Darren Mothersele

Sometimes you just need a quick solution, using the built in functionality of modules you are already using without adding extra modules to your site. For example, you might want to add a country field to a node using CCK without the overhead of a complex module like Location.

Here's an easy way, just use a standard text field, with a "Select List" widget. You then just need the data to create the options. Here's the data you need, ready to copy and paste into the options for the CCK widget.

I've got my ticket and travel sorted for Drupal conference in Paris from 1st-5th of Sept. Now I just need to sort out some accommodation. Please let me know if you've found a good budget hotel or hostel!

After talking with many people in Serbia for whom English was their second language it became apparent that the main way young people learn English is through music, TV and films.

I have been learning Italian for 4 months. I started with an intensive short course when we arrived in Italy, and have followed this up with audio courses and attempting to use websites like livemocha. It is clear now that I must start watching Italian films.

I recently spent an interesting 8 days in Serbia, talking about Web 2.0, Social Software and its use in Youth in Action programmes. I'd never been to Serbia before and I immediately found some "cultural differences". You can see the view I had from my hotel window in the attached photo. Yes, a bomb! Not what I expected to see when staying in a hotel at the top of a mountain in a national park.

Tickets are available for the next Drupal conference. It's in Paris. I'm planning on being in London the week before, just need to sort out some accommodation for Paris. The combined tickets for Szeged saved lots of time and money - doesn't look like there's anything similar for Paris yet.

http://paris2009.drupalcon.org/

It's been a while since I've posted anything. I've not disappeared, just not had brilliant connectivity recently. In brief here's the latest, and I'll post more details when I'm settled:

• Moved from London to Cagliari, Sardinia. (Hence lack of connectivity!)
• Active Tags module on Drupal.org really coming on, plenty of bug fixes thanks to dragonwize helping out.
• New server online soon, migrating from CentOS 4 to latest Ubuntu Server.
• What else? Stay tuned...

Here's a quick way to add recent tweets to your Drupal powered websites. The following code is as simple as possible. Add it to your site's module folder and enable the module. You they get a block to position on your site. The block is populated with your most recent tweets via a Javascript call to the Twitter website.

Here's a quick one. mysqldump is useful for backing up your Drupal website database (also look at mysqlhotcopy for MyISAM only databases). If you use the Drupal search system on your site then you probably have a massive search index. This index often takes up just as much space as the rest of the site, and can always be rebuilt so doesn't need to be backed up. mysqldump includes an option to exclude tables. For example:

Two similar services launching at the same time... An interesting comparison article, Facebook Connect vs Google Friend Connect: Fight!, at Mashable nicely summerises the key points. As they point out in the article, the two services are aimed at different users. Facebook Connect seems too much like a one way street, whereas Google Connect supports OpenID. There are other services that have been around for a while offering similar functionality, for example Disqus.

I've been wanting to get to grips with some of the more advanced features of SimplePie for a while, and I thought a good way to do this would be to build a blog search engine. So, that's exactly what I did this weekend, and I came up with MusicInstinct.