The idea of PlanetOU was always to represent a community around an institution by aggregating blogs written by people connected to it (the idea is explained in full in my earlier post What planet are you from? PlanetOU of course!). It uses the core Aggregator module in Drupal to pull in content from about fifty different websites to make a constant stream view of the latest blog posts from OU staff bloggers. This approach works well, but a key point to note here is that when feed items are imported in this way Drupal does not create new node items (it isn't native content to the software that runs this site), and as such are not visible to the built-in search engine. These blogs are spread across many different domains (e.g. only a few people on the TwitterLeague for OU people use the OU's blogging facilities) and so are not indexed by any institutional search engine. Fortunately there is now a solution to this challenge; a Google Custom Search Engine (Google CSE).

The world of Web 2.0 consists of many sites that you might use for different purposes, you might use Flickr store your photos, Twitter to microblog, last.fm to find new music, your bookmarks on del.icio.us, maybe a blog of your own, the list could go on for quite some time. In each of these sites you might have a profile that tells part of the story about who you are, but these websites usually keep themselves to themselves, the profile will only reflect your interaction with that site. So different aspects of your Web 2.0 personality can be found scattered all over the Internet, but now it is possible to tie these strands together to enhance your website or blog and give a better impression of the things you find interesting.

Do you like my Random Content block? I thought it would be nice to show people random selections from previous entries on my website as another way, along with the Popular Content block, to help visitors discover pages that they might be interested in. The way it was done is a little hack-ish, and it would be better to write this up as a module, but it does give an example of a custom content block using the PHP filter.

All sorts of people connected with The Open University are blogging about their interests, experiences and knowledge they want to share with you. These people include not just academics but also librarians, tutors, techies and project managers all putting information out there and discussing ideas, it's a side of the OU that you might not have thought about, one that isn't immediately visible when you deal with the OU, or even work in the place, but it is quite an interesting side. If you put all of these people together you start to get a sense of what this community is talking about, the discussions within it and what is being considered for the future. Enter PlanetOU, the part of this site that tries to bring these voices together in one place.

One of the great aspects of the blogosphere is the ability for people to leave comments on your blog and also comment on other people's blogs. It makes for a great continual conversation between people all over the internet (by the way I would like to say a big thank you to everybody who has left comments on this site and taken the time to get in contact ). Comments are another manifestation, along with, for example, blogs, social networks and wikis of how the internet is moving away from being a broadcast medium that people just 'surf' to being a place for to interact, communicate and share ideas. The problem has been that is difficult to keep track of these different conversations across dispersed web sites.

Do you like the new design for this website? I had been meaning to do a custom Drupal theme for quite some time, the old theme I had been using 'Sky' looked pretty good but carried with it a couple of problems. Firstly, it was a fixed-width theme. Fixed-width websites are one of my pet hates, and laden with problems, they don't get the most out of the available screen area, often leaving large empty spaces or disappearing off the screen. Secondly, you could either have a left or a right sidebar; I wanted both! Plus it is always nice to have a unique design.

The phenomenon that is Web2.0 has brought about many new opportunities to interact with websites. The downside of this so far has been the necessity to register for each site separately that creates the baggage of having to remember lots of user names and passwords. Help is at hand though with a new system called OpenID that might life easier for all of us in the future. The good news is that this can easily be integrated into Drupal to make your users' lives easier.

Drupal has been officially updated to version 6! An announcement detailing some of the new features is available at: http://drupal.org/drupal-6.0. If you are unfamiliar with Drupal you can get a booklet that describes it at: http://drupal.org/node/10767. Amoungst the new features is built in OpenID integration, better language support, easier theming and a new Schema API that makes it easier for module developers to support databases other than MySQL.

Many visits to websites now are as a result of a search made by a user. In fact you may be reading this very article as a result of using a popular search engine like Google or Yahoo. Traditionally, to make search engines of new content on your site that you might like to make visitors aware of, you had to wait for a visit from a Web Crawler, a program used by search engine companies that visits websites and analyses them to find out sort of information they contain. The problem with this is that you don't know how long you might have to wait for that Web Crawler to next pop round and share your new content with the world. Fortunately, this has now changed, and the big search engines have created a mechanism to update them with up to date content information about your site.

Admittedly, I didn't actually try to put the EEE into a handbag, but a couple of people very enthusiastically mentioned that such a feat would be possible. Now of course as I'm sure you know there are few subjects more serious than servers, this is the impression I have got over the years from sysadmins suspicious of developers! So we ought to see if some serious technology works on the machine, could we really use it as a web server? Or a database server? Maybe even for Drupal?