theming

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.

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.

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.

I created a Page Template for the Tiga theme I'm currently using. I'm calling it Mapper, because it's the hook that will load my Google map page once I upgrade to the new API. Basically, I copied Tiga's page.php file and added an include to the PHP file that will actually load the map.

Time sure flies when you're buried under an avalanche of work. I'm trying out a new theme for June, called Tiga. I think it's pretty good looking, for a theme, and I like how it organizes the different blog sections.

I finally got website hits from below the equator (hello, Kiwis and Aussies!) and also got hits from Korea and Norway. Greetings all. I guess this means I need to update the map page. I think it's really cool that I can use Google Maps to get a vague idea of where my visitors come from, even the indexing spiders. (I realize that hostip.info, which does my IP to geographic coordinate conversions is not the most accurate in the world, but I have to assume that it can at least get countries correctly.