Last night I gave a presentation that reviewed different strategies for creating photo galleries in Drupal. The short version is that there are a multitude of options available and they vary widely in their popularity and complexity. As is often the case with Drupal, the more of the system the more power you have, but the trade-off is in the work (and knowledge) required. There are a number of examples as well, but you have a Drupal gallery you'd like to show off (or even a module you think deserves mention) please tell me about it in the comments.

I just finished my presentation on PHP at the London, Ontario Podcamp 2010. There's probably not much here for seasoned PHP hands, it's oriented towards someone who wants a basic introduction, especially oriented towards theming a content management system. If you're just getting started and have a question, be sure to put your PHP question in the comments below and I'll do my best to help you out.

I was recently looking for a little diversion, so I fired up my iPhone and looked up the top free games. It's not uncommon for this list to contain limited demos and other apps that try to sell you on premium, paid version, but usually a little time on the free demo is enough for me.

This time I decided to download a game called GodFinger which is a Real-Time Strategy (RTS) game with a cute, drag-and-drop interface. The reviews weren't stellar but I thought I'd give it a try.

In yet another fit of late night browsing, I came across a little gem called Tidy Service:
http://www.upstartblogger.com/tidy-service-101

Sure, lots of the web editors out offer some kind of markup validation or cleanup, but what excited me about this one particular is that as a service, it can be used anywhere. Sure you can use it to beef up free (but excellent) editors like Textwrangler, but to me the biggest opportunity here is cleaning up code in the browser.

At Podcamp London today co-web geek Anthony Vella-Zarb and I gave a presentation on using Drupal for social media. Includes some introductory information on Drupal, including why it's great for online communities, and the power of the community behind it.

We also talked about some of the modules that make Drupal great for social web sites, focusing mainly on Service Links, Flickr, Picasa, iTunes, Embedded Media Field, Activity Stream, the Facebook modules, and Twitter. After some illustrations and a quick example, we moved on to offering up some resources for learning more.

Over a year ago, I started to play around with using my MacBook Pro as a media center. I had bought a new HDTV a couple of months prior, and wanted to see how I could get the most out of its display capabilities.

I started with VLC, which worked OK, but at the time it was incapable of 5.1 surround output. The next application I tried was MPlayer (using the GUI version), which did everything I needed but all the commands required a keyboard, using arcane commands.

Came across this interesting application of twitter, implemented as a kind of exclusive subset:
http://www.exectweets.com/

It'll be interesting to see how many more of these spring up.