Drupal

It's past 3AM here in the frozen tundra of greater Boston, and I've just about finished porting my personal site and its 10+ years of cruft from it's long-neglected Drupal 5 install to a shiny new Drupal 7 base.

More on that later. Now I'm going to bed.

Today is one day before my one-year anniversary at the Mars Space Flight Facility, and also one day after I finally got something else launched that the public might have a remote interest in.

You have a Glassfish server.

You are a Drupal developer.

So I quit my job in newspapers last May and hauled my then-pregnant wife across the country to work for NASA.

I've been a busy little bee, working on all sorts of projects, mostly involving Drupal and/or jQuery. But sadly, not one has been allowed to see the light of day.

Yeah, I finally got around to re-theming my site, and moving it to Lighty at the same time.

How did I manage this? Søren was being pacified by his Granddaddy and Grandma Carol:

So I needed a method to take a long, nested list and turning it into a compact, multiple acolumn list, in order to display it as sort of a site map for the home page for a site I'm working on.

Being a huge fan of jQuery, it was naturally my go-to library of choice.

Scanning the plugins site, I found a possible solution from a feller called Ingo Schommer called columnizeList.

So I finally gave something back. Granted, in proportion to how I've benefitted from open source software over the years, it's not much. But it's (marginally) better than nothing, right?

I released a Drupal module I call Commentify, which is one of several modules I wrote (or thought up/architected) to integrate Drupal with the proprietary CMS we use at work.

Have I mentioned that I loves me some Drupal?

Oh yes. I probably have. Anyway, in the last 48 hours of last week I managed to take two sites from photoshop mockup to fully functioning. Well, almost, anyway. There are of course some minor issues with Internet Exploder to deal with, and some pages to be tweaked.

[img_assist|nid=531|title=|desc=|link=url,http://mom2momsc.com|align=left|width=237|height=250]

[img_assist|nid=532|title=|desc=|link=url,http://heritage.islandpacket.com|align=left|width=147|height=250]

We spend lots of dough each year converting material from our dead-tree editions into web-friendlier versions for our web sites. We crank out a bunch of PDFs, and send them through the ether to somewhere where the labor is cheap and the workday long, like Vietnam, Indonesia or Canada or something. Then some poor soul slices 'n dices them into jpegs and links and such, and sends 'em on back, and posts them on our site.