chacadwa.com

It may seem odd that I spent Drupal 7 release day installing Drupal on a Microsoft server platform, but that's what I did. Honestly, the timing was coincidental. One of my current projects has been to stage up a new Windows 2008 Server to replace an aged Windows 2000 web server, and yesterday just happened to be the day that all of the pieces fell together.

I was recently asked about using issuu.com as a tool for publishing print media on the web. While I found only a couple of minor things I didn't like about Issuu, mostly regarding zoom control, this question roused my general dislike for the practice of dumping printed material to a PDF file and slapping it on a website.

Last Monday, we released the first episode of the Geeks and God Podcast since I became one of the hosts. There were a lot of lessons to be learned in the process. Here are a few of the things I discovered.

Tonight's rehearsal of our annual musical drama, A Christmas Tale, was a night of different perspectives. I wasn't really thinking when I snapped this photo with my cell phone, but it fits.

When we started out tonight, neither of my lighting guys were there, so I stuck my teenage daughter on the light board, where she did a great job of being mature and attentive, following cues without error. She worked backstage last year, so she saw a new perspective on how lighting tied in to the portions of the show where she'd had to move props on- and off-stage in the dark last year.

It's sometimes hard to remember that "instant" text messaging has been around for a long time, and that text messaging is far older than voice technology for long distance communication. The difference today is that text messaging devices are wireless, and don't require intensive training and study to be used.

My great-grandfather, Rush Webner, was a telegrapher for various railroads, including a 36 year stint as agent-operator for the Wheeling and Lake Erie station in Smithville, Ohio.

Note: I've updated this tutorial for Drupal 6 in this post on the Geeks and God website.

Old school web design meant including a page full of links to other websites. As older sites are transitioned into current practice, many site owners expect this trend to continue. And in some ways it has, most commonly as a block containing a blogroll of other sites. This method can provide both solutions by creating a custom content type that will turn links into nodes, and can then display them as a page or block using Views.

Note: I've updated this tutorial for Drupal 6 in this post on the Geeks and God website.

This example "mysite" module demonstrates hook_form_alter. There is a lot of good info out there about hook_form_alter, but I found very few examples that put all of the pieces of custom module creation together in such a simple way as this.

The also function adds an example "form_array" element that displays everything in a form using print_r. Installing the Devel Module is probably a better way to get this same information. You wouldn't want to leave this hunk of code on a production site, but it is pretty nice for seeing what form elements are available to manipulate.

Uncomment print $form_id; to show the name of every form on your site as you navigate.