Alexander's Blog

After a more than a couple 24 hour coding marathons today I am very proud to announce that Dialogo Digital (http://dialogodigital.com, #EditoresDialogo) launched it's redesign to the public. The modern design was conceived and created by web designer Joel Martínez of String Puerto Rico (http://stringpr.com/) in late September 2009. It took me around 8 weeks to convert Joel's standards compliant XHTML into a full Drupal theme.

Three main templates were developed: one for the front page, one for the news sections, and one for the news articles.

PG Engineering Solutions (http://pges.net), a Puerto Rico based Engineering firm in charge of developing projects such as the San Juan, Puerto Rico Urban Train is now using Drupal for it's web site.

I built this site in only one week using a vanilla Drupal 6 distribution (http://drupal.org/drupal-6.15). A premium theme from TopNotchThemes (http://www.topnotchthemes.com) was used in order to reduce both development time and cost.

I just enabled the Update module in one of my Drupal installations, already knowing that it was going to notify me and my users to death about security updates. I had heard before of a command line utility called Drush that allows you to download, and update modules with simple commands a la apt-get install xyz, apt-get update xyz.

According to 3i/PricewaterhouseCoopers, in the first three months of the 2000, a record US $22 billion of venture capital was pumped into a record 1330 Internet start up deals in the US alone - the same number of deals and more than twice as much money as in the whole of 1998.* Worldwide in 2000, business plans raised nearly $200 billion of external function for start ups, management buyouts and expansion - two-thirds of tit for technology businesses.

Visual Design for the Modern Web

I went to Borders - a religious practice - looking for a book that re-introduced me to the color theory, but with a focus on how to apply it to the web I found this 341 page jewel.

Since I began programming in PHP in 2005, I was also deeply involved with all kinds of technical stuff - PHP, MySQL, JavaScript and later on HTTPRequestObjects, YUI, Prototype, JQuery, Zend Framework and finally Drupal. Yet until recently - that is - today, I felt I possessed strong web development skills but not so strong web design skills.

In the field that I work often the difference between a successful project and a failed one is learning previously unknown technologies literally from one day to the other, then applying what you just learned right there on the spot. Time being one of the most valuable resources yet most limited constraints on web development projects, learning fast is key - and I'll do whatever I need to learn faster.

Although you cannot buy time because time itself is priceless, when buying a book I feel like I'm buying time at a price infinitely cheaper than the price of time.

I need to construct a newsticker for Diálogo Digital. We have been re-redesigning our news site for about 8 weeks now (except for the web designer that prepared the plain HTML/CSS files) I am alone. Initially I felt inclined to use a community provided (contrib) module, but here were my options:

• http://drupal.org/project/newsticker It is built for Drupal 6, uses JQuery's serialscroll plugin, outputs the newsticker into a block. Does not use Drupal's node system.

• http://drupal.org/project/views_ticker Built for Drupal 5 only, so it wasn't really an option.

This post is continued from my previous post In programming there's no hand-holding, just like in the Army

My friends often ask me "why did you join the Army?" and "what did you learn from the Army?". Because they obviously haven't been to it, they can only appreciate it from the perspective of the mainstream media which all it shows are the same15 to 30 second footage clips of marines patrolling the streets of Baghdad or Kabul, or bloodied dead people lying on the floor.