drupal

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.

I think I should be blogging. Yeah. Time hasn't waited for me; it's been almost a year and a half. But first, I must apologize to Tom Scholz.

Big changes in my life. Over the next few days, I hope to update on these changes. To wit: I'm now living in Alpharetta, GA. I accomplished this in two moves. The first move was from Boston to temporary lodgings in Roswell, GA. Now I'm settled into a nice little home office in a condo (with a garage!) in Alpharetta. Still trying to adjust to living down here; the weather, ironically, has helped, as it has been colder than normal, which for me equates to just plain normal.

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.

Cutting to the chase: It was easy, if tedious.

Onward.

Where have I been for the past few months? I wrote 50,000 words of a novel in November while maintaining a full work schedule. Most of the novel was written after midnight; just thinking about the process of writing it makes me feel tired. Work's kept me pretty busy with lots of Drupal work. I've been flexing my artistic muscles a bit, doing some logo work for myself and for friends. I've done some troubleshooting on websites; last week I helped fix the theme over at the Panthers BBS my friend Eric runs. And three weeks ago, I upgraded Hackwater.com to Drupal 6.

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.

Oh, Intarwebs! I didn't mean to abandon you! I owe you Puerto Rico pictures! And Thanksgiving pictures! See, I've just been playing with your cousin over at rpg.hackwater.com, doing some theme hacking. In fact, this week has been my best programming week so far, solving problems and applying fixes left and right. After finishing a medium project at work that had me doing some cool Drupal hacking, I turned to various small issues in my queue that had been getting no play thanks to my focus on the larger project.

So after a month of playing around in the Drupal back end, theming and adding modules, I'm back to creating content. I've decided to get rid of the hierarchy that still need to get a nice camera to aid in the food adventures feature, and who knows? It may lead to some other
picture posts. I've been looking at the Lightbox module, for example... Imagine a Lightbox block with a randomly generated thumbnail. It could be pretty slick.