I wrote about my experience with the OpenID account provider Clickpass in the previous blog entry Using Clickpass for OpenID Site Login. I mentioned I would try to install OpenID for use with Clickpass and the CEO of Clickpass left an encouraging reply. This week I tried installing the OpenID Drupal Module. I must say it was a bit confusing, but I was able to successfully log into Startplane from Clickpass.

Look at the bottom of this article and you will see a "Digg This" button using the familiar digg icon. Adding this button is an easy way to increase the visibility of your blog. To add this digg button simply install the Digg This module from the Drupal website. It's installation is surprisingly simple (as are most Drupal modules).

I noticed the title of this blog entry matches the title of my last one with only one slight word change. But the difference between the two titles is rather significant. "Community Plumbing" refers to the mechanics of Drupal itself, while actually building an online community is something completely else.

If you haven't heard about Drupal by now, you should! This is especially true if you consider yourself any type of web programmer or developer. I've been experimenting with Drupal on-and-off for several years and am continously impressed with how easily it allows you to create brand new, powerful, community driven sites.

For those who doubt the strength of Drupal just take a look at a few of the big-name sites powered by Drupal:

Warner Brothers Records

I came across a very interesting new site today while investigating the Advanced Forum module for drupal. Shell Social Network Playground is a site designed to show how Drupal can be used to make a social networking site.

I'm just now getting into the whole drupal movement thing, but I have to say that I like what I see. When I see quotes like Larry over at GarfieldTech saying things like:

Drupal is a community; a living, breathing, growing, vibrant community. It's human nature to want to be part of something bigger, something grand, something amazing. Well, here it is.

I guess this is the obligatory post that occurs early in the lifespan of any successful blog where I complain about the amount of blog spam I am receiving. It is always a bit disheartening when your community receives more spam than actual comments. Most of it now seems to be trackback based spam. When I disabled anonymous comments, most of the comment spam went away. I have now changed the settings of the trackback modules to reject one-way trackbacks... hopefully that will eliminate most of the trackback spam.

I've been meaning to enable search engine friendly URLs for Drupal for some time now. It's a very valuable feature, but requires a few module installations to get running. The main reason I want them is to add some context to trackbacks. Not all blogs post the title and snippet of the post that is linking back. I hoping having search engine friendly urls will help entice some users to click through on the trackbacks. I am also hoping they well help a little with search engine ranking, but my main motivation is aesthetics as I've given up trying to please the finicky search engines.

In an effort to increase exposure, I am registering with Technorati. This is the "Post Claim" to allow their spiders to start indexing our posts. It should be a good experiment as I'll be monitoring the effectiveness via Google Analytics.

Technorati Profile

Tonight I've installed the trackback module on startplane. I think trackbacks have the potential to be an incredibly powerful tool for uniting people across the web. Unfortunately, I think they've fallen by the wayside for two main reasons. The first is the spam issue. By moderating and using spam filters I think this issue can be overcome. I would hope most bloggers who have stopped using linkbacks because of spam would reconsider now that the technology has improved.