What I did with my summer vacation
Drupal. Drupal! Drupal! For the past 10 months I have been neck deep in Drupal. Drupal is an free open source content management system with an eye toward online communities. It provides a framework to handle much of the heavy lifting involved with developing an interactive website. And much to my surprise, out of necessity and curiosity, I've become quite an accomplished Drupal developer.
And in the past two weeks, I've launched two sites:
FearlessLiving.org is the big one. If you were to make a check list of all of the features possible for a website, this site would mark all of the boxes. It truly tests the limits of Drupal with about 50 modules enabled including functions for ecommerce, message boards, external rss aggregation, mailing lists, and access control to paid content. The site launched with about 600 pages and continues to grow. Many custom Drupal modules were developed for this site and most of them are now available for free as Drupal contributions.
Participate.net is my other site and while it has a more focused feature set, it goes even further in sculpting Drupal into something far different from the "out of the box" version. Created in conjunction with Adaptive Path, this site gives all registered users their own blog. Users can assign their entries to one of the social action campaigns and those entries will show up along with others on that subject.
After all that work, it's great to finally have these sites "out there". There's still a lot of clean up work to be done, but I think that I might actually get some free time in November or December. What a way to spend a year.