I just downloaded an app on my iPhone that will allow me to blog. It's a pretty slick app that so far works really well. The only thing that I'm not liking so far is that I can't add categories (tags) on the fly, there's just a list of tags used on my blog. Thats pretty nifty in and of itself. Anyway, so far so good! The app is called iBlogger.[Posted with iBlogger from my iPhone]

When it comes to anything on the computer I like to find a better and more efficient way to do things. I've been this way for a while, and it's something that I don't think will ever change until I get older. In my opinion this is a good trait to have, and it may find me appealing down the road in my career.

Congratulations to Drupal for winning the 2008 Best PHP Open Source CMS from Packt Publishing! What a great award to receive. It's nice to know that the CMS that I'm most faithful to is receiving awards like this. Keep it up Drupal Core maintainers.

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I came in this morning to find that our Main College Website wasn't accepting logins to the site. When I would try to login it would redirect me to the page it was supposed to but not log me in so that I could have access to the admin stuff. Since I couldn't login I didn't have access to any of the Watchdog log to see where the issue is coming from. I immediately went to forums to see what I could find.

I found a couple of discussions about it, most of which were all related to the 'sessions' table in the database. Then I found another discussion that recommended checking the Watchdog log through the 'watchdog' table in the database. So that's where I went next. This is what I found:

I have now been a member of drupal.org for a year! That's pretty exciting. I was thinking that it might be fun to put a post up talking about the things that have happened in the last year, and the things that I have learned. This might be a good resource to those just researching different CMSs, so here goes:

What a year it's been for me! A year ago we made the final decision to go with Drupal for our CMS at my work. I can say that decision determined a lot of my future in web design/development. Here's what has happened in the last year:

One thing that I was trying to do for a while on my work website was create a block that contained a list of nodes that reference the current node. At that time I had searched in a bunch of places, but didn't know exactly what I was searching for. It so happens that it's actually a really easy views arguement.

What I was trying to do was show a list of the jobs available that are related to the current Program Page that they were on. For example, if they were on the Welding program page they would see a list in a block of the jobs on the job board that have been referenced to that program. So they would see welding related jobs that would be applicable to them!

I set this blog up a couple of months ago thinking that it probably wouldn't go anywhere. Well, it still hasn't. :)

But, I did get some activity on a few of my posts that were supposed to have attached txt files to show the code snippets that I came up with. Unfortunately I, being the newbie that I was back when I started this blog, didn't check my access control checkbox to allow anonymous users to view my uploaded files. I really feel like an idiot, but I did check it and those attached files are now available. Hope everyone didn't lose hope! :)

A module that I haven't been able to live without since I got into Drupal is called Menu Trails.

This module has been a lifesaver for me and a necessity on most all of my Drupal sites. One thing that I like to do on my Drupal sites is use Views to generate lists of nodes. Views makes that kind of stuff quick and easy. Menu trails fills a gap that, in my opinion, Drupal has completely left out. The Menu Trails module allows you to take node types and taxonomy vocabularies and automatically add them under a certain menu item (retaining breadcrumbs).

I'm going to start a new tradition of including blog posts of "modules that I love!"

My first "module that I love" was one that I just came across this evening while doing some research for a small client of mine in the Las Vegas area. Her e-mail was as follows:

"Could you tell me how I can take a ton of emails from excel spreadsheet and put them in a distribution list so that I can blast a flyer about our grand opening"

At work I am building some pretty complex content driven pages with Contemplate. I have some node data being displayed in the main content area and the rest in a dynamic block using Views Arguments. To keep a better handle on the data being displayed I am the Contemplate module, which I have found to be an extraordinary module for what it can do.

I ran into an issue today where I wanted to hide the label to the field if the field was empty. After some searching online and digging I couldn't really find anything, so I did a little research on my own and was able to come up with the solution. Here it is: