Tonight's rehearsal of our annual musical drama, A Christmas Tale, was a night of different perspectives. I wasn't really thinking when I snapped this photo with my cell phone, but it fits.

When we started out tonight, neither of my lighting guys were there, so I stuck my teenage daughter on the light board, where she did a great job of being mature and attentive, following cues without error. She worked backstage last year, so she saw a new perspective on how lighting tied in to the portions of the show where she'd had to move props on- and off-stage in the dark last year.

It's sometimes hard to remember that "instant" text messaging has been around for a long time, and that text messaging is far older than voice technology for long distance communication. The difference today is that text messaging devices are wireless, and don't require intensive training and study to be used.

My great-grandfather, Rush Webner, was a telegrapher for various railroads, including a 36 year stint as agent-operator for the Wheeling and Lake Erie station in Smithville, Ohio.

Old school web design meant including a page full of links to other websites. As older sites are transitioned into current practice, many site owners expect this trend to continue. And in some ways it has, most commonly as a block containing a blogroll of other sites. This method can provide both solutions by creating a custom content type that will turn links into nodes, and can then display them as a page or block using Views. This tutorial assumes that you have a running Drupal site and understand the basics of downloading and installing contributed modules.

This example "mysite" module demonstrates hook_form_alter. There is a lot of good info out there about hook_form_alter, but I found very few examples that put all of the pieces of custom module creation together in such a simple way as this.

The also function adds an example "form_array" element that displays everything in a form using print_r. Installing the Devel Module is probably a better way to get this same information. You wouldn't want to leave this hunk of code on a production site, but it is pretty nice for seeing what form elements are available to manipulate.

Uncomment print $form_id; to show the name of every form on your site as you navigate.

There are a lot of other backup scripts for Drupal on the web, but I promised somebody I'd post mine in response to this week's episode of the Geeks and God podcast. There are variations based on how the different servers are set up, but here's a basic summary of how I do it.

I wrote this email today intending to resend it again and again as new friends started joining Twitter, primarily from Facebook, but have quickly realized how cumbersome that might become, so instead I'm adding it here as a blog post for all to enjoy.

I've noticed a couple of my friends have signed up for Twitter but are not using it. Most of you have added the Twitter Facebook app, and are wondering "ok, so now what?" As a diligent and responsible Twitter addict, I've decided to sit down and write you a nice email to help you get started.

Matt Farina recently posted a question on FriendFeed about increasing adoption of Drupal among churches.

I'm wondering how we can make Drupal easier for churches to adopt. Drupal for Churches distribution? Documentation targeted at churches? Thoughts?

I think four factors are that churches are asking the wrong questions, we're providing wrong answers, the Drupal web site probably doesn't target non-geeks, and the word about Drupal isn't getting to the right places.

Lifestream aggregation is an issue I've been pondering for quite a while now. I have multiple blogs and web 2.0 services. Twitter, Tumblr, Flickr, Facebook, FriendFeed, YouTube and the list goes on. I've been seeking an effective way to combine all of this crud into a single RSS feed so I can share all of it in one place.

And so I've tried a couple of methods. I made some Yahoo! Pipes. I tried rolling everything through my Tumblog. I tried the feed aggregator in Drupal core. And I mostly settled on FriendFeed, especially since Rob Loach wrote a sweet FriendFeed Module for Drupal.