development

Yesterday, I blacked out my site in protest of SOPA and PIPA. I figured the easiest way to do so was to create a quick custom theme just for the occasion, a minimalist theme inspired by BoingBoing's own SOPA Strike page. Further, I would switch my site to its offline mode, which meant I had to have a working maintenance page template.

This isn't necessarily big news, or even new news, but it's important to me: last June I became a Drupal module maintainer. I had previously submitted a couple of patches to one of the modules we use at work, and after some time without any comment, I decided to ask the module maintainer about it. He immediately offered me the position, since he hadn't been able to give the module the attention it wanted, and, with trepidation, I accepted.

Wow, time flies when you're having fun. I hadn't intended to spend the day playing with Drupal, but the incontrovertible fact is that it's almost ten already, so I have. The idea was to enable the Pirate module (Arrrr!!!) and then take care of a couple of security advisories that affected my installation, requiring that I update Drupal core and the Date module. This ultimately ended up leading to my creating a sub-theme for the Marinelli theme.

Hey, you know what's fun? WYSIWYG that isn't.

Neil was trying to increase the speed of Drupal on one of the New England Region SCCA sites, and he told me about the early success he's had using eAccelerator for caching. So I decided to try it out.

I'm looking forward to the first week in March, because I'm going to Drupalcon with my co-workers. I've been using Drupal for almost a year now, so I'm still a relative newbie, but I feel I've learned a lot, and I've gotten to really enjoy hacking on modules and theming using templates. I'm very excited over what I might learn in a couple of weeks.

I've been heavily using Drupal for a couple months now, and I've finally absorbed enough to start troubleshooting the various migration issues that occurred when I went from Wordpress to what I'm playfully referring to as The Bazooka (because there's just so much you can do, and so many modules if you can't do something; it's amazing, and as I originally assessed years ago when I wanted a blogging platform, almost too powerful. Almost).

Every time I drive by this sign, I giggle a little bit. I don't know why...

In other news,

After a long, hard day at work hacking on Drupal, I like to come home, relax... and hack on Drupal. I've created a view for my existing articles so as to create a dynamic landing page for same. I'm pleased with the results so far.

I finally took some time to update to WP 2.2.2. Naturally, this update broke Democracy again, so I have to go through my mini-hack that lets it work with WP-Cache and figure out what changed from the original 2.0 to 2.2.2. I also have to go through my plugins to figure out what else I broke. I'm starting to feel nostalgic for Drupal's file structure. More on that later.