Blogs

MySpace.com
I just can't stand it. Mainly because I never have gotten into the social networking thing online but also because it's slow and the pages all look really gross.

One thing I do like about MySpace is hacking it. I like making myspace profiles look good. Plus it's nutty getting paid to write inherently broken code.

The latest: Senator Edwards' profile. This was fun. The goal was to make the profile look and feel like oneamericacommittee.com as much as possible (a very nice site). It will be interesting to see how it evolves.

I'm ready for another one...

Fresno Filmworks is looking for someone new to manage their website.
fresnofilmworks.org
It's a great opportunity for the right person or business. This is a volunteer position, BUT sponsor listing in the monthly newsletter plus free passes to films are part of the arrangement.

I have really enjoyed hosting and maintaining the site over the last couple of years. Filmworks is a great organization and they are wonderful to work with.

The time commitment is about 1 hour per month - a little more before the festival. The site is built with html/CSS/php and the person taking over should be familiar with these languages. We also would like to involve the new web developer in a server migration. I am currently hosting the site.

Please contact me here if you are interested.

Last week we launched the new and improved website for the Fresno Metropolitan Museum.

This site is a great case study for why you need a good server environment. I started this build months ago on pair networks servers running Drupal 4.6. It was barely functional and pair kept saying the boxes were fine. I've been here before. Bad things happen to Drupal when the servers are slow (namely annoyed users and table corruptions but it can get worse). I brought the Met over to Advomatic, we upgraded to 4.7, dumped flexinode and rebuilt everything with CCK. Boy was that ever fun!!? Integration of tools like the new imagefield and imagecache for CCK actually were fun. This is when Drupal starts to feel like a powerful weapon. whee!

There are some really cool feratures for both users and admins. First off I'm happy to see various departments blogging. The site admins now have the ability to create full galleries of images for Exhibitions and Collections. We mixed in a little theming magic and galleries + captions are automatically embedded into the individial pages. One of my favorite sections is the Renovation Station, which tracks construction progress. The Lightbox module provides a nice alternative to viewing full-size images here and within exhibitions. Plus the people love the Ajax. Hat tip to strange bird labs - the dhtml fader on the homepage is a straight rip from The Egg, which it a gorgeous Drupal site.

Setting up ecommerce for membership and tickets was a breeze. I see huge improvements to the e-commerce module in 4.7. For years I've hated every ecommerce tool I tried (zen cart, digishop, oscommerce, paypal_pro, hand-rolled whatevah). This setup was super-fast, allows for flexibility, and PayPal IPN works silently in the background as it's meant to. finally. I have high hopes for effective inventory tracking for ticket sales.

Note: The design, layouts, and initial IA for the Fresno Met site were done by Suzanne Bertz-Rosa.

It has been 2 weeks since I closed the old business and started working for Advomatic. The projects on my plate are so fun I can hardly stand it. Two of them are large community sites, so the lessons and challenges that came with building Famous have so far been invaluable. I'm also looking forward to launching the redesigned Fresno Met site in Drupal. Stay tuned for an August 1st launch!

I can't believe how much I have learned in such a short period. It hasn't been so much learning completely new things, but finding different and often better approaches to old problems. My understanding of how themable functions work in Drupal went way up last week (big thanks to Drumm!).

My 'a-ha' moment was via converting a static block for news items on the Personal Democracy Forum homepage into aggregator feeds. Not a problem except the aggregator module generates blocks with titles only (function: theme_aggregator_block_item). We needed teasers, source titles, and post dates. 2 weeks ago I would have just hacked the aggregator module, or written a custom query for it, which may or may not have worked. And, hacking modules is never ideal. In actuality only a tiny change to the module itself was required to print source titles via: $item->feed_title in the standard aggregator block. Other than that it's a simple rewrite of that function in the theme's template file. In this case it was an old 4.6 xtemplate chameleon theme (ouch!), so the function became chameleon_aggregator_block_item. All that was needed was a rewrite of the same code the module uses + some special stuff to bring in teasers (not really teasers per se but truncated feed item descriptions). This is much more efficient and 'drupal-friendly' than a something like a snippet, certainly more elegant than a complete module hack. Ask me for the code if you think you can use it.

Today is the last day of think inkless as think inkless. I have closed up shop after six wonderful years and am turning this domain into a blog.

I will be posting tips and tricks on using and developing for Drupal, various things I see around the web, and happenings with my pet project: Fresno Famous. The old think inkless site has been archived here.

In case you wonder what's next for Suzi, I have joined Advomatic, where I look forward to focusing on design and IA for progressive grassroots and arts communities - all within the Drupal framework.

Stay tuned.