A little over a year ago I blogged about moving to using a Drupal Planet tag to determine which posts about Drupal get posted on Drupal Planet. This is certainly better than having every Drupal related post appear in Drupal Planet. Why not send everything? Well there are a number of smaller posts that don't need to land in the hundreds of RSS inboxes around the globe but should still appear on my site.
However, the separate tag method has its drawbacks. For one thing it means my site now has, by default, two pages of Drupal posts. One contains all the posts and the other just those that went to Drupal Planet. Visitors to my site, however, don't need to see this distinction. In fact they are put off by it because it's a nonsensical differentiation for these visitors. Even somebody following a link from Drupal Planet is left with just a few posts and might not find some other smaller posts that could be helpful.
Given that the ability to post content and selectively send it to Drupal Planet is important and that I'd like to do so without hindering the usability of my website what's the solution. In true Drupal fashion there's a module for that. In this case it's the Flag module to be precise. Here's a quick look at this simple setup.
After installing and enabling the Flag module the next step is to create a Drupal Planet flag. Adding a flag starts with visiting Administration >> Site Building >> Flags >> Add (/admin/build/flags/add) on the site.
A couple of settings are key to making the Drupal Planet flag work well. First it should be a "Global" flag meaning that each node is either flagged or not and individual users can't set the flag differently on each node.
Just how much kids pick up from the world around them is amazing. Each day some new words are added to their vocabularies, used correctly and leave parents asking just when did this happen. By way of explanation a few recent examples from our 2-year-old.
Over the course of talking to computer users each day I'm consistently amazed at the varied ways we use the same tools. More often than not an exchange ensues where we share our favorite tools and tricks. Here I'll start an occasional series of posts on the tools I use that make the dozen hours a day I'm in front of a screen pass quicker. First up on that list is 
