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While putting together the social icons for our new custom site font (to keep everything resolution independent – try looking at this site on a retina display!), the official Google plus icon just felt out of place. So I worked up a new version, still I think very much on brand, but referencing G+ circles, and a bit closer to our own site style.

I have put together an icon set so you can use it in your own project should you wish!

@graemeblackwood

Today I am running a couple of Acquia webinars on producing beautiful Drupal ecommerce websites. I'll be looking at our journey with The Making Spot, from brief to completion, sharing how we came up against a number of Drupal design problems and general user experience design issues that needed working through.

Somewhere in the North Indian Ocean we've spotted tropical Drupal heaven, shaped from pure white sand and caressed by the blue waves. At 30,000ft with phones in Airplane Mode it was pretty hard to get an exact fix unfortunately.

Anyone have more precise directions or know what it's like on the ground?

One of the most important and complex aspects of a DrupalCon is the schedule. An enormous amount of work goes into getting it right from the huge number of session submissions, which have to be reviewed and selected by the track chairs and their teams, to the people whose job it is to carefully consider and decide time slots for all of them.

We went to Playful 2011 recently. It’s a conference where people talk about — you guessed it — the value of being playful in, mostly digital, experiences. This talk by Chris O'Shea is fairly representative of this year’s emergent theme.

At Deeson we’ve been thinking about play a bit too.

Drupal’s core search technology is a good fit for small to medium sites, or where the search requirements aren’t particularly sophisticated. The benefits of core search are zero setup and no additional server requirements; the node content is indexed in the database.

However, for busy sites, sites with a lot of content, or if features such as faceting are required, then Drupal can be combined with Apache Solr, a specialised search platform.

Back in October, I carried out some in-depth research into using video in email. Already knowing that Flash video isn't possible, I was interested to see how well HTML5 video works, and the results were very exciting, although not a miracle solution.

The team over at .net magazine asked me to write an opinion piece on the subject, which has now been published in this month's .net (issue 212). Thank you for recognising it as a worthy subject!