Drupal founder Dries Buytaert is out with his yearly Drupal download stats. Overall, Drupal has been downloaded 1.4 million times with Drupal 5 leading the pack. New version 6.0 is picking up the pace with more and more downloads each month.

These numbers only include downloaded from Drupal’s Web site. Other download options aren’t included in the chart below.

Videojug has put together a simple video about what CSS is and how to use it. It’s just the really simple basics but still worth a view. And if you have questions, stop by our CSS help forum.

A few weeks ago, I read about Woopra over on CN. Intrigued, I decided to give it a try. I registered two accounts (one for work and one for personal use) and signed up all of the sites I manage.

A week or two later, I received notification that my sites had all been approved, and that I could start using Woopra to track them. I got all of the tracking code installed, downloaded the Woopra client to my desktop and started watching the action on my sites.

For a week or so, I was really impressed. The interface is extremely attractive, and has lots of pretty colors. The data it collects seems to be most of what I want from an analytics service.

With VirtualBox running very effectively on all of my computers, I decided to start looking into some alternative linux distributions. I am, admittedly, a SuSE fanboy. It was the first Linux distro I ever tried, and, excepting my limited usage of hosted servers running on other platforms, and attempting to use Sun Solaris 10, it’s the only *nix distro I’ve ever tried. I was so impressed with it from the start that I never looked back.

However, now that I’ve begun to look into other distros, I’ve found something that’s severely lacking, so far. It seems that SuSE is one of only a very small few that release full packages anymore. Everyone else seems to have one or two choices for installation media – a live disc or a minimal installation CD.

Intense Debate is one of the new crop of comment replacement services. Basically if you have a blog, you can replace the default commenting system with the one that Intense Debate provides. While I am not a great fan of these replacement services yet, they are gaining in popularity because they offer additional services and functions that the standard blog commenting systems don’t.

I was able to grab some time with Intense Debate developer Austin Hallock and our interview transcript is below.

Allen: Can we start with a brief bio about yourself?
Austin: Sure, I’m 16-years-old, live and goto high school in Arvada, Colorado. I started in the ‘tech world’ when I was 12 building lame Geocities sites, and slowly progressed towards forums (phpBB), and then onto custom built sites that involved a lot more programming. I developed and ran two websites in 2004-2006 that I sold for $10,000 (quite a bit of money to a 15 year old), then moved on towards building another site that never really took off, before moving to Intense Debate.

Allen: How do you describe Intense Debate?
Austin: I think of Intense Debate as simply a better way to do comments. With most blog platforms, comments aren’t really focused on as much as they should be — comments can be what drives traffic to your blog, as well as what gets people to return and engage in a conversation. Intense Debate takes the standard comment system and enhances it to have threading, reputation, and a central storage house for all your comments (as well as a lot more, you can check out the new features we roll out here: http://intensedebate.com/blog/).

Allen: What’s your role with the company?
Austin: I’m one of 2 developers here, and when it comes to programming, I’ve mainly been working on the new features we release every week.

Allen: What’s the technology behind Intense Debate?
Austin: We use PHP5 and mySQL… pretty much the standard LAMP stack. To display our comments on blogs we use a combo of javascript, PHP and a bit of modified AJAX (to work across domains).

I visited the main Web site for the Novell companies the other day, and was fairly impressed by the design of the home page. I was a bit disappointed by the fact that the menu is hidden until you mouseover (poor choice for usability), but I was impressed by the overall design.

The site makes very good use of Flash, and seems to have optimized the Flash items extremely well. You won’t hear me toot the horn for Flash usage very often, but Novell’s Web site impressed me very much. When you have a chance, you should pop on over and check it out.

I was especially impressed by the home page of the main site and by the SuSE Linux pages. I am honestly shocked at just how quickly the pages load, even with the large Flash objects on each one.

I am probably quite late to the party, but I discovered Sun’s VirtualBox a few weeks ago, and have been extremely impressed. In the short time I’ve had VirtualBox installed, I have already installed two operating systems that I was never able to successfully install on Microsoft’s VirtualMachine.

With my Vista Home install as the host system, I am now running Windows 98SE and SuSE (11.0) as guests on my computer. I will most likely install Windows XP Professional fairly soon, as well; though I will have to see what I can do with the licensing, since I also want to run some fairly modern version of Windows as a guest on my SuSE machine.

With Microsoft VM, I was never able to get Win98 installed properly (it always froze when I was trying to install), nor was I able to get any distros of Linux running through VM.

Last week Jefferson Graham from the USA Today newspaper ran a column about search engine optimization. He spoke with master of all things SEO at Google, Matt Cutts. They also filmed a video together and I’ve embedded it below. It’s worth a watch if you are trying to optimize your Web site or blog. It’s just the basics but it’s something many of my clients don’t think about. Especially the part about making sure that you use the words you want to rank for on your page.

Although this is on the outer fringes of technology-related information, I just wanted to post a happy story about an experience with customer service.

Those of you that have followed this blog for a while should know that I have had some very poor experiences with customer service in the last few years. I was honestly beginning to think that it was perfectly normal for companies to completely ignore their customers any time a support issue came up.

Victor Tsaran is an accessibility engineer at Yahoo! who focuses on developing best practices for the creation of websites that work well with screen readers. The video below is about a year old but still provides great insight into the acessibility side of the Web. It’s something we don’t speak about enough but is so very important.