I've been spending quite a bit of time rethinking the layout of the imagefield gallery administration system and what I'd like to do for Drupal 6.  That's still a ways out but I've already started on the new administration interface and wanted to share some of my thoughts on its design and where it's going.

In its simplest form, hosting a website just means two things. 1) Providing a server to house the files that make your website work, and 2) providing internet bandwidth that allows your website to be seen by the rest of the world. The majority of the 100,000^[1] new sites that went up today, were done in a “shared” environment where there may be hundreds of other websites on the same server as yours.

Oklahoma is a pretty small environment in which to run a Web Design & Development shop. Having been around in some form for the last 25 years gives us an edge in that department as we have lots of history, and track record to fall back upon, but that doesn't mean that some of our competitors don't do equally well. The difference, I think, is how we go about keeping our customers.

So we have all sorts of things going at any one time around here.  Personally I have a ton to do, so I often find myself working from home during evenings and weekends.  My personal project lately has been a service that we're hoping to roll out later this  year, but I'm using Drupal 6 (the newest version) and as such, there's a bit more learning curve on it.  However, with that learning curve comes new abilities, and new power that we previously did not have.  This project is a great example of some of those new abilities in action, and I'm hoping to put up some tutorial work later on this same topic.

So the design world is all a-buzz with talk of IE8 passing the acid2 test. As a standards junkie, I had to see for myself, and yup... sure enough it seems to pass, but if I don't sound thrilled, let me explain why.

So I've spent a lot of my time over the last few days getting Feedburner set up and working inside of a Drupal system... specifically this Drupal system.  It was an interesting task, and one I've enjoyed customizing specifically for this site, but it didn't go quite as simply as I had hoped.  This had a lot more to do with Feedburner than it did Drupal, mainly the fact that its FeedFlare stuff is... well cumbersome html wise.  Luckily, thanks to FireBug and Jquery, this is a task that was handled fairly simply.

So, for any of you who've come to one of our Lunch and Learns, chances are you've seen the slide where I mention that I'm on 3 different Advisory Board Committees at Francis Tuttle Technology Center.  Today was one of those meeting days where the committee gets together and discusses current industry issues, where the industry is going, and what things will get a student hired in Oklahoma.

After more than two years of using Drupal rather extensively internally, we've finally managed to create and commit back to the community our first full fledged module: the Imagefield Gallery module.  Development on the module is continuing today even though the first major release of it was over a month ago, such is the way with modules in many cases, there's always something new to add to the "to do" list.

As a premier Oklahoma Web Hosting firm, The Worx has dealt with a lot of different customers. And nearly every SQL variant is running somewhere in our Oklahoma DataCenter. But for this dicussion, I am going to limit my comments to MySQL and PostgreSQL.

I talk about Drupal pretty much all the time.  The reasons for this vary greatly, but one of the primary reasons is that it's really easy to get passionate about something this big.  See Drupal is kind of new to Oklahoma, and Oklahoma web design shops for sure, but that doesn't mean that it's "new".  Drupal's been around for more than 6 years now and in that time, it has become a force to be reckoned with.  There were literally over 700 developers who helped to work on Drupal 6, to make it the best product they could.  And already those same developers are getting geared up to create Drupal 7, talking about where it will go, and what features it will have, and how they're going to really grow this product.