A few days ago I was hanging out at a the Denver Boulder Users Group meetup. One of the topics of conversation was Drupal Gardens and the potential shift Gardens could have on Drupal's place in the instant blog-o-sphere. Much like Wordpress allows you to set up a blog almost instantly, so too does Drupal Gardens. The home page claims to allow setup of a site in 15 minutes, and it makes good on that claim.

Currently you need a beta-code to make use of the system. There is a signup on the the Gardens' site to get you in the queue to get in on the fun.

First off, I have to say that Gardens is extremely slick. The interface is exceedingly easy to use. Setting up a site is as easy as entering the name for your subdomain on Gardens and clicking a button.

A few days ago I wrote about the Drupal 7 redesign of the Examiner.com website and that there were recruitment effort ongoing for front and back end developers. Thanks everybody that took the time to send in a resume.

The team is also working on a second important project in Drupal 6 that will be used to foster Examiner community and communication. It is hard to call a site that targets 10's of thousands of users as an Intranet, but that is kind of the way it is being built.

The last project that I worked on at pingVision, prior to becoming a free-agent, launched in the last couple of days. I'm thrilled that California Watch has joined the ranks of the Drupal community. The Center For Investigative Reporting is a fine non-profit that has been doing good work since 1977 engaging in in depth investigations on issues that concern Callifornians.

I had the pleasure of Web Producing the development of the California Watch site and also engaged in some light configuration of various modules including quicksketch's excellent Insert module. I hope I get the chance to write about that module in the near future. Both the teams on the pingVision side and on the California Watch side were a real pleasure to work with and for. It was a fun "swansong" project for me.

At the last Do it with Drupal, Michael Meyers shared some of the details of the Examiner.com plan to migrate from the current coldfusion footing to Drupal. The project is being developed in Drupal 7 with the intent of helping move needed contributed modules and core to a final release rapidly in 2010. Clarity Digital Group owns and operates Examiner.com (the source for local news and information in North America). Clarity Digital Group is migrating Examiner.com, a top 60 website to Drupal 7 using NowPublic.com as a model. This will create one of the largest Drupal sites. The team is still being actively grown and includes:

• chx
• nagba
• Morbus Iff
• kkaefer
• Pasqualle
• litwol

Most Drupal shops are highly distributed or scattered. This fragmentation poses interesting challenges. In my most recent job I was lucky to work in an environment that was almost entirely not distributed. This made collaborations with developers, themers, and project managers much simpler.

My life recently transitioned as I moved from being an employee to being a freelancer. In addition, I helped found a company called Vintage Digital (I'll write more about that in the future.) We're engaged in custom software development largely focused on Web applications. Mostly we're working with open source systems like Drupal. We'll be launching a little interim Website in the next few days, nothing special - just a place for us to blog until we have built a proper presence.

We've been taking small jobs to work through our process working as a distributed team. We're all in Metro Denver, but without an office we've been working in each of our home offices. There are a few lessons we've learned so far.