DrupalEverything.com

Image handling is one of those things that it's easy to not think hard enough about, but that your users will expect to be able to add to their nodes and their experience working with them will have a dramatic impact on a user's experience with your site. It's a far thornier issue than you may think.

I've had my head rammed neck deep into a big pile of stuff I barely understand for the past couple of days, trying to get my head around the challenges of displaying video on a web site, especially video that can be viewed on the end user's iphone and ipad. 

Drupal does a lot of things very well, but right out of the box it can put users through a pretty dramatic learning curve.  Creating content, jargon-y controls, and other little things will give users who are uncomfortable at the computer palpitations.  I've learned the hard way that I always need to be looking for ways to take the confusion out of the interface for my users. The simpler I can make the forms, the more likely my users are to be able to use them. 

I've been talking up the power of the taxonomy module in the Forums today, and when you get right down to it, it's damn hard to beat the usefulness and power of this apparently simple, unsung hero of the Drupal core pantheon.  

What makes it so interesting is the flexibility of the taxonomy tools.  You need freetagging style anything-goes tags?  It's there.  You need rigid categories to organize content on your site? Done.  You need heirarchical taxonomy to serve as an index of complex content?  It's waiting for you.  

The Propopulate module is one of the little unsung heroes, IMO, of the drupal module world.  Maybe it's a little bit of a niche, maybe it's the sort of glue code others are more used to writing for themselves, but for me, in some of the data-heavy web sites I've been creating, it's a necessity. 

Coworkers are awesome.

My "friend" Steve (might not be his real name, but then again it might be) tried to throw me under the bus this week. In the inaugural meeting of a state commission he has been asked to sit on, he volunteered me to build a web site for the commission -- a working site where they will be able to share ideas and resources between meetings, etc. That was two days ago.

Sometimes, I'm a dope.  Actually, a lot more often than sometimes, but who's counting, right?  Well, found myself searching around the other day for a solution to a challenge with a drupal site, and no matter what I searched for, I wasn't finding the answer to what I wanted. 

You probably haven't been able to avoid the buzz about Foursquare, one of a couple of new geo-location microblogging social media outlets that are starting to make some noise out there.  Internet fads come and go, but Foursquare is something small businesses really need to pay close attention to.  

It's a Game?

We've finally decided to start heavy duty promotion of our videos-for-parents site, My Kids Turn.  This is a project that has been several months in the making, and while there are still a ton of improvements I want for the site, it's in a place where I'm excited to see if we can build an audience for what we're offering. 

I've been wrestling for a few days with problems with one of my websites, related to database problems, spam, and other junk.