Open Source

Behind every Drupal website are the modules and configuration settings that define the website’s content model, authoring experience, presentation, and integrations. This post will explain and explore how the Schema.org Blueprints module handles configuration compared to a Drupal distribution and a Drupal recipe.

A Drupal distribution provides a predefined list of modules and configuration that define an entire website solution. For example, distributions offer a starting point for building a commerce, government, or intranet website. The Drupal community has acknowledged that distributions can be too opinionated and can become challenging to maintain.

There is now a Recipes initiative whose goal is to provide a modernized approach for distributions. A ‘recipe’ is a composable piece of site functionality and features bundled together. For example, a ‘recipe’ would provide an event registration system with an Event content type, a calendar view, and an online registration webform.

After installing a distribution or recipe, developers and site builders must alter and reconfigure what is installed to meet their organization’s unique requirements. The ‘Recipe’ initiative and the Schema.org Blueprint module share the goal of providing a better starting point for building out a website’s features and functionality. The big difference between these two solutions is the Schema.org Blueprints module does not ship with a predefined content model and configuration. Instead,…Read More

Working with open source for a long time is tremendous work, often unappreciated. Join me with a moment of sharing a word of appreciation to one of OSS hero you know!

And yet, 25 years on, Google Search faces a series of interlocking AI-related challenges that together represent an existential threat to Google itself.  The first is a problem of Google’s own making: the SEO monster has eaten the user experience of search from the inside out. Searching the web for information is an increasingly user-hostile experience, an arbitrage racket run by search-optimized content sharks running an ever-changing series of monetization hustles with no regard for anything but collecting the most pennies at the biggest scale. AI-powered content farms focused on high-value search terms like heat-seeking missiles are already here; Google is only now catching up, and its response to them will change how it sends traffic around the web in momentous ways. That leads to the second problem, which is that chat-based search tools like Microsoft’s Bing and Google’s own Bard represent something that feels like the future of search, without any of the corresponding business models or revenue that Google has built up over the past 25 years. If Google Search continues to degrade in quality, people will switch to better options — a switch that venture-backed startups and well-funded competitors like Microsoft are more than happy to subsidize in search of growth, but which directly impacts Google’s bottom line. At the same time, Google’s paying tens of billions annually to device makers like Apple and Samsung to be the default search engine on phones. Those deals are up for renewal, and there will be no pity for Google’s margins in these negotiations. Search on the web is in a terrible state right now. Searching for anything on Google is a horrible experience, with results riddled with ads and an endless stream of SEO’d garbage content of low to no quality. Alternatives, such as DuckDuckGo, aren’t much better, and tend to promote garbage anti-science and fascist nonsense if you’re not careful enough. At this point I just don’t know what to use to find stuff on the web, and tend to just go straight to sites that I think have the best odds of containing a relevant result (e.g. going straight to Reddit when dealing with some obscure bug or software issue). I know there are even smaller competitors, but I don’t hold high hopes they can offer the same breadth as Google once did, or even DuckDuckGo sometimes does now. It’s not looking pretty out there.