I am sitting in the webmaster issue cue on Drupal.org waiting to see if I will be aggregated on Planet Drupal. I was going to write something once I was accepted, then noticed that I was getting click throughs from the issue que anyway, so decided to start here instead. This is a weird post for those of you who read this blog already. I have created a feed that only includes postings from this blog that are in the category 'drupal', and I am asking to be included in the Planet Drupal aggregator, which is currently 339 bloggers strong. I have had a Drupal login since 2002, at best guess. My current account is from about 3 years ago because for some reason I signed up again. At a Lullabot workshop in L.A., Webchick merged my two accounts, using the newest one since it had the most activity(not that I have a lot).

I have been reading about Drupal for 7 years and installed it for the first time about 4 years ago. My background is in design in general and consider myself an artist rather than a coder. In fact, I am nothing of a coder, except being able to look at PHP and know whats being called in a Drupal system. What really gets me excited about Drupal is that it allows for broad participation in how it develops, and even if you aren't developing for core, you can still have great power over the system through contributed modules. It is very exciting to watch Drupal develop over the years into a real positive force on the internet. It is the most exciting to get together at meet-ups or local user groups and camps to share and learn about Drupal as peers. It is the community of Drupal that makes the magic. Otherwise it would just be like any other content management system.
My contribution to the project is largely in advocacy. Hardly a professional conversation goes by without my mention of Drupal. I have been a part of only a handful of actual drupal websites, most notably this one, which is my training ground in many ways. But I really pride myself on being able to talk to people who don't know anything about CMSs and internet hoopla, and the people who write the code and build the sites. I guess you can say I am a little bit of both of these people myself, so therefore I understand how each other are seeing things.
I am inspired by Drupal as a community and as a project, and I want to share my thoughts back to the community through Planet, since I can't really contribute code. I am also looking to get guidance from the community to help steer some of my advocacy efforts, since some of my most empassioned efforts have not gone so well(they have cycled through three systems since!). I feel like if I keep making the same mistakes in speaking about Drupal, than I end up in effect hurting the community.
My personal project, Plumbob, involves advocacy for and eventually rebuilding houses with passive solar design. I believe this way of building will be fully realized by aligning local communities differently and creating neighborhoods that live, work, and learn together as we rebuild our infrastructure with passive solar as one of it's foundational principles. An open source communications/information infrastructure is another foundation, and you guessed it, I believe Drupal has an important role.
So thanks for reading this, and I hope you like what you read and want to read more in your news feed in the future!