nuts or would more teleworking be better for the world?

Clean modern theme with fine tuned css, will be great for blogs, communities and online media.
This theme was designed & developed exclusively for Drupal by RussianWebStudio.com team.

Features:

• Smart 1-2-3 columns
• Big amount of regions
• Fixed width (from 1024px and greater)
• Tableless (css based)
• XHTML Transitional valid
• Tested in firefox 2+ / opera9.x / chrome / ie6+
• Additional quick-links blocks for admin

restyler

Hello, all,

I came across this post today: http://meredith.wolfwater.com/wordpress/2008/12/11/validation-of-my-crac...

It has a great quote from a student that highlights the strength of Drupal when used as a teaching tool:

I’ve been using Drupal for my classes as its flexibility supports my more constructivist approach to teaching. As one of my students wrote:

Comparing Blackboard and Drupal, I thought that the opinions and thoughts of the students are treated with respect by using the Drupal system. In other words, by using this system, students are like the main actors and actresses in movies. I thought that the features of Drupal were built around blogs and focused on connections and communication among teachers and students. On the other hand, Blackboard focuses on announcements and instructions from teachers to students.

Well put, Toshu! The focus isn’t on me imparting my wisdom to my students (thought hopefully my lectures were worth something!); it’s on their impressions and reflections about what they’re learning and the conversations that come from sharing those reflections.

Drupal in Educationbillfitzgerald

Posted by Jeremie Lenfant-Engelmann, Software Engineer

More than once, I've had a conversation over email and later realized that the information contained in the messages would make a great starting point for a document. So I built an experimental feature for Gmail Labs that does just that: with one simple click, "Create a document" converts an email into a Google Docs document.

No more copying and pasting the text from your email -- just open the message you wish to convert, click the "Create a document" link on the right side of the page, and voila, you have a brand new document which you can then modify and share!



Even if you're not interested in converting any of your current messages into documents, you can easily open up a blank doc by hitting g and then w (just make sure you have keyboard shortcuts on).


To turn on this feature, go to the Gmail Labs tab under Settings, select "Enable" next to "Create a document" and hit "Save Changes" at the bottom. Though we're temporarily missing the "Send feedback" link for this feature on the Labs page (oops!), we're still anxious to hear what you think.

I gave a Drupal presentation at the annual FeWeb conference here in Belgium last night. FeWeb is a Belgian association for website developers; this year was the sixth edition of their annual conference.

I was shocked, surprised and pleased to find that everyone in the audience had heard of Drupal and almost half of the audience had actively used it. I had lengthy conversations with a number of Belgian Drupal shops, including Coworks and Connexion, and discovered that almost all of them have made Drupal their main platform during the last year. Most reported that they can't keep up with the Drupal demand.

Clearly, Drupal has grown massively in Belgium over the last year ...

Dries

I've recently been thinking a lot about the freemium business model. For those unfamiliar with the freemium business model, it was first articulated by venture capitalist Fred Wilson in 2006:

"Give your service away for free, possibly ad supported but maybe not, acquire a lot of customers very efficiently through word of mouth, referral networks, organic search marketing, etc., then offer premium priced value added services or an enhanced version of your service to your customer base."

I've been thinking about the freemium business model because, inspired by Drupal and Open Source, both my companies, Acquia and Mollom, use a freemium business model. (Technically, Acquia uses an Open Source business model which is different from the freemium business model, but there is plenty of overlap and similarities -- pointing out the differences could be a blog post and discussion on its own.)

At Acquia, we currently provide community subscriptions for free -- people that want help with Drupal installation and configuration can get free support from Acquia's Drupal experts. While our free support is limited to certain channels (i.e., forum only), certain support questions (i.e., no module development help and no security best practices) and comes without response time guarantees, we have people on staff whose full-time job is to help you (example customer story). Further, we invest heavily in Drupal and give those contributions away for free.

Similarly, at Mollom, our basic spam filtering service is available for free to sites with limited post volumes. Our free website protection service provides all the features of our commercial Mollom Plus product, but is limited in the number of posts it will protect each day and in its access to our high-availability back-end infrastructure. The great majority of our Mollom clients are using our free filtering service with great success.

There are a number of things that attract me to the freemium business model. The first, and certainly foremost, is the opportunity to do “good” and “well” at the same time. It’s a great thing to help people build quality websites with Drupal, and it’s a great thing to provide Mollom to help deal with spam. Second, I believe a company is better off with a large install base than a small install base, even if the majority of clients ride free. A large install base translates to direct and indirect network effects, including efficient marketing, greater brand awareness, the collective intelligence of your users, and faster product adoption. And, last, I strongly believe that a successful company built on the freemium business model is simply a stronger and more defensible business in the long run.

The freemium business model is relatively new because it didn't become a serious option until the internet gave us a low-cost distribution channel. Ultimately, I can't help but think the freemium business model is the business model of the future for the sole reason that it puts the customer first. With the freemium business model customers only have to pay when they get significant value from the software (i.e. they have reached the limits of the free version). Compare this to the current model where people have to pay to get access to the bits, or where people have to pay before they got enough value from the software (e.g. most shareware software).

That all sounds great but you have to make the freemium business model work first. Getting free users to convert to paying customers is hard. Conversion rates of less than 1% are not uncommon. Free is often “good enough” and only a few people choose to pay for additional features and services. You have to put enough value in the free version to drive adoption (so that you get the scale and the network effects that derive from it), while providing enough incentive for people to pay for premium features or services. The marketing and sales funnel is really wide at the top, and very narrow at the bottom. Plus, you have to make sure that the paying users subsidize all the free users.

Achieving the right balance between free and paid customers is difficult and requires close attention to a number of variables. As a result, I've been trying to answer questions like: how much should we invest to acquire additional free users? How do you estimate the value of a free user? What is the cost of a free user? How long does it take for a free user to convert to a paying customer, and how many will do so? What are the triggers that convince free users to convert?

For example, in Mollom's case, one could argue that we get thousands of dollars worth of value from free users already. We currently have more than 3,000 active users that use Mollom for free. Say each user spends on average 15 minutes a week moderating his site's content and reporting classification errors to Mollom. Mollom learns from this feedback and automatically adjusts its spam filters so that all other Mollom users benefit from it. At a rate of $10 USD/hour, we get $390,000 USD worth of value from free users a year -- 3,000 users x 15 minutes/week x 52 weeks/year x 10 USD/hour = $390,000 USD/year. If these numbers hold up, the value of a free Mollom user could be estimated at $130 USD/year. And that doesn't include the marketing value they add. That said, the value of a free user probably declines as you get more of them and the business becomes stronger.

Both Acquia and Mollom have just opened for business so we have a ton to learn. It will be interesting to look at the different variables and questions a year from now, and to see what we have learned. I hope we can make it work so we can do good and well at the same time ...

Dries

All major search engines, including Google and Yahoo!, are moving aggressively trying to capture structured data. This isn't exactly a surprise because it provides tremendous opportunity. Let's take the example of product search. Imagine the web as a huge database of millions of products, and search engines like Google and Yahoo! giving you a rich set of controls to filter by price, availability, color, shipping cost, user ratings, and more. Wouldn't it be great to be able to search all the world's products from a single page with a single interface? I'd think so too.

It is waiting to happen; we just have to connect the dots. That is, we have to make Drupal emit structured information.

Hundreds of thousands of Drupal sites contain vast amounts of structured data, covering an enormous range of topics, including product information. Unfortunately, that structure is hidden deep in Drupal's database and doesn't surface to the HTML code generated by Drupal. As such, search engines can't pick it up as a product, and they'd fail to include it in their world-wide product database.

I first talked about the semantic web and Drupal in my DrupalCon keynote last year in Boston. In my presentation, I laid down the challenge that we need to put fields in core and make them first class citizens. Once fields are thus empowered, they can be associated with rich, semantic meta-data that Drupal could output in its XHTML as RDFa. For example, say we have an HTML textfield that captures a number, and that we assign it an RDF property of 'price'. Semantic search engines then recognize it as a 'price' field. Add fields for 'shipping cost', 'weight', 'color' (and/or any number of others) and the possibilities become very exciting. I envision a Drupal core CCK with the power to do just that.

Here is another example. Imagine a standard Drupal node-type called 'job'. The fields in the job node-type would have RDF properties associated with them mapping to salary, duration, industry, location, and so on. Creating a new job posting on a Drupal site would generate RDFa that semantic search engines like Yahoo!'s SearchMonkey would pick up and the job would be included in their world-wide job database.

Technologies like this disintermediate so many existing websites and organizations that it makes my head spin. It is too great an opportunity for us to pass up on. By adding semantic technology to Drupal core, I think we can make a notable contribution to the future of the web.

This kind of technology is not limited to global search. On a social networking site built with Drupal, it opens up the possibility to do all sorts of deep social searches - searching by types and levels of relationships while simultaneously filtering by other criteria. I was talking with David Peterson the other day about this, and if Drupal core supported FOAF and SIOC out of the box, you could search within your network of friends or colleagues. This would be a fundamentally new way to take advantage of your network or significantly increase the relevance of certain searches.

I can has semweb in Drupal core?

Dries

Intuit has finally dropped the subscription fee on Quicken Online, its Web-based financial software that competes with Mint, Geezeo, Buxfer, and Wesabe. The company is still selling, as completely separate products, software versions of Quicken.

When I last covered Quicken Online in December 2007, my biggest complaint was its price. In a market with free (and very good) competitors, there was just no reason to pay for Quicken Online. This is a smart move on Intuit's part. But while Intuit Online is a solid service, the online competitors keep getting better, too. It's unclear to me that Intuit's history will translate into market share in this competitive market.

Intuit is also still preparing to release its iPhone app that accesses Quicken Online data, as I wrote in December. No word on when that ships.

High customer support costs and an angry customer base (check out the user review scores for Quicken and Money) make standalone financial apps like Quicken and Microsoft Money questionable product lines for their makers, and when the online services take hold I will expect their demise. Devoted Quicken users like me, though, will need more capabilities (like bill paying and support for complex investment transactions) before we can make the transition, and the public at large has yet to be convinced that these online financial data storehouses can be trusted.

A quick snapshot of your cashflow (2007 version of Quicken Online)

(Credit: Intuit)

See also: Quicken Beam: Your finances made cute.

There's more online financial news coming tomorrow morning from the Finovate conference. Check back here.

Rafe Needleman

Last weekend, Mollom blocked the ten millionth spam attempt. That is ten million tiny contributions to making the web a nicer place. We've been growing pretty fast. Drupal is still the main platform for users with Mollom subscriptions, with Joomla! coming second, and Wordpress third. Milestone weekend!

Dries

Shared by John
this should be really useful...

This module is very simple with following feature -

- Provides a menu for multi site list
- List all sites by reading sites folder that is sitename as per drupal multisite instruction
- Provides link to run cron and update.php for all site from a single site

Post new feature/bug in project issue queue. Hope this will help you manage your sites in more better way.

this should be really useful...

About Student Activities at Texas A&M University

The Department of Student Activities at Texas A&M University is responsible for overseeing the annual recognition process of the 850+ student organizations on the College Station, TX campus. The department also advises several large organizations directly and offers leadership and involvement opportunities to the entire student body. Many of the most popular traditions on campus are heavily supported by the department, including Fish Camp (an extended orientation program attended by over 5,000 freshmen a year) and The Big Event (a one-day service project in which 10,000 students complete over 1,000 community service tasks in the city and surrounding areas).

History of Student Organization Web Hosting

read more

bneece

The New Zealand government is using Drupal at http://beehive.govt.nz. The site features information about all their ministers, their speeches, press releases, ministerial briefings, major government initiatives and more. Hat tip: Bevan Rudge.

Dries