Star Shaped

Today, this domain turns nine years old. I will refrain from posting a screenshot of the very first layout I made for this domain Wait, no I won't. Here are a few screenshots from the past nine years (please don't laugh too much):

Red, Black, and Cheesy

Okay. This is one of the first layouts I ever made for this domain, way back in October 2000! I had not started my blog just yet; kids, in 2000, online journals were all the rage, at least in the circles I traveled online. And no, my online journal no longer exists on the internets, thankfully.

Adventures with Bad Scanners

I apparently loved using bad pictures of myself as part of the layout back in the day, 'back in the day' being sometime during the spring of 2001. Notice my rockin' Paint Shop Pro 5 skills and the even more rockin' frames I used. My blog was powered by Blogger. Oh yes, I was awesome.

Yummy Starfruit

If you've been reading my site for a long, long time, you knew this layout would be posted; the starfruit layout. I graduated from frames to tables, keeping with the 'latest and greatest' at the time (I believe I made this in summer of 2001?). I also changed my layout way, way more often in the early days than I do now.

Man, I Loved That Plant

At long last, in 2003, I moved away from the tables and started using divs and css to create my layouts. I also moved from Blogger to Movable Type to b2, which I used up through 2004 when I switched to Wordpress. (I only recently switched to Drupal.) I liked this layout.

I Apparently Love Purple.

Circa 2004. I remember making this layout while sitting in the library on the IU campus. I folded the stars myself and took the pictures of them myself. I've rarely used stock photography in my layouts (the starfruit layout being one of the few exceptions).

Twilight for Wordpress

Oh, Twilight. I later released this theme as a Wordpress theme, but I haven't updated it since 2005 when I first created it. I really liked this one; I created it while sitting in the loft of my first apartment in South Bend.

So, yes. What better way to celebrate my domain-a-versary by posting old layouts? Happy birthday, Star Shaped!

It has been over one month since I have posted an entry to this blog. (Sidenote, I hate the word 'blog'. Lame.) I've been busy this past month, visiting my family, going white water rafting, learning Drupal, and hanging out with some of the new people I've met in this area. Life's been exciting, but I have been slacking in maintaining this site.

I'm not sure what to write in here anymore. I sometimes write about my knitting, sometimes about what I'm cooking, and on the rare occasion, I write about my experiences with Drupal so far. I liked this place when I focused on what I do, and really, I haven't been documenting that very much recently.

I am hopefully going to keep a better track of what's going on my life the next couple months. I started a new paper journal at the end of July and would love to take pictures of it, and I've finished a shawl and a camera case and other various and assorted knitting goodness this summer. I've also spun a few skeins of yarn, and I've made the switch from Windows to Linux (Ubuntu, to be more specific). I've been busy, but I haven't felt like writing about it at all.

This changes now.

So. After five great years with Wordpress, I've made the decision to convert my site to Drupal. It's nothing to do with Wordpress as a blogging platform; I work with Drupal every day at work and wish to familiarize myself with it, so I figured running my day to day blog with the framework I use at my job would be the easiest way to do this. I've spent some time over the past few weeks learning how to theme the Drupal way, and I'm pleased to find that the theming process isn't as cumbersome as I initially thought. Obviously I still have things I need to tweak, and one of these days I want to actually design a new theme, but for now, this will do.

Later on I may write more regarding what modules I'm using, how I went about configuring things, and so on, but tonight I am tired and just happy I got this up and running tonight.

Yesterday I cut my hair and dyed it blonde red. Do you want me to get into the horror that is attempting to dye your own hair blonde? I didn't think so.

Hey kids! I can't smile when I take my own picture!

(Actually, I will tell the blonde story. I bought a home bleach kit, mixed it and applied it correctly, yet my hair turned out ORANGE. I remembered why I went to salons when I kept my hair blonde last year. I ended up running to the store at 9:45 last night to buy the red dye, and crossed my fingers to hope it would look all right. Thankfully, it came out pretty good! Oops. Lesson learned, at least.)

Can you spot me in this picture? (taken by misselizabeth.)

This weekend I attended my first nerd Drupal camp; Drupal Design Camp Boston! When I first heard of this event I figured only locals from the New England area would make the trek to Cambridge, but as more and more people signed up, I found that people and companies from all over the country (and world!) were willing to make the trip to this area to meet up with fellow Drupal geeks. This made me think about just how community oriented this framework really is...

I've not been working with Drupal for long; I built a couple sites using it about a year ago, but I followed no set standards or practices. (My coworkers now would absolutely cringe over some of the things I did. I know better now, guys. But don't worry; even back then, I didn't hack core!) When I started my current job about a month ago, I knew I needed to get up to speed on the system. I know CSS, I know PHP; I'm just not familiar with Drupal functions and the theming system. I figured this camp would be a perfect opportunity to learn more about this CMS and to meet a few people in the community. I was not disappointed.

On Saturday morning I woke up at 6:45 (yes, in the morning); way, way too early for this late riser, to make my way down to Boston from my apartment in New Hampshire. After debating taking the train, I decided to drive, only because the commuter rail I wanted to take wouldn't have gotten me to the conference in time. "I've driven around Chicago tons of times," I thought to myself as I loaded my things in the back of my car, "Boston shouldn't be much different."

Oh, how I'd eat my words (thoughts?) just an hour later as I circled the same stretch of road multiple times, anxiously searching for the correct exit after getting off the wrong one more times than I could count. I took one too many wrong turns and ended up driving over the Tobin Bridge to Chelsea, cursing as I paid the $3.00 toll for my mistake.

Somehow, after aimlessly driving around Cambridge for 45 minutes, I came across MIT and the venue, parked my car, and made it in time to converse with my coworkers for a bit before the keynote. Whew.

On to the camp. I attended a few great panels during the day on Saturday, my favorite being mortendk's "Mothership: To End All Bloated HTML" session. I am a huge, huge proponent of clean, minimal HTML and CSS, and one thing I've noticed since starting with Drupal is that everything gets its own div. Everything. Nested divs make me want to throw things across the room and curse repeatedly. (Well, maybe not that extreme, but close.) Morten's Mothership theme interests me mainly because he strives for the same thing I do; for yummy CSS and HTML and nothing extraneous. In his words, his goal is to "to get so clean html you can wipe youre ass in it!" I like that. And I liked his presentation.

I also enjoyed my coworkers @sethcohn and D's session on "Adding Wow, Bam, and Poof to your Design" (of course). I'm glad I came to work at a company with so many talented and intelligent people, who also like to have a good time!

Speaking of a good time, Drupal geeks love their beer. Just sayin'.

In all, I'm happy I attended my first of what I hope to be many more Drupal meetups. I met a few new people, including @zarabadoo, @thescaryclown, @timeril, @mortendk, @bedsheet, and at long last, after years and years of being friends through our blogs and other online forums, I met @nikkiana in person for the first time! The Drupal community consists of a lot of funny and intelligent people, and I look forward to meeting more of them in the future.