I love working with Drupal. But it has lots of drawbacks. Mainly, that it’s not easy. Even for developers. We often run up against things that just don’t work as expected. So, time is spent figuring out why and how to make it work. We can usually find a way. But it sometimes costs more to find the solution than is reasonable for a specific project. I have found the same thing with WordPress...
Open Source Web Development
Amazon Affiliates and Taxes
Last week I had my 15 seconds of almost fame. I’ve been an Amazon Affiliate for years. When I got my email from Amazon that they were closing my account because of the sales tax law passed by California. For some reason my name got passed to a couple journalists as a spokesperson for the 10,000 or so affiliates who had their business shut down without recourse. So while I was up on a...
Building a Toys for Tots Application with Drupal
Toys for Tots is a national program of the Marine Corps Reserve that distributes toys to needy children each Christmas. The local chapter works through every school (public and private) throughout Humboldt and Trinity Counties. It’s quite a logistical feat to identify and contact each family, provide a count of the number of eligible children in each community and note their gender, age and location where their toys will be distributed. Previously, this was...
Hosting vs Development Services
One of the struggles we have within our company is drawing the line between our hosting services and our web site development services. This most often comes up when we come across sites we built 5-6 years ago and suddenly the technology behind them no longer works. For example, we built sites using our own custom systems. Granted they were based in open source technology like PHP and MySQL and they worked back then....
Back from Drupalcon!
I returned from Drupalcon in San Francisco on Thursday and have spent the last few days catching up with work and life. I’m just starting to sort through all my thoughts on this great conference. First, I wish I could have attended even more sessions. But fortunately, they were all recorded and are already available on archive.org. Additionally all three keynotes were excellent and inspiring both in terms of Drupal and for the open...
Drupal Gets a Big Wet Kiss
Drupal,the open source content management system that we use almost exclusively for building web sites, is now being used to run the official White House web site, whitehouse.gov. For the general public this will mean little as they won’t see any visible difference in the site. But it’s great news for us, the Drupal community and the open source movement as a whole. But it’s also an interesting political statement by the current administration...
Humboldt State Switching to Drupal
I’d heard from some people that work at Humboldt State University that they are moving their web sites to Drupal. But a link from a friend on Facebook (thanks Grace!) confirmed it. Not only are they moving to Drupal, but they are installing the LAMP stack (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP) on the servers. So it looks like HSU is embracing open source big time. This is such a good move considering all the budget...
Price Fixing in Web Development
I subscribe to a number of web development mailing lists, RSS feeds, Twitter streams, and, of course, talk to web development clients all the time. What I have learned, if that’s the term, is that pricing web development projects is way more art than science. There are apples and kumquats. There are formulas and there are “realms”.There are jobs and there are sales pitches. The bottom line, and that’s what we’re all concerned with,...
Eureka Chamber Launches at Last
It’s been a long road, but the new Eureka Chamber of Commerce web site finally launched this past week. This is a Drupal site with a nice design by our friends at Carson Park Design. We converted their Photoshop file to a Drupal template. We installed and configured numerous modules, ported content and imported (several times) their membership directory. We trained staff on managing the site and they are off and running. Most importantly,...
Impressions from Drupalcon
I’ve been back from D.C. a couple weeks and I am still trying to distill everything I experienced at Drupalcon. With three days of intense sessions, Birds of a Feather gatherings, discussions and keynote speeches I have yet to find a way synthesize everything. In fact, I was so excited by some of the things I learned, I am frustrated by not bing able to implement them. OK, it’s only been 2 weeks, so...
At Drupalcon
My hotel is only 5 blocks from the Verizon Convention Center in Washington, D.C. So it’s an easy walk in the cold morning sun. But today, day 2 of Drupalcon, as I got to the Convention Center door I realized I forgot my pass to Drupalcon. So I hiked back to the hotel, and the back to the center. 15 blocks already today. So far this morning I’ve been to a session on the...
Obama Embraces Drupal
What a strange sounding title to a post. But this is just to point out that the new site Recovery.gov released to track the recovery plan is built with Drupal, a content management system and framework that we have been using more and more. In fact, we’re in the process of making our own site over in Drupal, and we’ve just become a partner with Acquia which proivdes professional support services for Drupal users...
Redwood Technology Consortium Site Upgrade
We recently completed an upgrade to the Redwood Technology Consortium web site. A few years ago we converted the site from a proprietary Cold Fusion system to the open source Drupal platform. We felt it was time to upgrade since the site was running on a 4.x version of Drupal. 5.x had been out for a while and all the modules we needed had also been upgraded to the current version. While we were...
Adventure’s Edge At Last
It’s been a long road, but a couple weeks ago we got the OK to launch the new Adventure’s Edge web site. We’re pretty proud of this project because of the various tools we either built or incorporated in to the site. We’re quite proud of the design. It’s simple and straightforward, but with the Flash on the home page and some dynamic tools, it’s a vast improvement over their old site. We used...
Prosperity! Revamp
After about a year and a half of struggle we finally unveiled the third version of the Prosperity! Network’s new web site. The saga of this project is a good example of design by committee that is the death of many projects and results in cost overruns on many others. In spite of some valiant efforts to define the goals and features of the site from the beginning, the project kept morphing. There literally...
