Drupal

Most/all of the sessions at the recent Drupal convention are online at http://drupal.org/node/385952

The only way I have found to fix weird characters (eg ampersands "&") appearing in the aggregator feed is to hack Drupal as follows (refer this):

if ( !function_exists('htmlspecialchars_decode') )
{
function htmlspecialchars_decode($text)
{
return strtr($text, array_flip(get_html_translation_table(HTML_SPECIALCHARS)));
}
}

// Resolve the item's title. If no title is found, we use up to 40
// characters of the description ending at a word boundary but not
// splitting potential entities.
if (!empty($item['TITLE'])) {
$title = htmlspecialchars_decode($item['TITLE'], ENT_QUOTES);
}

I don't have any experience submitting patches, when I know how to do it I will submit it as a patch.

When you are writing content for a web blog or website, you must break up the text.  When readers are confronted by many paragraphs of text, they subconsciously are "scared off" and will back away from reading it all.

You can use images, bullet points and white space to defeat the "big blob of text" look. It will make a difference.

JQuery is a powerful Javascript shorthand. The best video I have seen for it is from the Drupal Dojo and can be viewed here: http://blip.tv/file/193619. The video does seem to cut out 1/3 of the way through, but it is still useful.

If you include a small amount of code in each web page you want to track, Google will track the hits and users that come to your web pages. It is quite easy to set up. The best and easiest way is to use the drupal module.