bill tsukuda

Not that anyone will notice, but this site has been migrated away from Media Temple’s grid server to a small VPS. If you’ve ever tried to run a Drupal site on “the grid”, I’m pretty sure you know why I’ve moved. Media Temple’s mysql performance, unless you purchase a “mysql container”, is dismal at best. This site, which was running pretty bare-bones as far Drupal module usage goes, was taking up to four seconds for each page to load when logged in since the database queries took a horrendously long time. I’d been on Media Temple since way back (when they still offered old-school shared hosting), and I think I was much more pleased with the service/performance/price level then, and have been just suffering through things silently as they’ve segued into “the grid”.

I've been working on a couple of sites the last week, and and both of them ended up using the "Popular Content" block from Drupal's Statistics module (not used on this site). One thing that I really don't like about that block is that is uses so much vertical space, so to make it all webified I decided to turn it into tabs. I know there's a couple of modules like Quicktabs that allow for easily configurable tabbed blocks, but this was going to be one of the few tabbed blocks (in one case the only one) on the site, and it seemed like overkill to install a new module to "tab" a single block. I decided to just use the jQuery Tools tabs plugin to fix the block.

One little project that I wanted to get done on this site was to have the monthly archive links (over there on the left) load a list of post titles via AJAX and list them underneath the month when clicked. For some reason, I thought this was how Blogger was set up, but I can’t seem to find any pages that work that way. This was a fairly straight forward project that took about 2 hours (or something like that—work, eating, and all that stuff makes me unable to time things correctly).

Modifying the Drupal Book module wasn’t as bad as I thought it would be, but not as good as I’d hoped. I wanted a simple output of thumbnails from “pages” within the portfolio book, but since Book uses the menu system to maintain links rather than node relationships, I had to tinker around a little more than I’d hoped to. Fortunately, the table of contents for the book is placed inside a template_preprocess function, so it wasn’t that hard to override the book navigation function.

After a little bit of thinking I’ve decided to go ahead and base my portfolio section on Drupal’s Book module. It has a few things going for it that I don’t feel like redoing:

• Drag-and-drop re-ordering of items
• Hierarchal structure
• Built-in menu block

The urge to be productive again made me look at the website I built four years ago and realize it’s a bit of a mess. It was a crude attempt at bridging a Movable Type install (which was written in PERL) and whatever I knew about PHP at the time to make something of a dynamic site. After being a paid web-monkey for about three years now I decided to finally take the plunge and re-do the site using the buzzword compliant Drupal (especially since I’ve been working with it for so long).