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Oy, what a year it's been! Aside from the excitement of the election and the economy, it's been an exciting year for me in the professional realm. (Personal realm, if you don't already know then you shouldn't know. :-)) And of course, it's been a crazy crazy year for Palantir, too, but in a mostly good way.

Let's see, one new job, two new Drupal jobs, two conferences, one sprint, three camps, six new colleagues, two foreign countries, eight other US states, one book... and a partridge in a pear tree, probably. Oof!

I've been meaning to upgrade the Akismet module on this site for a while now. Of course, I waited so long that another option just appeared, one I've been waiting to see for a while: Mollom.

The other other project from apparent insomniac Dries Buytaert, Mollom is a content filtering service similar to Akismet. I've actually been familiar with it for a long time, as the GoPHP5 project has been running a Mollom private beta since last June. In fact, when Acquia was announced my first thought was "wait, what happened to Mollom?"

Marco Tabini, of php|architect magazine fame among other things, has been openly disappointed at the death of PHP 4. Not because he likes PHP 4, but because of the "OMG you're discontinuing something that everyone's still using!" argument.

I like your magazine, Marco, but I have to disagree with you on this one. :-)

What a week it's been! Eight days ago, we launched GoPHP5.org to try and break the stalemate that kept PHP 4 on past its sell-by date. At launch, we had a half-dozen projects and about 10 hosts that had signed up.

What a difference a week makes.

"Never believe that a few caring people can't change the world. For, indeed, that's all who ever have." --Margaret Mead

A while back, various people were lamenting the state of PHP 5 adoption, myself included. What to do about it? How to get hosts to let programmers leverage the added functionality that PHP 5 offers? How can we do that without cutting off 80% of our user base?

The solution a few people suggested was team work. If all PHP projects stopped supporting PHP 4 and made the jump to PHP 5 at the same time, none of them is penalized in the market for being "first" and web hosts will have a clear business case to upgrade their systems to PHP 5. We can then all start offering faster, cleaner, more powerful, more secure web software.

But how does one get all PHP projects together to agree on something like that? Actually, it's fairly simple. You ask them.