Well, it's official, The Worx Company is going to be at Drupalcon Hungary!  I personally am increadibly stoked to be going (if you can't tell by the exclamation point) and best of all, my wife is coming to expand her Drupal knowledge as well.  As a Drupal-centric shop, we deal with the software every single day, but Drupal is expansive, so any chance we have to learn more we always try to jump at.

A quick jaunt over the pacific and back, has given me some new perspective on what exactly  is going on in the rest of the world as far as web development is concerned.  Having just gotten back from Korea, I find I see it through a different colored lens this time.  This was my second trip to that wonderful country and the trip, overall, was MUCH more enjoyable than my first, but I noticed many things that I found quite startling.  In that regard it's amazing to see a country so thoroughly drinking the Microsoft Coolaid.  There is NO Firefox in that country, all the major website providers are creating activeX based products, and as such, the default assumption is that everyone is using Windows and everyone is using Internet Explorer... we (the Drupal community) have GOT to figure out how to change this (not just for Korea, but any major country in this same situation) and I think the first real step (from our end) has to be a Korean translation for Drupal.  I'm working on it with some Koreans, but I don't speak it natively, so it's slow work and I'm sure there are others better qualified than myself.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Finding a web design/development shop that has your best interests at heart can be a real chore today. I'm reminded of this simple fact in an especially vivid way today because of a potential customer we spoke with. Seldom have we run across a single client so badly abused by our fellow web vendors, but apparently they're out there.

Today was Wednesday and as such it was our weekly Lunch & Learn. We do this ritual almost every week in an effort to help both our potential clients and existing clients learn more about our industry and how it affects them. Today the web has had a massive affect on almost every industry. The problems resulting from this particular paradigm shift are too numerous to go into any detail, but the two problems we encounter most often are a lack of education, and a dependence on proprietary software. Both of these issues are completely understandable as the web is still relatively new, and people are still relatively inexperienced, and this is exactly why we hold our weekly lunch & learns.