Inspired by Darren's boring site note—which I usually find interesting—about his trying out a new WordPress plugin to his blog, and a brief email conversation, I developed the What Would Seth Godin Do? module. It uses code from the WP plugin written by Richard K. Miller, adding a block to Drupal 5 sites for the first few visits people make to the website, with a friendly message to that visitor. The administrator chooses how many visits constitutes a few, and what the message might be, such as 'how to get started' or, currently, a link to the site's main RSS feed. The block disappears after the number of visits set by the administrator.
The way it works is that it adds content to the enabled block if the visits are under the specified number, tracked through a special cookie, and if that number is reached, the block's content goes blank. (Drupal blocks do not display if there is no content to display.) The name of the module is inspired by a blog post Seth Godin wrote last year arguing that new users to a site should get a little more help than frequent visitors.
It took about a half day to write, test, create the project on Drupal.org, and re-learn the correct steps for checking it into CVS, and fix silly bugs like leaving in the dummy text during the initial checkin. Oops! I still have the module flagged as 'developmental', since I haven't done enough testing, and would like to make sure it works across browsers. It's a pretty simple module, so I would love to hear feedback about it before tagging it for a 1.0 release.