The Google Adsense module for Drupal has been updated by 2bits. Since we use it here at CMS Report, we thought we would also talk about it here. Some of the new features include:

The local newspaper for Sioux Falls, SD contains an article about an online service called Feed Rinse. The service "can rinse your feeds by keyword, author, tag, etc, or filter profanity and more." According to the article, the service is making national headlines on their Feed Rinse product. I've never used the service, so I can't really give it thumbs-up or thumbs-down. Some excerpts from the Argus Leader:

Those looking for SMF, a forum-based CMS, could not reach SMF's host server the past few days at Simple Machines. SMF's server was down for an extended period of time from July 22nd and 23rd. Thantos, one of the SMF developers, posted a message that only gave vague reasons for why there was a server outage:

Markus sent us a comment that he has a new version of the Akismet module for Drupal 4.7. Since I have yet to put up a "latest comments" block on my site, I've reposted his comments here:

Most of us in IT are aware of the recent data thefts of personal information within the United States government. Over the past couple weeks the VA admitted that files containing personal data for more than 50,000 active duty and more than 26 million veterans was stolen. In related news it was also reported that the "Energy Department disclosed to Congress on Friday that it suffered a security breach from a hacker in September that compromised 1,500 personnel records".

For our Wordpress 2.0 sites, we have been using the Akismet plugin to fight off the spam thrown at us through our comment pages. We've been impressed with the results with over 550 spam filled comments blocked since early 2006 and only two spam comments slipping by Akismet's filters. With these impressive results, we have been hoping to see an Akismet Drupal module also developed. Now both Drupal and phpBB users have access to an Akismet module for their CMS.

I have to admit something. Before today I had never visited Nick Lewis' blog. However, I'm extremely impressed with the how-to content on his site. I'm sort of known to be theme development "challenged", so I look forward to articles such as the one I'm reading now.

The following is an excerpt of his latest article with regards to theming in Drupal using the PHPtemplate engine:

Taking the term of Web 2.0 further, CNET has an article about Family 2.0 sites:

I too have been seeing an increase in blog spam at some of our sister sites, especially those using Wordpress. Akismet, an anti-trackback spam group, is confirming the case in their own stats too. It looks to me that the spammers have declared a new war on many fronts. My theory, there are a lot of lonely servers on the University campus in the United States that are just sitting there now that the students have gone home for the summer.

This could be interesting for those that work with MS Word...the 2007 version will have blogging capability. It will be intesting to see how well Word will be compatible with third-party CMS applications.