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Monthly Archives: August 2009

i hate flu and colds

i really hate having a cold or flu or anything like that….

have had this stupid flu thing since friday afternoon (no its not piggy flu fortunately). i hate the endless sniffles, the feeling that your nose is on fire, the costant feeling of the need to swallow because something is tickling the back of your throat, the lack of energy, the headaches.

what i hate most of all is that things are so busy taking time off for sickness just isnt an option, i need to battle on, do as Jesus did, fight the good fight (ok bad link i know!)

things coming up for me are getting involved in the install of a new monitor sound desk at church (new in the sense we never used to have one – God bless Aviom) initial planning for a redevelopment of a considerable chunk of our main website.

hopefully going to be going on our churches equivalent of LifeChange Teams (a newfrontiers project), a “Transform team” to Johannesburg(Jo’burg) in South Africa, it should be exciting as it will be in january which is pretty much the height of the SA summer.

otherwise general stuff is going on as normal, Uni starts end of September, and mixing front of house at church on sunday at ChristChurch London



How do i do it!

so how is my site built, its quite simple really.

i use Drupal which is a CMS system that uses PHP and MySQL its module based so that you can extend the functionality really quickly and fairly easily, this setup is reasonably simple and uses very few non “Core” modules.

some important modules that i would reccomend for anyone seriously working with drupal are:

1. CCK (Content Creation Kit)

not so much a module but a set of modules that allow you to do so much more with drupal by adding fields and the ability build custom forms as one example, its power is really shown when you combine it with Views, the best kind of overview for CCK can be found at: http://learnbythedrop.com/drop/86

2. Views

this is a module that can help you improve the way you display almost anything in drupal, it is essentially a smart query builder that allows you to present almost anything within drupal how you require it.

3. Wysiwyg, TinyMCE, IMCE, IMCE Bridge

these 4 modules combined make actual content creation so much easier, from a simple editor interface that resembles a basic version of your favourite word processor(TinyMCE – not actually a current drupal module), combined with easy file upload and picture management from IMCE, and producing good posts with zero HTML coding makes life a lot easier.

there are so many more good modules out there, and these are by no means the only modules you should use when building a drupal site, but they are a great base point to start from.

at some point i will point out some other great modules and give a life update soon, but for now its late and tomorrow i have to do some consultancy work for my local church which will involve the setup of a brand new dedicated server for all there web needs and emails, its going to be fun.



All Change please!

If your taking a look here and have visited previously, you will have noticed 2 things:

  1. New look
  2. A new post (yes this one!)

well yes you guessed it, i am kind of back! i have been thinking for a long time that i needed to give my site a long overdue update and sort out, even if only to stop the daily emails informing me that there is an update to drupal (the backend of the site)

as my work for Newfrontiers involves a fair amount of web work and the fact that i needed to create some sort of portfolio of my skillset (web and otherwise) having just finished the build of my first official website set to go live within the next week or so (more info later)

i thought about putting it here, sadly my choice of domain name several years ago just didnt feel appropriate (i was just a motorsport and racing game mad kid back then! – to some extent still am!) so my solution…

somersettechsolutions.co.uk

obviously my new site is still under active development (i only got the domain today!) but i am happy to say that i have my first working instance of the drupal multi-site functionality so only one update to do each time 🙂 so as i obviously have 2 sites now i thought that i need to layout my idea and plan for them.

i want this site to very much remain as my ramblings and other personal stuff, i dont want to say how often i will post (i will try as regularly as i can) and what i will post, but i would like to post anything and everything from my goings on personally, to random geek things i have learned or discovered or just plain random postings.

my other site will very much be a showcase of what i have done and can do so will have content relating to that (so geek stuff mostly!) i dont particularly want to run 2 seperate blogs so i will see how things pan out with regards to how i develop the new site.

this post is already too long so i will cut it short here, i already have a fair few things to say but i figure holding a few things back will give me content when i cant think of any and also build some suspense 🙂