Update: check out the poster I did for the event as well.

Just like last year, my (now) ex-university, the Catholic University of Leuven, still has a theaterfestival for and by students. Friends of mine organise it and I'm the resident web monkey and designer for their site and poster. The site's domain name means "Leuven plays" and is a pun on theater and plays (it works in english too). So, every year we try to base ourself on some playful theme when coming up with the promotional material.

In the past, there's been blackjack and chess. Last year's design came out really well, so I posed myself the challenge of doing even better.

I redesigned the site from scratch, this time using a 1930's carnival/fair as the theme.

Update: I've posted the presentation slides and a video is available as well.

I'll be attending the OSCMS conference in Sunnyvale CA at Yahoo next month. Aside from a repeat of my DrupalCon jQuery talk, (though with a bit more examples) I just submitted another proposal for a talk. It's something that I've wanted to do for a while now:

In meetings and lectures across the globe, people are made to endure hideous presentation slides featuring some of the wildest colors, clip art and typography. Many websites are so confusingly laid out, that you get dizzy from the overload of boxes, images or links. And every day, people receive resumés, invoices and ads ... *cue lightning and thunder* set in the Comic Sans font.

It's enough to make the average designer's hair turn blue, fall out, morph into a ninja and stab him/her in the eyes.

But, all hope is not lost! Contrary to popular belief, graphical design is not some arcane voodoo magic, but a straightforward discipline that values experience, reusability, elegance and good tools just like programming. Just like code, there are plenty of objective ways to measure the quality of a design. However, just like art is subjective, so may two programmers disagree on which implementation is the best. No designer is born with a genetic sense of proportion... it's just that while you were busy writing BASIC code on your C64, they were busy drawing superheroes.

I myself am an engineering geek who's never had any sort of formal design or art training, but has earned the title of "design nazi" on numerous occasions.

This session will teach geeks some basic principles about graphical design (especially on the web), from a geek perspective. This means we won't talk about "visually balanced design" but "here's a good approach to spacing". Soon, you'll be hearing the oooh's and aaah's when you don your designer hat.

You can vote on the session page if you're interested.

Ahoy from the Vancouver PHP conference. I gave a talk titled "A Closer Look at Drupal 5" earlier. Overall response was positive, although according to Boris I wouldn't have managed to squeeze everything in 1 hour if I hadn't put on my zippy fast presentation speaking voice, so there might have been some information overload at times.

Oh well.. I figure anyone generally only remembers at most 50% of a talk, so I might as well blast you with a bunch of things and hope some of it sticks ;).

Thanks to Dries and James for letting me use their earlier presentations as a base.

The slides are no longer available by Dries' request, as he has had problems with people stealing slides without permission before. Sorry.

I've been working on Drupal distributed search for a while now, releasing a beta of the OpenSearch Aggregator as well as a release of the OpenSearch feed module. The aggregator has a friendly UI for setting up any number of sources and the feed contains relevance information from the Drupal search system. Results are also cached on the aggregator for performance reasons.

More information about these modules can be found in my earlier blog posts about OpenSearch.

The ultimate goal however is to set up distributed search for a Bryght client between a network of secure Drupal sites. The searches for logged-in users should include content that is visible to them across all the different Drupal sites.

OpenID is the obvious choice as an identity mechanism for the users, but it does not immediately help us with the authentication. I've written a document after some research that details possible approaches and solutions. Because we're talking about frontier technology here, it seemed best to repost it publicly to sollicit feedback from anyone interested. I could certainly use some extra opinions on this, as it is all very new to me.

Two months ago I got a Nokia N73 hand-me-down from Roland thanks to Nokia's Blogger Relations Program. It's a 'smart phone' with a large 320x240 screen, a 3 megapixel camera and more. Before this, I'd been using an old Nokia 3310 brick (monochrome screen) so this was quite a step up. Still, I wasn't particularly unhappy with my old phone because all I really needed was voice calls and SMS. So I was curious myself to see if I'd actually use all the bells and whistles.

See the Drupal.org issue.