Various people have prodded me to explain my recent involvement in Drupal, or rather the lack of it. Unfortunately, I haven't found a way to do so in a way that is constructive and tactful, especially not when it comes to other contributors. Like Soylent Green, Open Source is made of people, and it's these people who are at the basis of a mountain of frustration that has driven me off. At the end of the day, I feel that the vast majority of contributors is not willing or not able to apply the level of diligence that I apply to my own Drupal work. This is both in terms of technical background and research, as well as in the actual execution and quality assurance. I find that too little effort is spent on polishing things so they really shine, e.g. in the actual development (back-end and UI), but equally in, say, outreach and marketing. It also seems that any exceptional efforts that go beyond this typical fare are often wasted, because the author invariably has to fight a prolonged (and sometimes never-ending) battle to keep the polish from being obliterated by someone else's refactoring.

This is further aggravated by the fact that a certain group of people always seems ready to chime in their two cents (or more) in long, repetitive e-mail threads or project issues, while not actually contributing to the end result or even bringing solid, technical arguments to the table. Said persons seem more interested in maintaining the business revenue that Drupal provides to them, rather than producing a better CMS.

This leads to a culture where actual expertise becomes a burden rather than a benefit, because whoever does something first is often expected to keep doing it indefinitely, for the benefit of everyone else. Rather than contributors having a symbiotic relationship with each other, it becomes more and more parasitic and unidirectional.

After many years in this environment, I find myself utterly drained and unmotivated to participate in that sort of charade anymore.

Out of recommendation from a certain evil norwegian, I gave EditPad Pro a whirl. Took me 10 minutes to remove it again.

Am I too picky? Maybe. Here's what I want from a text-editor (in no particular order):

• Runs on Windows 2000. Vent your anti-Microsoft anger somewhere else, I use Windows every day and I'm not likely to switch any time soon.
• Native Unicode and UTF-8 support. This is 2004. Unicode has been around for ages, and I see no reason why I should occupy myself with encoding issues. I deal with multiple languages, so Unicode is the only logical choice. Unicode compatibility is no longer a problem thanks to the Microsoft Layer for Unicode (from now on I will shoot everyone who refers to a byte as a 'character'). Note: automatic conversion between Unicode and the current ANSI codepage doesn't cut it (that's what Editpad Pro seems to do).
• IME-friendly, with bonus points for an integrated IME. Sometimes I type Japanese, and it requires indirect input and conversion of typed characters. Certain editors I've encountered do weird things which prevents the IME from doing its job, so that's why I mention it explicitly.
• Advanced editing for web-development. I do a lot of HTML, CSS, PHP, SQL and JavaScript, so anything that can make coding easier is a plus. The least I want is syntax highlighting, but intelligent auto-completion, validation, previewing and other visual cues are very handy too.
• Good user-interface. This one shouldn't really be necessary to mention, but so many programs seem to miss the point here: a program should be easy to use. I'm not going to go down to specifics, there are a lot of good references on the subject around. Because I'm picky as hell, reconfigurable toolbars, panels and hotkeys score good too. Don't confuse this item with the next one, which is:
• Nice to look at. I don't need menus that whiz by, flashy windows with skins or other novelty visual effects, but that doesn't mean my applications can be butt-ugly. Things such as proper spacing and margins, aesthetic proportions and contemporary looks are big pluses.

I don't think these are such crazy demands, so if anyone who has suffered through this rant up to now knows a program which satisfies these conditions, please post a link here ;).

Update: I've settled for Notepad2 for now. It's a small, functional, neat editor and it's open-source too.

For some reason I've never actually used Drupal's blogging API, so here's my first try. I'm using w.bloggar which, while very functional, has managed to annoy me after only 5 seconds of usage. Still, it's fun: don't have to log-in to Acko and open the blog window. I can still use taxonomy items perfectly, and I get a preview without having to submit ;).

And hooray for Drupal for not coming up with yet another proprietary standard!

So I decided to try out blogging again. The entire web is doing it, so it must be fun, right?

I played with the Acko.net theme and got this cool transparent-block effect on the right. It works in IE6 and Mozilla Firebird 0.6 (that's good enough for me) though in other browsers it should simply fall back to solid white blocks. For compatibility's sake I did include a CSS3-compliant opacity property in case it's ever implemented...

Basically the blocks are output twice, but the second time it is in a semi-transparent layer with white background, and all inner elements set to 'visibility: hidden'. That way no extra drawing is done, but the elements are sized accordingly. Yes, it's a bad hack, but it looks neat. I believe if IE6 had proper PNG support, I could use a semi-transparent background-image, but I'm not sure. For now, this'll have to do.