ted serbinski – a blog about drupal, macs, productivity, health, and bmws

Just in time for Mother’s Day, the 2nd Annual “Cookbook for Moms” is now for sale! This year we have teamed up with Missy Chase Lapine, author of “The Sneaky Chef” in helping us raise money for the Boys and Girls Club.

Moms have submitted their recipes and the community has voted for the top 40. From there, those recipes were exported from the site and into the Blurb publishing system, where they were meticulously edited, laid out, and designed up for an awesome looking cookbook.

From the press release:

The 2nd Annual “Cookbook for Moms” is an original publication, featuring a unique collection of family recipes and personal stories that have been submitted and voted on by moms online.

“As a mom who understands the importance of family mealtimes, it’s great to have Missy contributing to our efforts,” said Andra Davidson, president of MothersClick. “This cookbook is our Mother’s Day gift to the members of our online community and moms everywhere. The concept of sharing recipes is very much in line with MothersClick’s overall mission of exchanging parenting information and advice between moms. And most satisfying of all: this purchase truly gives back, as all of our proceeds will support the kids being helped by The Boys & Girls Clubs.”

“This is a unique collaboration of community and a novel fundraiser,” says Roxanne Spillett, President, Boys & Girls Clubs of America. “We appreciate the ongoing charitable efforts of MothersClick on our behalf.”

Featuring over 40 original recipes, the “Cookbook for Moms” offers a treasured collection of family favorites, contributed by moms from across the world, recipes that are quick and healthy for busy families and dishes that can be prepared with children. These are recipes that have been voted best by moms online, and selected entries include a personal description about the dish and each contributor.

Last week when I was in NYC for MothersClick meetings, I met for an interview with Jerad Bitner and Dave Burns, both developers at SonyBMG. These guys run a site called DrupaLMAO, a Diggnation inspired site that posts weekly videos talking about the Drupal community.

SimpleFeed was released a little over 4 months ago and has been working out very well. However, it still wasn’t fast enough—-at least for me. It could work faster, it could be more efficient. So over the past month or two I’ve really reworked some of the internal logic, making things much more efficient. I also borrowed a tip from FeedAPI about hashing entire feeds to check for updates faster and simplified the unique hash of each feed item to be much faster to compute and compare.

What you eat can be summed up succinctly with the phrase “junk in, junk out”, meaning, if you don’t eat well, you’re going to have bad outputs (e.g., can’t concentrate, always tired, illness, etc.).

The key to productivity is to complete some task, and repeat. After a while you’ll get enough done that you can say you’re actually being productive. But often or not (especially for me), something creeps in and hinders this: procrastination. “Oh, I’m too busy right now” or “This is too complex to think about, I’ll do it tomorrow when I’m feeling more refreshed”. We’ve all been there, done that. Probably still do that.

When I redesign my blog, I like to release the previous theme out into the open for anyone to make use of. I did this last year with the Orange Mint theme release and it worked out well.

Attached below is a zip file of my “Black & Blue” Drupal theme. The code is licensed under the GPL so you are free to do with it as you wish. I just ask that you link back to my blog if you make use of it :)

So why not commit this to Drupal as a theme project? Well I have no intentions to maintain it, no desire to extract into a more generic and usable theme, and I have to catch plane to San Francisco in a few. But, if you want to make and extract this into a Drupal project, by all means please do. Enjoy!

About 9 months ago I redesigned this blog unveiling the black & blue theme (picture 1 & picture 2). For a while the redesign was great and reflected my current state of mind—the previous year had been a bit bumpy and the black & blue was to be symbolic of the “bruises” along the way.

With this new design, however, things are starting to blossom and I am entitling this new design “Spring Breeze” —- indicating a refreshing amount of new change coming in the next few months, which I will be blogging about in more detail when the time comes. Not to mention, I can’t wait for the tracks to reopen :D

I’ve been a big fan of the book Getting Things Done for a few years now and it’s great to see the rise in popularity of this book and it’s concepts, especially in dedicated GTD sites like 43 Folders and dedicate apps like OmniFocus.

If you don’t know what GTD is or about, I recommend watching this video of David Allen talking at Google about GTD. It’s a great refresher or introduction.

Today, we announced the official launch of our new widget and API system for Mom Blog Network, the “sister site” to MothersClick. We’re excited not only because these products are great new features for our users, but they also highlight the successful development of our community application.

As an extension of our custom, Drupal-based white-label solution that powers the ParentsClick Network, our widget system ties in directly to new content being generated across our network of sites. In the case of Mom Blog Network, as moms vote on various posts making them popular, our widget system catches this data and sends it to a custom PHP processing engine that dynamically builds and serves the widgets. The advantage to this system is it allows us to support millions of widgets without invoking Drupal each time to serve them — we like our servers :)

Continue reading on for examples and more…

In a previous post, I posted about some of the most gorgeous desktop wallpapers I’ve found on the internet.

Today, I’ve found another great resource: Really stunning desktop wallpapers over at Smashing Magazine, a great webzine on design.

Definitely worth checking it out, I especially liked the Mac OS X Simpson one :)