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

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

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p. After months of work with Jon, we're finally pleased to announce that 2 Guys Uncorked has launched!

As per our blog post, "2 Guys Uncorked is an innovative, easy to use website dedicated to reviewing wines that can be found at Trader Joe’s and Whole Foods (and generally, most any other well stocked wine store). We make it easy to figure out what wines to buy each week depending on where you’ll be drinking them."

This project has been great to work on and combines two of my passions: building websites and drinking wine.

During the construction of this site, I stumbled upon a lot of great Drupal tips, from streamlining things, to developing the site faster, and more. In future blog posts I'll be detailing these, including how to build a wine management system, nifty RSS tricks with CCK, and some general theming tricks.

If there is anything you see on the site that you're interested in, please leave a comment and in a future posts I'll be sure to delve into how that aspect works. Look for a full featured Drupal writeup soon too.

The new Stafford American Legion Post 290 web site has finally launched! This new site is quite an update from the old one and really gives the post a lot more control over their website, along with advancing them in to the web 2.0 age.

I volunteered to build this website since I’m part of the Sons of the American Legion, because both my father and grandfathers are and were in the American Legion. My dad is currently maintaining the content on the site I’m and taking care of all of the technical issues.

This is the first time my dad has used Drupal but he has quickly picked it up. The ability to edit pages directly by navigating to them and just clicking “edit” has made his life super easy and he can just focus on the content without having to worry about HTML and uploading files. The menu system allows him to rearrange the site and add new pages with ease.

This Thanksgiving I’m certainly very thankful for my talents & gifts and being able to help out this post, greatly simplifying their website maintenance and allowing any of the members to easily update content now. It’s truly great to see how Drupal can empower groups to do more with their website without needing to be tech savvy :-)

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p. That's right, the all new Mom Blog Network has finally launched!

This site is a very similar to Digg and allows moms to submit interesting links around the internet and/or add their blogs, allowing other members to vote on the content, determining what's hot and what's not. There are RSS feeds and email updates, delivering the latest mommy news to you each day.

And I must say, the site is highly useful. I visit it everyday to check on it but find myself clicking around and reading about all sorts of interesting things. Quite cool to see it being adopted so fast :-)

For this project we wrote some custom modules that control a proprietary system of algorithms to reveal hot topics, blogs, and users, both by time based, vote based, and category based filters. It's an extensive system and it's been written to be extremely high performance in mind---very noticeable as you click around the site.

Mom Blog Network also joins MothersClick in becoming part of our all new platform, ParentsClick Network, Inc., a new digital media venture to serve the needs of parents. It's going to be a busy 2008 that's for sure :-)

Stay tuned for updates!

Well it’s been almost a year since this site has had an overhaul. The previous design, “Orange Mint” was a 4.7 beta site and held up well over the past year, despite it being very out of date.

With all the changes going on in my life (forthcoming blog posts to explain more) I decided to redesign this site and upgrade it to Drupal 5.

This new design I call “Black & Blue” and reflects a more mature me, overcoming various “bumps and bruises” over the past year :-)

Well I’ve been so busy with work lately, I haven’t had much time to post this blog. Going to try and work on that more this year, maybe as a new after-the-fact New Years resolution, or something to that effect ;-)

But one of the projects that I recently worked on that I can finally talk about is the new Sony Musicbox website, which actually launched back in November 2006. Sony Musicbox is a website that hosts music videos for all of Sony’s artists. Users can come and watch videos, comment & rate them, add them to their favorites, and also add their own tags to videos too. Users can also add friends to their buddylists and write in their very own blog!

The new MTV.co.uk website has finally launched, completely powered by Drupal 4.7+ (plus a few theming patches that I wrote for Drupal 5.0).

For this project, I was one of the co-architects where my primary role was to figure out how to make Drupal look like MTV wanted--not a simple task to say the least :-) The intial MTV designs had over a dozen complex CSS files, along with hundreds of images. Additionally, each piece of content could be themed differently to fit the channel (e.g., MTVUK, MTV2, VH1, Flux, etc.) it was associated with--on occasion, multiple channels too. Under each channel there were different sections that all had different types of layouts, from 1-3 columns, to various amounts of associated content (e.g., blocks).

One of the biggest problems I run into when creating Drupal sites is a proper admin theme. Sure, there are various techniques to have a different admin theme, but often I want to integrate that into the current design. Many times that is ok, but the real problem was the admin menu--where the heck could I place it, it often didn't fit the design I was working on.

Well I thought about it a bit, then I took some HTML, theming logic, and a bit of CSS (and JS to help out our IE friends), and voila, an admin menu bar for Drupal that doesn't interfere with your design.

At the end of last week’s TWiT episode, Leo and company talk about the new TWiT.tv site. A clip of that can be listened to below.

Also last week on the Lullabot podcast, Jeff and I talked with Leo about his new site. Have a listen as we talk about the site, how it was conceived and built, and discuss a few of the problems we ran into.

After many months, the new TWiT.tv has launched! This has been an amazing project to work on and certainly my best work to date. I originally started on this project back in March 2006 when I joined Lullabot in its infancy as their first senior web architect. From the start I was ecstatic; TWiT was the first podcast I ever listened to and to be working closely with Leo Laporte to develop his new site was an amazing opportunity.

From the start, I took over this project completely—from developing to managing to client interactions to acting as the sole architect of the site—my skillset was stretched through a wide gamut. The project started with Leo sending me the design comps from Arktyp. They were certainly beautiful and well thoughout!