This last week I have been trying to get my head around a number of things as well as read through a couple of new books, so my brain is now sufficiently mushi-fied. Hopefully I can get the multiple projects into some semblance of order so that the real work can start soon, but right now there is just a lot of imagining going on…
The books I am perusing are The Real Business of Web Design and Building Online Communities with Drupal, phpBB, and WordPress.
The Real Business of Web Design is an enourmously simplified title for an extraordinary little book. It isn’t a how-to book under any stretch of the imagination; instead it is a manifesto for taking web design as information architecture to a whole new level in which humankind finds what it is looking for, business gets done, and it reaches its true potential in a global network that reflects both diversity and an individuals uniqueness in one fell swoop. If that sounds utopian, it is, but, as the history of the web reveals so far, it is also true. This should be required reading for anyone seeking to do more with the internet than just code up a site in Dreamweaver for Uncle Hal’s photography biz.
Building Online Communities is a very different book, but a very interesting read for my knowledge-hungry techie side. I had narrowed my own CMS interests to that which I could handle a few weeks ago; which happened to be Drupal, WordPress, and phpBB. When I saw a book that addressed all three; I just had to buy it. The reasoning for those three programs is that, in the opinion of the editor, these represent the best of the Open Source community in blogging, bulletin boards, and website implementation. I couldn’t agree more. Much of the how to install and configure stuff I had already figured out on my own, but I keep coming across these little gems that make me say “aha! I didn’t know I could do that!” or “that’s how that works?” that make the price well worth it.
The sections on theming have got me started on figuring out how to code up a fresh new design for my favorite blog…you guessed it! Pixel Surfers! I have decided, since my PHP skills are rudimentary at best, to take on creating a scheme for the Binary Blue theme; which has all the functionality I could ask for and more. I am in the process of figuring out what blocks are which div and going from there. My biggest issue is that it is a 2 column theme with one column “widgetized”, but I think that I would still like a 3 column layout. So that begins, if only I could get my spongy gray matter to get with the program (sigh).
Also, I will be installing Drupal, for the first time, on my main site this week. Don’t worry, it will be in a test folder, so there will be nothing new to see for weeks and weeks. But I have multiple domains that I host on my site, so the main focus will be configuring multiple domains from single Drupal install. Oh well. If it’s not a challenge than it’s not worth doing, right?