My co-worker Boris surprises me with a link from his work weblog to my notes about the first day at Seattle's Drupal Camp, so I'll take that as a nudge to write a little about Thursday, the second day. For the first session I parachuted in to the first session for a sleeping-in Steve McKenzie—no worries Steve, I woke up an hour before getting there myself—to talk about modules. I prefaced my remarks with the modules I worked on: the Pirate module, a Flickr module which I'm abandoning because Flickr Hood has similar features (I've offered to help out with it), a little module, called Quotable, that converts all <q> tags to text with curly quotes (which I use to this day, inspired by Mark Pilgrim's article) and, of course, the On This Day Module (source code). I then tried to answer questions as best I could until Steve got there then jetted to the user room again, where I demonstrated podcasting in Drupal (I ended up just pointing to the long article I wrote for Bryght's support site as I didn't have anything prepared for the demo—which is okay, since I didn't expect to demo anything) and the powerful if sometimes complicated taxonomy system.

I misspoke by saying "vocabulary", "taxonomy" and "term" were Drupal words: they are terms borrowed by Drupal from library science and other fields that rely heavily on categorization. I still stand by, however, the idea that many users are confused by the terminology and, since many are used to systems with 'categories', such as Movable Type and WordPress, the way Drupal describes it and handles it internally can be daunting. (A brief aside: Just a Gwai Lo uses taxonomy terms in two ways: one which uses taxonomy terms to create what look like weblogs to the outside world and tags.) I expounded briefly on the disadvantages of tagging, or rather a perceived disadvantage, in that it tends to make a site's categorization look messy, especially if the site has a large community. I say 'perceived' because there is value in the mess, that site administrators and community members will find surprises in what people think something should be tagged as. Boris, who managed to survive explaining what the Drupal core modules do with his voice intact, spoke about another disadvantage about tagging, in that there lacks a standard way to separate tags. del.icio.us and Flickr separate with a space, Flickr allowing quotes but not del.icio.us, and Drupal sites throwing in commas as separators, meaning you can't have tags with commas in their name.

For the last session, Gregory Heller demonstrated CCK, Views, and Content Template. (Some people thought he was saying "content" when he was saying "contemp"; I noticed the night previous that the Drupal.org project's URL has it cleverly as "contemplate".) This bundle of modules make for a highly customizable site, far much more than is currently possible without writing your own content module.

(I started experimenting with CCK and views earlier in the week on a test site. Not really knowing that Gregory would cover it, I installed Content Template the night previous and, since the theme to his site was a little mangled to see the configuration page, I stepped in to show what it looked like when formatted properly. Since aggregator2 is busted, at least on 4.7 sites, I may just use CCK and views to benefit from strange new content types with strange new ways of displaying those content types. If I can get Amazon S3 to work for me, that's where my mundane SkyTrain videos will go, along with other 'static' files.)

Earlier in the day we ran into the Robots who are responsible for 43 Places among other sites, and then while at their office, wondered what they really thought of 43 Thongs, a parody of their 43 Things. They have a sense of humour about it—which comes as somewhat a relief seeing as how I used pretty much the exact same look—and reported being slightly disappointed that it wasn't about the uncomfortable underwear.

Over the course of those 3 days (which includes Tuesday evening, when I lost my Nokia 7610) I got to liking Seattle a bit more, after, on the second day, having walked down Pine towards the water, guessing correctly that if I was walking downhill I'd be in good shape for actually finding it. Though I don't regret leaving when I did—the resulting downtime spent at home and then with some friends I got on Friday made the decision feel right—if I'm in a similar situation I'll consider spending an extra day on my own to explore the city a bit, and maybe take in a major league sporting event like I thought I might when in Seattle.