Yesterday Development Seed was kind enough to give Chris & me a rundown of how the Drupal community is organizing its participation in the Google Summer of Code program. Along the way I got a chance to chat with Alex and Ian about FeedAPI and FeedAPI Mapper, two excellent projects that DevSeed ushered into being through last year's Summer of Code and now continues to maintain and extend.

I've just begun using FeedAPI for the first time in a project destined for production, and so far I'm very pleased with it. It offers a more fully-considered alternative to aggregator.module — and with the addition of the optional Mapper module it becomes simple to turn aggregated RSS items into Drupal nodes, with the items' attributes stuck in whatever CCK fields you care to create. It's really slick.

In my case I'm using it as an integration point for Blip.tv. Our client needs video capabilities, but I saw no reason why we should mess around with transcoding, customizing an FLV player and all the rest of the headaches that come with web video (been there, done that). Blip does all of that stuff very well, and has social features baked in, too. I'd rather just have the client upload their videos there, then count on FeedAPI to turn them into nodes that can be exposed through Views. Any configuration that we can't get from the Blip RSS feed can be manually handled by an editor — Workflow-NG fires off a "please come edit and publish me!" email whenever a new video node is created.

Ah, springtime in Washington, DC. Where unpredictable weather comes to sow its wild oats.

It's been a distressingly long time since the days my mother was around to remind me to 'bring a jacket', but it got me thinking: The judgments that I make on whether to don a blazer in the morning are based on fairly quantifiable data. I know at what temperature I like to wear a jacket, I know what the temperature for the day is supposed to be, and I know not to wear suede if there's a chance of thunderstorms.

It seems likely that in the age of ultra-accessible information (of which weather seems most ubiquitous), I could build something to do this decision-making for me. Inspired by the geekery at this year's SxSW, I started envisioning a service that would send my phone a text message each day—advising me on whether I should wear jeans or shorts, a jacket or a t-shirt, or bring an umbrella.

WeatherMama had been conceived, and its 2 month gestation is finally almost over.

Read on past the jump for all the geeky details.