SmithWeb.us

One of the systems I've lately inherited makes heavy use of Mongo for data storage, a data system I've not used previously. So, when the boss called tonight and said that his boss needed counts of an object in our system by state in the next 10 minutes my thinking went something like...

No problem, that's a simple SQL group-by....Oh, wait. This is mongo. Oh, crap! How do I do that?! It's a function; Map...Something.

I've joined the Cult of Mac.

Drupal Voices 175: Clay Shirky on Social Media Theory and Drupal
In his interview for Lullabot's Drupal Voices series, social media guru Clay Shirky made two points I found especially interesting, both of which have direct impact on how we design social sites.

DrupalCon Chicago is done. Now it's time to unpack, review and condense my notes, and begin to sort out how to integrate everything I learned into my processes going forward. In subsequent posts, I'll expand on each of the points below, but my goal at the moment is to lay out the biggest things I'm bringing back from the con.

In preparation for his upcoming keynote at DrupalCon Chicago, Dries has posted a request on his blog that Drupal users answer the question of what Drupal is to them. My answer to the question is:

Drupal is the lackey that I force to write the boring, repetitive code (e.g., log in/log out, change password, database CRUD operations) so that I can focus on the interesting problems.

For the past couple years, I've been using the contributed Recycled theme. I really love the theme, but it's time for a change. Though, frankly, I doubt I would have gotten there if Recycled had been available in a Drupal 7 version.

I've been working on a travel site for a friend, highlighting Costa Rica as a tourist destination. To express the things there are to see and do in Costa Rica, I've created four content types:

• Regions
  - areas of the country
• Destinations
  - places to go within Regions
• Tours
  - things you can do at a Destination
• Hotels
  - places to stay

Hotels and Destinations are linked to Regions by means of a Node Reference field and Tours link to Destinations in the same manner.

I've started working on getting the development version of Drupal 7 installed and running so I can get familiar with the changes that are coming and work on having a d7 version of my Post Reminder module ready when d7 hits production release.
No sooner had I installed the new version than I got my first error
Fatal error: Class 'PDO' not found in .../includes/database/database.inc on line 137

I completed version 1.0 of the Post-Reminder module last night. This version clears up the three major issues I had with the 0.7 version released previously. Users can now see a list of all their reminders from their account page, the Amount of Time field is validated as an integer on reminder creation/editing, and an error is displayed on the reminder creation form if the site administrator has not set any content types as permitting reminders.

Yesterday was the official end of my last class at Capella. Assuming I don't fail my final paper, and there's no rational reason to expect I would, I'll have my degree in hand in a few weeks.

A few months ago, Molly found out that Walking With Dinosaurs would be in town this week and bought Evan and I tickets as a way to celebrate the end of my school, his beginning Kindergarten, and the impending birth of the twins.