RobbieTheGeek.Com

Hi again all just figured that after the North Jersey Web Design Meetup last night that there could be new visitors stopping by the blog, so welcome all, especially folks that listened to me rant about Drupal and standards based design last night. It was an interesting meetup, a lot of folks that are new to web stuff, or not in their words, "very technical". This is strange to me considering that all aspects of my life are permeated with technology, from my job, to school, to my hobbies. Within a few minutes of people showing up at the Panera Bread in Fair Lawn, NJ, the conversation turned to Drupal and me doing intro to Drupal type walk throughs. This is always fun and exciting as you see people starting to understand how Drupal works at the simplest level, and that it is accessible to anyone. Then explaining at a little higher level how Drupal does things as opposed to Wordpress, or another blog-focused CMS.
I myself was working on my current project, trying desperately to figure out imagecache with CCK. When I get this all figured out I will write up how to get it all working, because I am finding all the documentation on this solution to be confusing, and not making sense to me. There are a few articles using imagecache over at Lullabot and on 2Bits.com. Hopefully this will all come together soon, so I can mover forward with other aspects of the project I am currently working on, since all other work on this project has ground to a halt.
I have previously written a few articles on books, podcasts and other technology resources that I use, read or listen too. A few new things that I am finding useful for fun and for productivity. I find myself using a nice little set of software to work on a live Drupal site, that has sort of coalesced over time as my suite of web development applications. Why I use these individual pieces of software are twofold, one they are free or very inexpensive and two they all work in unison and save me from thinking. The FTP client I use while doing the theming on a website is CyberDuck it is freeware, opensource, FTP client. It fufiills all my requirements, freeware, and it supports the text editor and CSS editor. When I say support I should say, in a very cool way allows me to choose to edit a PHP, HTML, or other text based file in Smultron and save it and it automatically FTPs the file back up to the site. This is also true for my CSS editor of choice called CSSEdit.
Smultron is a great lightweight open source text editor, that supports syntax highlighting. The best $30 I ever spent for software was on CSS Edit, this little application allows both textual and visual editing of CSS. This combination took me a few months to finally consolidate down to, but it has really made my development of websites go a lot smoother.
Lastly I have been using Twitter very frequently, and I wanted to mention it to folks that I highly suggest it as a way to keep folks updated on what is going on with you and what is going on with others that you know, should know, or wish you knew. It is like a persistent away message on the instant messenger of your choice except there is a community aspect and small conversations can happen around it. It is what I have jokingly called stalkerware, but in essence it is a way to quickly talk about what you are up to without stopping to write an entire blog posting about it, conceptually it is microblogging. I hope to hear from you and please add me to your friend in Twitter at http://twitter.com/robbiethegeek