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I know yall do QA, however, you aren't testing for power users apparently. Check this out. I like to build and deploy drupal websites. Drupal websites require constant code updates, as well as test servers, so I like to use shell to move files around. However, it seems, whenever I move files around, every single files and directory gets assigned permissions 664, or 644 -- i forgot. The fix is running this command in the unix shell:

chmod -R ugo=rX,u+w ~

Content type madness is a common disease that effects drupal sites of all sizes. It is most frequently seen in drupal 5 and 6 sites, as result of content construction kit.

It is a serious, chronic disease that can result in long term damage to a site's agility, usability , and information architecture.

Common symptoms of content type madness include:

1. More than 11 content type*
2. Dubious distinctions between content types [e.g. press release, vs. annoucement, vs. news item, vs. alert]
3. No use of drupal taxonomies
4. Overuse of views
5. Users of site reporting feelings of malaise, and depression after working with content on the site.

Frequent complications of content type madness include:

1. Improperly set content defaults, ranging from internationalization, to comment settings, to publishing workflow, to user permissions.
2. Presentation inconsistency due to the proliferation of node-[type].tpl.php files.
3. Switch statements that exceed 200 lines in the hook_preprocess_node(&$vars) function in the template.php file.

Treatment Options:

Treatment of content type madness is usually difficult,  time consuming, and often requires the services of drupal specialists. In severe cases, treatment requires a total redesign and refresh of content. If you have never attempted to treat content type madness, BACK UP THE DATABASE BEFORE YOU TRY.

The Time of Webdesign, alistapart.com, published an article "In Defense of Eye Candy". Yes, I agree: people like nice looking things. I'd even go as far as to say that surveys, and studies don't necessarily do justice to how biased all of us are to visually pleasing things. I also think many people aren't aware of the real reasons why they might choose design A, over B. I have no doubt, that when it comes to design, the reality is as dubious as the results of this study.

The reason why I disagree with the article are:

The vast majority of projects [e.g. under 50k] put too much time into eye candy not too little. This time is rarely well spent.

With smaller projects, the questions that tend to need to be solved first are as follows:

1. Does it work?
2. Can I explain the purpose and value of the website to my 80 year old grandmother.
3. Is the messaging coherent, and worth reading?
4. Does the design succeed in not getting in the way of the main objectives of the website?
5. Can we actually built/adapt with the navigation/IA rules that we decided were important in our meetings?

Too often however, I've found that "what color should links be" stonewall questions like: "can people figure out what a link is?".

I've lost weeks, if not months of my life sitting in meetings debating the pro's of design A (with fake content), vs design b (also with fake content) only to launch a mediocre website with mediocre results. Turns out, gradients don't convert customers -- no loss though, good designers tend to be too expensive to actually give most companies a return on their investment. This is not to say "know your place." Rather, I'm saying, spend money on what makes you money.

In my humble opinion, the difference between the top 1.0% and the top 0.1 percent of websites is eyecandy. However, the difference between the top 50% and top 1.0% is all funciton, and communications, baby. So the cliche goes, no need to put lipstick on a pig.

One Rant:

As far as the importance of the look and feel of a submit button, I call 100% bullshit. There's no harm in showing users a form that looks like a form, in whatever archaic browser they happen to be using. Oh, and BTW -- good luck making that submit button work as well as a native one in all browsers you need to support. Really, I should bill my clients $400.00 for a submit button that is yellow with shadows? Get real, or offer me a job.

Job posting is here:
http://groups.drupal.org/node/21537

Use my contact form if interested. Austinites are given uber-priority, but currently the strongest applicants are outside of Austin.

I set up a twitter account today. It wasn't out of the blue, I was installing the twitter module for a client (works great btw). Yet, I'd be a liar if I denied flirting with the idea of twittering. After about 3 hours, I decided I didn't want to twitter.

I've begun a quest in finding the opposite of twitter, for I feel that quest will reward me with happiness.

Highlight: WYSIWYG API Gets Top Spot With 97% Growth (Feb 8th - March 29th)

Ever wondered which modules' userbase was growing fastest?

With a bit of simpleXML, 2 hours of boredom, and drupal.org's usage charts, I can provide an answer. Personally I thought the results were rather interesting.

This list only includes projects that got 6000 downloads or more last week. I picked 6000, because otherwise, ubercart wouldn't show up.

I had this weird idea: drupal has become so complex, with so many moving parts, that understanding the big picture is like predicting the weather. I forgot how long ago this was, but I know this would have been an accurate report:

PLANETWIDE DRUPAL REPORT [sometime in 2008]

Nothing makes you feel "not so special" like having the majority of your daily comments -- that pass captchas mind you --  left by bottom feeding SEO consultants. Now before I explain why these consultants are bottom feeders, and why you could teach an 8 year old chimp to do their job* (which they charge upwards $75.00 by the hour!... adding insult to injury) let me tell you why I can't defend myself.

A friend of mine, Anthony Alofsin, started a blog. He's primarily know for his contributions to the field of architecture, as a professor, and author of over 20 books on the subject. His interest in blogging, however, is literature, and -- i think -- challenging, and subverting a few of today's fashionable institutions of thought.

His first entry contains a manifesto:

Beyond mere entertainment, literature, achieved through writing, can still be subversive, can still seduce, and undermine. When words move beyond simplistic entertainment, they deal with ideas and themes that exist across time. Literature brings us to think about concepts that no longer appear in any discourse and are not so present in the dynamic digital world: life, death, loss, dignity, excellence, paradox, respect, irony, civility, altruism, all the varieties of tragedy, and joy too. Also, good literature provides the pleasure of words. Just as bloggers get immense pleasure in putting their words together, so does the literary writer. The language and syntax may be different, but underneath the satisfaction is not so different.

I'm reminded of George Orwell's 1946 essay, The Prevention of Literature. Writes Orwell:

Newspapers will presumably continue until television technique reaches a higher level, but apart from newspapers it is doubtful even now whether the great mass of people in the industrialized countries feel the need for any kind of literature. ...Probably novels and stories will be completely superseded by film and radio productions. Or perhaps some kind of low grade sensational fiction will survive, produced by a sort of conveyor-belt process that reduces human initiative to the minimum.

He goes on predict today's publishing industry.

Even more machine-like is the production of short stories, serials, and poems for the very cheap magazines. Papers such as the Writer abound with advertisements of literary schools, all of them offering you ready-made plots at a few shillings a time. Some, together with the plot, supply the opening and closing sentences of each chapter. Others furnish you with a sort of algebraical formula by the use of which you can construct plots for yourself. Others have packs of cards marked with characters and situations, which have only to be shuffled and dealt in order to produce ingenious stories automatically. It is probably in some such way that the literature of a totalitarian society would be produced, if literature were still felt to be necessary. Imagination — even consciousness, so far as possible — would be eliminated from the process of writing. Books would be planned in their broad lines by bureaucrats, and would pass through so many hands that when finished they would be no more an individual product than a Ford car at the end of the assembly line. It goes without saying that anything so produced would be rubbish; but anything that was not rubbish would endanger the structure of the state. As for the surviving literature of the past, it would have to be suppressed or at least elaborately rewritten.

1955- 20?X - THE MARKET RULES CULTURE WITH A SILVER TELEVISED FIST

What Orwell couldn't have predicted was that it was the market (as a social institution) -- not a totalitarian government -- that exiled literature to die alone on a deserted island. He couldn't have forseen that the that his day's newspaper, and radio ads -- not the marxist and facist movements that he feared at the time -- would fulfill his fears.

TV: A SECRET CONSPIRACY OF HUMAN NATURE, SCIENCE, AND TECHNOLOGY

Television is the fist that beats most American's minds into the familiar dull submission of conformity and lack of imagination.

-- Shut the fuck up donny. Cowabunga dude. Don't have a cow, man. What's your favorite show? --

Ad people pay for eyeballs, and TV producers try to capture as many eyeballs as they can. TV isn't stupid because a conspiracy wants us to be stupid: its stupid because we all tend to gravitate towards the same stupid things, and if the goal is eyeballs, go with the fart joke, guy getting hit in the nuts, celebrity freak out. Almost no one can turn away.

The INTERNET: IN A SURPRISE MOVE, HUMAN NATURE, SCIENCE, AND TECHNOLOGY OVERTHROWS ITSELF

So far, the effect of the internet on the ad driven culture of the last 40 years is so brutally apparent that, its hardly worth reiterating. The twilight that's enveloped newspapers, and magazines shall fall over television as we know too.

Clearly, this trend is not bad news for literature. However, the internet isn't a golden angel from the sky. More importantly, don't listen to ANYTHING made of gold that descends from the air, for its tongue speaks only lies and treachery!

The internet wave -- in so far as a disruptive cultural influence will not stop -- recession or no recession. Its a communications tool, and the only human urge more predictable than sex is the urge to communicate.

In so far as literature is concerned, I think the trends benefit writers who blur fiction/non-fiction, and pack the most force in the smallest space. There's enough bloody subject matter writers on the internet -- what's needed are writers that can write small, beautiful works, regularly -- and can do so in a way that -- apart from being beautiful as prose -- evokes strong emotions, or makes people laugh. In otherwords, god like figures.