Since I’m extremely childish, immature, and a fan of the practical joke, I decided to build a web app that let you send an email to someone, but make it appear as if it comes from someone else. I decided to call it Prankmail. Frivolous, slightly dangerous, and perfect for a rainy weekend indoors.

Skipping to the good part, you can check it out at:
http://prankmail.org

And if you would like to read about how I built it, and how the
“build from scratch” process compares to building a Drupal site, continue on:

Before I really started with application specific code, I wanted to grab a few Open Source pieces and get a simple and efficient framework to build on (We’re not using Drupal, after all).

I wanted to have clean URL’s (none of that goofy query string nonsense) so I took a look at how Drupal uses MOD_REWRITE and .htaccess files and cobbled together a simple solution. I’ve also been looking at the new Zend framework, and I like the way it maps URL’s to controllers. I am also a fan of Drupal menu system, so I hacked up the arg() function from Drupal, and made it route URL’s to controllers. I like Ruby’s “convention over configuration” and so by default, I set it up so a URL of ‘/message/123′ gets passed to a function ‘controller_message’ with an arg of ‘123′, if that function exists.

I really like Drupal’s very light weight DB abstraction layer, and so I grabbed that as well (mostly because the syntax is so natural to me at this point), and stuck it in my web app.

For templating, I decided to give Smarty one last try. Every time I struggled with the syntax, or found myself fighting along, I could hear Rasmus saying “PHP *is* a templating language, stupid!” Next time, I think I will just stick with a ‘pure’ PHP templating solution.

Setting up this simple framework let me write the rest of the application with speed and ease. Included libraries aside, the actual application itself is quite small.

For help on the UI, I used JQuery and specifically thickbox. I also found the visual JQuery site to be a great resource when I got tripped up on syntax. JQuery is truly fun to code with, and it’s a great feeling to have so much control over the DOM, with such simple and beautiful syntax.

I mean, how is the following snippet not poetry in it’s simplicity:
//add a token to the form that we will check to
//make sure the form processor only looks at forms
//submitted from this page...
$.get("/token",function(txt){
$("#mailform").append('
‘);
});

The above snippet leads into how I was concerned with spammers and bots submitting mail, so I borrowed a technique from Jack Born and used JQuery to append a token (MD5′d salt + timestamp) to the submission forms DOM, and at the same time inserting the same token into the Session. When the form is submitted, I check to make sure that the timestamp is “fresh” (within 20 minutes), and that the two tokens match. This should prevent, or at least make it more difficult for a bot to make a post directly to my form processor (and I don’t have to use a silly CAPTCHA).

So how did the whole process work, compared to using my usual framework of choice, Drupal?

Setting up the whole framework from scratch was definitely the fun part. I really enjoyed having a chance to “do things my way”, rather then hunt through documentation or lines of code in search of an answer. I think many people code because it feels good to build something, and while Drupal gives you many things “for free”, it was very enjoyable and satisfying to dive in and do it myself.

When it got to the point of adding comments and RSS feeds to the site, I have to admit that it was proving to get a bit tedious, and it would have been nice just to “turn comments on”, in Drupal. But all that being said, the whole exercise reminds me that there are many ways to get a job done. Drupal is a fantastic tool for a specific set of problems, but it’s just that.

Moral of the story is?

There are no silver bullets, and building silly websites is easy and fun.

Now go send some mail!

Next up: San Fran Drupaler’s should unite and throw something serious down at the upcoming Yahoo! Hack Day. I’d like to go, so if there are other Drupal heads in attendance, I’d love to work on any kind of hack involving Drupal, Yahoo! maps, upcoming.org concert data, and last.fm. Send me a shout if you’re interested!

Performance was very important, and we were having a huge bottle neck with Drupal’s XML-RPC library. XML-RPC calls were talking a long fricken time, and we were making tons of them.

Fortunately I had help from Walkah and Moshe, and I thought I would pass on what we did to drastically increase XML-RPC performance. This worked for us, so maybe it might help someone else out.

The problem is of course that Drupal does a full bootstrap for every XML-RPC call.

Our solution:
The first, simple (and huge) win was to utilize a PHP opcode cacher - this drastically reduces this bootstrapping time. We used eAccelerator, but there are many others.

Secondly, since we were working in a controlled environment (we knew what modules were going to be called via XML-RPC) we were able to hack the xmlrpc.php file to avoid a full bootstrap. The downside is we had to hardcode a few path things into the file, but again, this is for a particular app/site, and the performance gains were worth it.

Courtesy of Moshe, here is our revised xmlrpc.php file (you might want to rename it to xmlrpcs.php or something):


< ?php
// $Id$

// put any common.inc or other core functions here that your module relies upon.
function t($string) {
return $string;
}
?>


This was enough to get a huge increase in performance. (Yeah!)

Further thoughts:
One could use “mysql_query()” and avoid bootstrap all together, although I don’t think this is very much overhead, and the benefits of using Drupal’s “Database abstraction layer” probably out way any performance overhead here.

I wonder if there is any way to get Drupal to intelligently load necessary code instead of doing a full bootstrap. The “hardcoding” method above certainly works, but I am craving a more elegant and universal solution. Any thoughts?

Features include:

• support for mulitple playlist formats, including xspf, m3u, pls
• podcastable playlists
• AJAX ordering of audio tracks
• multiple ways to add an audio track to a playlist
• For the geeks in the crowd, playlists are implemented as a new node type.

Farsheed has set up a nice demo site where you can go and kick tires a bit, but you have to sign up first to create your own playlists. Enjoy!

Tim suggests a subscription based podcast service, and this is one type of revenue generating solution Bryght plans to offer to musicians. I’ve said this before, but based on my own informal surveys, I think there are many musicians out there who might want to be free from the constraints of the album. As an artist, why not just release and sell a few tracks a month, delivered straight to your fans MP3 player through Podcasts?

One could argue that the very concept of the “album” is arbitrary and is simply an artifact of our current (and physical) distribution channels. In the past, an album has been a convenient way to get music to the people. Stores stocked high selling albums, due to limited shelf space. People came and bought them. But now, we are at an interesting time. Digital distribution channels have matured to the point where they will start to influence the art that people produce and consume. Music distribution technology influencing music? That’s right, it’s a two way street!

For example, the phonograph and radio drastically influenced the music that was produced, simply by creating new markets. Would 80’s rock bands have worn as much makeup if their faces weren’t being beamed via MTV to millions of homes?

Looking ahead, I think a post-album future filled with regular releases of individual tracks will be more then simply a sea of singles, and I can’t wait to find out what takes shape.

– Update –
Richard chimes in with some good thoughts

In response, it seems that the Mambo development team is going to fork the open source project and go forth on their own, which certainly puts many members of the Mambo community in a tight spot.

Most important though, is what will the new forked project be called? My vote is for Lambada, all though Meringue also has a nice ring to it.

Lessons for the Drupal community? Greed sucks, be open and transparent (especially when setting up a foundation), and play nice with others!

Face Value of Actual Ticket - $35.00
Facility Charge - $1.75
Convenience Charge - $5.00
Processing Fee - $2.25

For four $35 tickets, one might expect to pay around 4 X $35 = $140, but when all the charges add up, I was billed $169.25! Before tax!

What we need is an open source, Drupal based, Bryght hosted, concert ticketing solution.

At Bryght, I have the enviable job of customizing Drupal for use on recording artists and record label web sites. One of the first things I wanted to do was to beef up audio support in Drupal, and so last week I was able to release the first version of the audio module. It can read and write ID3 tag information, can stream and download audio, and generates proper podcast-safe RSS enclosures. I am still working on adding support for iTunes RSS extensions, and cleaning up the code a bit, but it is working well on my site. Hopefully it will help others out there as well!

It seems like there are now a number of web applications whose feature set and usability levels rival (and surpass) those of their desktop competitors. I actually prefer the Gmail interface to that of many desktop email clients, and from my brief look at blinksale, it seems to be easier to use then many desktop accounting programs. Exciting times for web development!

Update:
So I have tried to automate my billing with blinksale this month, and have been unsuccessful. There was no place for me to enter my GST number, or any other additional fields that I required. Maybe I have to upgrade to the non-free account to accomplish this, but at this point I have lost my enthusiasm. Sigh… Back to Excel templates.

DrupalART is a site dedicated to helping people build and develop Drupal sites for artists and musicians. The goals are to show (through examples) various ways Drupal can be used to build artist websites, and build documentation aimed at newbies trying to use Drupal for their art or music website.

To start with, Farsheed has put up a good tutorial on how to podcast with Drupal. This site looks like it will be a great resource for artists and musicians.