David

Last night I managed to put up my third Drupal installation with some cool time lapse photography. I recently sat through an informative lesson in Drupal development and design from Jonathan DeLaigle. I have found that Drupal has a great number of modules that will expand it’s capabilities for large scale development…of which I’ll primarily be on the design end of. Some quick advice on styling Drupal for those new to it and are familiar with wordpress. Start with any design template you want.. you can port wordpress or static html templates over. Cut up the php of page and node parts of the core theme and paste them to suit another template and viola! While it’s not exactly that easy, but it’s a good deal more simple than I had originally thought it would be.

On another note..I finally upgraded to my personal machine to leapard..it’s been sitting in the box for months… and I’ve updated plenty of other folks machines, just not my own.. tis all good. Got php, mysql, rails, dgango, apache, mysql, php, zend, ssl, all those my old localhost stuff running in a day. I managed to shave down the disc space leaving me 40 fresh gigs to work with. Here’s a couple cool toys I use now.. An open with textmate button for my finder and an open terminal here button. I’ve also been using quicksilver a bit.

I’ve also decided that I want to host on Virtual Xserve’s at Media Temple. I’ve had shared hosting with them, I was on the first releases of the grid server and I’ve had several dedicated virtual machines running there sure and steady for several years… so I know they’re going to roll it out smoothly.
What I spend most of my time with clients doing is teaching them how to use a server and website tools and nothings easier to teach than apple. I can teach the average guy enough to handle his own IT and server with leopard and oversee it with remote desktop. And what is also nice is that I spend so much time customizing my apache, php, mysql, postgres.. etc on my own machine that I won’t have to fiddle too long with CentOS, Ubuntu, or another because I’m already familiar with the file structure and packages in Leapard.
I also have been building some iphone swag as xcode 3.0 was my primary motivation for upgrading to leopard and the iphone simulator makes it easy. It’s amazing that the developers area has much of the hard stuff laid out clean with demos… the gps, the tilt features etc.. the only hitch is the developers membership to distribute them.