BTMash

I'm a little late (18 days according to my vps uptime) on blogging about this. But after nearly 5 years of mulling about on tumblr, blogspot, wordpress, and xanga, I finally decided to pony up for my own vps and build out something I can call 'my own' (yes, I tweet a fair bit, but that's different!). Being that Drupal 7 came out a short time ago and I use Drupal for most of my projects, I decided this is a good time to build a site using it and:

• Port over any modules that I'd like to use that haven't been ported.
• Fix up any modules to work the way they probably should.
• Most importantly, learn something new.

I'm currently using a contrib-module-modified core Bartik theme to look the way it does (though will slowly look to create a new theme in HTML5 that looks similar to what I have - I'm really excited about this since its a chance for me to dabble at the theme layer of Drupal). A list of all the contrib modules being used on the site as of today are:

• CSS Injector - This helped me perform safe-ish modifications to Bartik without explicitly creating a new theme or directly modifying a core theme
• CTools - Needed due to some of my dependencies.
• Disqus - for comments (still mulling if these should be a part of the site via core comment module or left this go offsite).
• Follow - gives the cool follow buttons.
• Google Analytics - track how the website is doing.
• Mollom - currently used for spam protection on the contact form.
• Pathauto - automatic URL Aliases!
• Token - nice ui to the core token api.
• Twitter Pull - a somewhat lean method get my latest tweets to show up here (I had to write a custom module to pull up my tweets from it but eh, can't complain ^_^).
• Views - ok, I haven't figured out a use case for this quite *yet* (maybe a way to alter my home page?). But I am hoping to at some point!
• Webfont Loader API - handles the @font-face rendering (This site, much like the OS powering it, currently uses the wonderful Ubuntu font, though I may switch to something a little more lightweight down the line).
• XML Sitemap - provide a sitemap to various search engines.

I'm currently using git to manage the development of this website (note to all: always use a code repository of some sort for software you'll be managing. Not using one has always come to bite me in the rear.) and eventually get better at using it. I'm all about experimenting with new technologies on my new slice and with that said, expect for the site to come crashing down as I just might try something really stupid on it :D

With that out of the way, I know the site looks fairly plain, but I have done so to try and focus on content within the site (to hoepfuly improv spelling me and gramer), for others to get a sense of what I'm like, and to try and do what my good friend Luke says. I'm still unsure on what the aim of this blogging area will be (its likely to be a mix of the personal and professional things in life that are happening in my life). This will, much like everything, change over time and hopefully I can learn to adapt a little via this space :)