Now that Twitter 1.1 and Feeds are buddies, time to move to other data sources. Next up: Facebook. Using trusty Feeds and friends, I was able to ingest my own Facebook home feed. Here's how to replicate this:

For the impatient, attached is a feature that should get you set up quickly.

Update: This post now contains a feature that you can import in D7 to see the Twitter feed in action.

The new Twitter 1.1 API kicked in recently, which meant a new cycle of maintenance for anyone consuming their data programmatically. My own Feeds + Views demo site streams #drupal, using Feeds and complementary modules.

I created a bare-bones content filter to add musical notation to Drupal content, using the VexFlow / VexTab music engraving library. Here's a little sample, also showing my fork of the original library to handle basic Arabic musical notation (quarter tones and special scales):

Feel free to fiddle with the music snippet above.

Last week, I described a technique to query and display nodes in all available translations. This worked well enough, but a performance-minded reader pointed out that the query generated by Views (that includes N self-joins for N enabled languages) would not scale to a large number of nodes.

My usual approach when implementing new ideas is to ensure the logic works first, and only handle optimization when needed. It's a strategy that has worked well for me in the past.

Here's a little puzzle: display a table of nodes, each row containing the same content in all available translations.

How would you do it? Stumped, I asked that question on Stack Overflow a few years ago, but never received a satisfactory reply.

Then, a couple of days ago, someone asked me if I had solved it. I hadn't thought of that puzzle since then, but I would have felt bad answering no. So, with 3 years of i18n work under my belt, I decided to give it another go.

I've needed to build a regular expression filter for a view I'm working on, so I'm sharing the code here because it might be helpful to other people as well. My specific case is that I am building a Blocks administration VBO.

Jeff Geerling graciously transferred his "Is there a module for that?" tongue-in-cheek domain name to me. Thanks Jeff!

So, IS there a module for that? Probably. But if not, the Drupal community is large and will help you. You can even ask me to do it for you :-)

I asked this question on StackExchange:

Is there a way to use Drupal Queue API to sequence the execution of tasks, like in a pipeline?

My use case is pretty simple: I have a number of tasks executing in the background, doesn't matter their order because they are self-contained. However, I'd like a single task (of a different type) to execute after all the others are done.

How would this be done?

Last week, I started writing about my tribulations managing the configuration of a multisite, multilingual application using Features, i18n, and friends. I listed the site components that needed to be managed, and described the basics of saving string translations in a feature.

This week, I'll describe a particularly challenging component I had to deal with: inoffensive-sounding menu items. Should be easy, right?

I received today a gift from my Amazon wish list - namely, the Cat Stevens - Footsteps in the Dark album. Since I couldn't tell from the packaging who purchased this item, I am posting here to tell you:

Thank you! Much appreciated :-)