Blog by Category

Aug 8 2010

Promoting Drupal

Drupal is a Open Source Content Management System that I started working with a couple of years ago. I originally started looking at it because I wanted to update my Church website off of a static Dreamweaver based website to something that would be easier for multiple people to update. I have since used it to develop this simple blog website as well as a couple of smaller websites for local groups. My sites are still pretty simple and I am constantly learning better ways to accomplish things using Drupal and it keeps getting better with new revisions.

The learning curve for Drupal is quite steep because it is very powerful but once you get started there are so many things that you can do with it. Drupal.org has a large community that does a pretty good job of answering questions for those that have taken the time to do some basic research.

One of the drawbacks with Drupal is it has not had as much exposure in the past as other CMS's like Wordpress. Drupal is working on that but needs more support. Recently Drupal was setting up a booth at OSCON to get more exposure. They asked for donations from the Drupal Community to help cover the costs of the booth. They had a target of $2500 and came up a bit short so they may not have been as successful as they would have liked. I find it a bit amazing that with all the people that are using and developing Drupal that they could not raise such a small amount. If the Drupal community wants to see Drupal succeed we need to do a better job of supporting efforts like this to get Drupal more exposure.

Drupal is a great CMS but it needs more than just the developers to help it grow. For those of us that are not developers or programmers that use Drupal we need to do our part to help it grow in other ways. That means that more of us have to be willing to donate when we can to help get the word out.

May 23 2010

Mac Stuff

I have wanted to take a look at the iPad since it came out and finally got a chance to take a look at one today. It is an interesting device but I have decided that I will not be getting one. I can't justify having multiple devices with 3G accounts so I will have to stick with my iPhone for now. I am hoping that they will announce new iPhones and tethering this summer and that will make it easier to use my Macbook Pro when I am away from home. There are a couple of places I go with regularity that do not have any WIFI access and that limits what I can do when I am there. I still use my Macbook at my Desk more than away but it is nice to have the ability to take it with me as I go other places.

Apr 25 2010

Geeks and God is Back

Technology

I had mentioned a couple days ago that I was very surprised to find that the Geeks and God Podcast is back on the air. The format is a little different than the past but it is still a great podcast worth listening to. The original hosts are no longer doing the podcast but they have very capable replacements. The hosts are now a group of about 5 or 6 guys that have been long time moderators on the Geeks and God Forums. They bring differing expertise to the table and so far the two episodes that I have listened to have been pretty good. They are now doing the podcast monthly instead of weekly but the format seems to be working well. it's not the weekly fix that I had been used to in the past but I am looking forward to the next podcast in May.

Apr 21 2010

Training and Stuff

Training for the 3-Day

Well the weather here in Wisconsin has been pretty hit and miss. We had some very awesome weather and things have kind of gotten cool again so I have not been walking as much. I did get a couple of good 10 Mile walks in the first two weekend of April but have been a little lax since then. I hope to get back to some longer walking this weekend but the weather may not cooperate and it may rain all weekend. We'll have to see what the temp is like. If it's not too cold I will do some training in the rain.

Podcasts

I don't listen to that many Podcasts with any regularity. I used to listen to Geeks and God every week and really looked forward to it but they stopped producing weekly Podcasts last fall as they are working on a new project. I was really surprised to see that there were a couple new podcasts when I checked out the site the other day. The original guys had a special podcast to publicize efforts to get more people so sponsor children through Compassion. They also were announcing that the Geeks and God Podcasts would be back on a Monthly basis with new hosts. The new hosts have all been active members of the Geeks and God Forums and I am really looking forward to checking out their podcasts as I have some spare time this week. Will let you know what I think.

Jan 21 2010

Drupal 7 First Impressions

The Alpha for Drupal 7 has been out for a week now so I had to download and install it to see what this new version is going to be like. I installed it on my Mac running MAMP as that is the sytem I used for development and testing. The install went easily enough. Enter the Database name, username, and password and you are on your way. There were a couple more choices for options during the initial install but those are pretty self explanatory.

The first thing I noticed when I logged in was the Dashboard and admin menu. I am really liking that this is now part of Drupal Core since I always installed the admin menu module as one of the first things I did whenever I install Drupal. I love the new menu overlays. They make things much easier to find.

The other thing I noticed right away is that it seems faster. Granted I am running with a very Basic system with no extra modules enabled yet but it seems faster out of the box to me. I am going to take more time this weekend to setup a copy of my Website running on the new version to see how well it works and go through all of the options to see what else i can find.

Based on what I have seen so far, I can't wait for Drupal 7 to get to a Release version so I can convert my existing sites to it.