Wim Leers Freelance Drupal Developer

I've been very quiet lately, which was especially noticeable on Drupal.org. Right now, I'm in the middle of my exam period (Computer Graphics exam next Wednesday), but as soon as I can (exams will be finished July 2nd), I will resume my Drupal work:

1. Finish Hierarchical Select 3 for Drupal 5
2. Port Hierarchical Select 3 to Drupal 6
3. Finally do that write-up of my svn system for deploying and maintaing Drupal sites (it's ready since last December, just didn't have the time to do the writing).
4. Finish the consolidation of the jCarousel and Panels Carousel Style modules into the Carousel module.
5. Make the current CDN Integration for Drupal 5 module scalable (i.e.: stop using a serialized array to keep track of synced files, which was good enough for development purposes, but painfully slow for production).
6. Also port the CDN integration module to Drupal 6.

However, that's not the only thing you can expect. For one of the university projects I had to complete, my Qt skills had to be polished significantly. And I (like to) think I'm now at a somewhat decent level. I'll write some articles on this as well:

1. a short article on an efficient algorithm for resizing a QGraphicsView while maintaining the aspect ratio. It's actually not that hard to write this, but it took me some time to figure out, so I hope it'll be helpful to some one out there. That, and I'd love to get feedback from the Qt professionals. :)
2. a relatively lengthy article on building cross-platform applications in C++/Qt, including sample build+packaging scripts for Mac OS X (g++ compiler, packaged as .dmg), Linux (g++ compiler, packaged as .tar.gz) and Windows (both the Visual Studio and MingW compilers)

And for the Drupal fans that read this far: Qt is actually almost as cool as Drupal! Should it not be clear: no, I don't say that easily. ;)

I'm late to the Mollom announcing party, because I was on a vacation. Nevertheless, I hope I can still interest some of you with a slightly different angle.

The major issue with spam prevention is that it often (currently virtually always) involves extra steps for normal users. And more steps means less participation. Less participation means less traffic. And less traffic means less popularity, revenue and whatnot. So clearly there is much to be gained to prevent spam without annoying normal users.

And this is exactly what Mollom tries to do: minimize spam and minimize annoyance. Additional benefits are that you no longer have to moderate content (nor users, because Mollom applies its magic on the user registration form as well), and – this one is pretty amazing IMO – "improve the overall content quality". Konstantin Käfer explained this pretty well:

While I get virtually no automated comment spam anymore, I now get actual humans who post spam comments. These comments are usually somewhat related to the blog post. That means I’m not getting generic “This content is great!” comments, but for instance, “This bundle is very useful. Thanks!” on my blog post about the TextMate Drupal bundle. Sounds like a valid comment, however, the supplied comment author homepage contains clearly a spam URL.

I can confirm this observation: when I get spam comments, they're actually relevant to my content, but it's the author's URL that makes it spam.

I'm also one of the private beta testers and I'd like to thank Dries for choosing me to participate, because Mollom is really by far the least intrusive spam killer, and for that reason a growth accelerator. I will be recommending it to all my clients.

Click the images below for bigger versions:

In about an hour we're leaving for the airport. I'm going to Mallorca! Yay :)

I will be staying with David Jennes, a good friend of mine. He's on a student exchange program (Erasmus) there, so I can stay with him for free. That's also why I can afford this. It's a really welcome vacation, too. The last trimester at the university has been pretty demanding, so I'll definitely enjoy doing things a bit slower. And of course the much warmer climate (it was 17-19 degrees Celsius there when it was snowing in Belgium the last couple of days…).

This also means that I'm going to be slow with catching up through my pile of e-mails from my exam period of the last 3 weeks. I thank you for your understanding :)