What with the holidays, things have been a bit quiet on the DIAtribe lately, but DemocracyInAction has so many fish to fry, such a plentitude of balls in the air, so awfully many buns in the oven, there'll be chatter aplenty right quick.

We're cranking on some new tools and some new documentation and help sections that'll be exciting to share and get feedback about. And with the end of the year, we'll be diving back into our data for updated intelligence on last year's popular series of the best Hour/Day/Month to ask for donations, along with whatever else we find.

So things ought to get friskier hereabouts as well.

Since we're on about APIs lately, the Development Seed blog's description [warning: geeky] of using our API to internationalize StandAgainstPoverty.org by melding Salsa and Drupal is a timely comment.

Beautiful.

Everyone wonders how we maintain a commanding presence among Technorati's top half-million blogs. When you've got it, you've got it.

But you can at least feel like you're dope like us by cribbing from our blog toolkit.

I. Drupal, of course, is the content management system for the entire DIA site, and our blogging tool as well -- yes, even though we have a blog tool of our own. Drupal is the base; everything else is superstructure.

Democracy In Action is building a Salsa connectivity module for the open source CMS Drupal, but that's only part of the picture. We are actively collaborating with our user and developer communities to provide open APIs and libraries so that external systems can leverage and integrate the open structure of Salsa and DIA's high-performance CRM services. This collaboration has already yielded a number of successes -- DIA tools have been integrated with Drupal and Plone, and a comprehensive set of PHP libraries is close to release -- but we want to work with our community to provide tools for all of the languages that they use. If you are a developer hoping to integrate Salsa and DIA services with Ruby on Rails, Python, Perl, .NET, or anything else, let's work together to keep growing the progressive community's best set of online engagement tools!

In rolling out our spiffy new Drupal* site, one of the questions we confronted was whether to go with the spiffy Drupal blog application, or stick with the original we'd set up.

This sort of thing becomes an interesting question for a software provider ... because the original exploited DIA's own blogging tool. People with software to sell are quite rightly expected to use said software in appropriate contexts in their own operations.

Now, in over a year of very diligently eating our own dog food, I've come to rather intimate terms with its texture, flavor, and aftertaste.