While the post stayed up (and the contest stayed open) a bit longer than I'd intended due to busy schedules, but today I took some time and read through the awesome comments.

There are some really cool people out there doing interesting things with Drupal, and planning really exciting projects. Helping foster families connect with kids? Building collaborative tools for green communities? Connecting amateur robot builders? All very, very awesome. Figuring out who to send off a copy of Using Drupal to was tough.

At the end of the day, one project really jumped out. Webmaster Ari Davidow has been maintaining KlezmerShack since the 1990s. It's a site about Klezmer, a traditionally Jewish form of music that spent a couple of centuries under the radar, and experienced a revival in the 1970s. (I'm no expert, but I think his dedication shows: the site was second only to Wikipedia when I googled for "Klezmer".) According to Ari:

[The site] contains reviews, band listings, an international calendar, a blog, articles, vendor listings--it is one of the most immaculately messy collections of hand-crafted obsolete HTML (with some help along the way from Movable Type, bless it).

it's time to move the site into the 21st century. Bands should be able to maintain their own listings. People should be able to rate bands. People should be able to get the word out without my mediation.

That's one of the reasons the site excites me -- this is the kind of stuff that Drupal really excels at, and the kind of stuff we wanted to help people accomplish by writing Using Drupal. I think the site is a really good match for it, and I hope Ari digs his new copy of the book.

My only regret is that I can't drag an entire armload of the books out to the post office and send them off to everyone who posted about their "dream site." If any of you have updates or news about how the sites are progressing, I'd love to hear about them as they grow!

Do you have a dream web site you'd like to build? I want you to build it, too. Post your comments here, and I'll pick one to receive a free copy of O'Reilly's Using Drupal.

For me, one of the milestones of 2008 was the publication of Using Drupal, a book I co-authored along with the rest of the Lullabot gang. it was no easy task, but I'm really happy with the results. It's the first Drupal book that gives readers start-to-finish recipes for building a variety of real web sites, combining the software's core features with the smorgasbord of third-party extensions.

One of the reasons we wanted to write it was the inherent difficulty in overcoming the "Wait, how do I make sense of this?" barrier with Drupal. It's powerful software, but building complex sites with it means learning about a lot of different pieces. We -- I! -- want to see as many people as possible build the web sites they're daydreaming about, and I think Using Drupal can help some of them do that.

So, here's my question to you. What kind of web site would you like to build with Drupal? A community hub for your town? A wiki-like encyclopedia of comedy/mystery novels? An online magazine about vegetables? Post your dream site idea here, and I'll pick one of the commenters to receive a free copy of Using Drupal.

What's the catch? You have to post your idea -- and if your idea is chosen, you have to tell me how it goes when you give it a shot. I want to see cool things happen!