October, 2007

As much as I like working with HTML, it is horribly inconvenient to author my stories/blog entries with; especially when all you get is a tiny little text box to work it. You can't indent and you can't see the line numbers. So I started looking for a WYSIWYG editor that would plug right into Drupal.

During my research to find a CMS, I had read a few entries mentioning TinyMCE.
So I did some further research and it was the WYSIWYG editor of choice for most people on the Drupal forums.

I just dropped the TinyMCE module into SmartFTP, enabled it, added a
profile, and I was ready to go.
It came with an option to to boost the performance of TinyMCE, download
the "TinyMCE compressor".

When I was younger and a bit stupider, I would work days and days trying to layout my website, the perfect colours, headers, perfect CSS styles, well scalable and so on... but I would spend soo much time on it, that I would get bored of it, or find an issue with the design. So, I'd drop it, start over and the vicious cycle begin all over again.

Now, I'm a bit smarter, or at least I think so, more time constraint, and a little less picky about small details.

That reminds me of my current objective for example - for the past few hours, I've been trying to theme this site, but with no luck. It's not going to be as simple as just slapping on a header graphic, changing a few colours and calling it a day. I want to do things right and theme the whole site, which takes time... time which I am currently short on.

So I'm looking for an interesting and creative theme. My search brought me to lots of different pages with cool themes, but none that fit my bill. I guess earlier I said I was picky, I still am, but with the wealth of different themes and options available with Drupal, I think I can be.

If anyone has any links for come cool yet functional themes... please let me know.

Guess what the buzz word of the day is - Leopard.

Apple's update to their extremely popular and extremely successful  operating system is released today. Stores across North America will begin selling the update at 6:00pm EST, although I suspect a handful of employees working at the Apple Store have already purchased and installed their copy...and who wouldn't? It's a big release, Apple even has a widget on their front page counting down to the release hour.

Oddly, the release in Canada is delayed by 2 hours than it is in the United States - according to the widget on Apple Canada (8pm instead of 6pm). Huh? Why? Who thought of that one. If you live on the border, you can buy one from the US, and have it 2 hours before most other Canadians!

My life revolves around a comptuer all of which have Windows 2000, or XP, or Vista. I love the stability of Windows XP. Yet, after watching promotional video touting all the 300 new features of Leopard, I suddenly want a Mac. Not sure what I would do with one, but it would be nice to have...if not for anything productive, then at least for the 'cool factor'. It's a stunning piece of work.

I'm lucky in some ways, just not the ways where I can save myself some money. It hasn't even been a week since I've signed up for Go Daddy, and I receive an email today, promoting the 25% discount off domains and hosting... COME ON!!

I put in the DL.TV code and received 15% if I remember correctly, but I definitely could have used a couple extra dollars in savings. The code for the Halloween Special is gdm1038a if anyone is interested.

Similar thing happened to me when I bought my first car. It wasn't even a week, after I had purchased it, I hear a commercial on the radio for 0% financing on all 2007 Mazda's, where as I'm currently paying 1.9% financing. Again, I could have saved a couple thousand there in interest charges.

You win some, you lose some!!

Anybody that creates a webpage and publishes, wants to know if someone is viewing it, what they are doing on it, and if a search engine is indexing it. I wanted to start doing exactly that. Go Daddy provides some stats about how many hits, from where, what browser, and a few other bits of information. Not enough to satisfy me, especially when I want more in-depth insight regarding my visitors. Another major reason I wanted to do this is because the stats that I get form Go Daddy, include the hits that are being generated by my editing/viewing of the pages. This can add upto 100s a day, skewing my stats and perseption of how good the site is doing.

For this, I turn to who other than Google - or Google Analytics to be more precise. They have a whole slew of different metrics that are measured for a given site. Extremely easy to setup - for a regular website... and just a bit more work is needed to get it working with Drupal.

So, finally after years and years of people asking Google/Gmail for IMAP (Internet Message Access Protocol) functionality, it has been released. Google Mail through IMAP.

I'm not quite sure why someone would want to do this, but it is now available.

Salut!! My second post will be about finding web hosting for this site, why I decided to go with Go Daddy, and their service and support. So far, they have treated me very well. Registration was a breeze, but as usual they will try to sell you as many value added services as they can. i.e. .Net or .Info domains (Caution - they are selected by default), advance site-builder, extra email storage space, SSL certificates...etc. Once you get past all that, the rest was amazingly fast. Here is the timeline of my registration process:

• 10:45 - Started the registration process. (Found the domain name, filled in all the info, ploughed through the promotonal items they were trying to sell, put in my promo code - "dltv")
• 11:01 - I push the "Register Now" button. (Money gets sucked out of my credit card and I am presented with a Thank You page.

Welcome to Portfolio of Purazar Bhadha!

This is the first blog post. It's just a test blog post to see what Drupal can do.

After reading review after review, and listening to Leo pitch this product on his Twit and Inside The Net podcast, I though I'd give it a try. I'm not new to websites and content management, but I have never used a dedicated CMS before, so this will be where I will track my progress of learning Drupal. For now, I have just installed the system (automated install...), logged in, snooped around a few of the menu items and made this post.

Just as a safety precaution, I'm constantly copy & pasting this blog post to the clipboard, should IE crash (Yes! I am using IE, no Firefox allowed at work), or if Drupal spit up... I won't lose my train of thought.

Until my next progress report...

--Puraz