Nick Lewis: The Blog

The other night, while working at "my office", I ran into a hipster who I knew from high school. We cycled through the usual cliche selections on the coffeeshop conversation menu: discussing atheism, exsistentialism, and the question "what makes one piece of art better than another", ect. However, the conversation soon turned to an ad-based artsy/alternative publication he had secured some seed funding for.

His goals struck me as difficult; he sought to build a community of volunteer contributors, with revenue coming from ads (two red flags which become a uber-red flag because of their dependencies on each other, imho). I began giving him some advice, and ideas -- and it was at that moment that I realized Drupal, in terms of design, planning, and development isn't an inherently geeky subject, or skill. Looking over my projects over the past few months, it appears to be a platform which attracts the artists and musicians, the progressives, the forward thinking businesses, the world changers -- those whom, in the words of Apple, think different.

A beautiful reminder that some Americans are still awake. Below is some Georgetown Law student's retort to Barriento's arguments that spying on citizens without a warrent is legal.

"When you're a law student, they tell you if say that if you can't argue the law, argue the facts. They also tell you if you can't argue the facts, argue the law. If you can't argue either, apparently, the solution is to go on a public relations offensive and make it a political issue... to say over and over again "it's lawful", and to think that the American people will somehow come to believe this if we say it often enough. In light of this, I'm proud of the very civil civil disobedience that was shown here today."

For the 4 of you who may have wondered, I did not forgot about my promises of delievering a new super-theme for developers. I've in fact been working non-stop on it. Bugs, new insights, and new techniques have all contributed to the delay. So here's the latest update.

Major changes since last post

1. I've dropped the nifty corner's technique in favor of rico's curved corners. The rico method is far less buggy, does not require additional CSS, is easier to implement, and appears to be licensed under the more flexible Apache 2.0 License.

Tip 1: Use the word robust. And use it often. Every 5th time you use the word robust, be sure to combine it with the word "scalable". e.g. "Our vendors offer robust, and scalable solutions to the enterprise-level CMS markets."

Tip 2: Speaking of which, also use the words vendor, and end-user. Make it a point to distinguish the two as often as possible. e.g. "Well, the latest release of bloatus 5.6 offers a variety of features, and improvements that both vendors, and end-users will welcome."

By making such distinctions, you will prove to your audience that you understand the business-side of content management. Open source communists emphasize API's, collective intelligence, the ingenuity of people working under tight resources, and the human desire to create meaning out of being a part of something larger than themselves. Intelligent, business-minded people know that such fairy tales are hogwash. Quality, business driven, CMS solutions have proven robustness, and scalability that Drupal can't match. Let

"Oh... great....", says the audience of drupal users, "another free drupal theme -- that's almost good as another free bag of baby vomit."

So Why a New Theme? 

While there are many drupal themes for us to choose from, let's face it: most of them are either ugly (I'm not naming names), don't work on any browser besides firefox (way too many to list), or are way too complex to be effectively extended and customized (echm: friends-eclectic, and civicspace... I'm looking at you). Not to mention, a large number of themes are merely ports that weren't designed with drupal in mind.

Some people like SNL's Stuart Smallie (OCD, child of alchoholic, and has an eating disorder) pin messages on their bathroom mirror that that are engraved with phrases such as "people like me", "easy does it". In a similar tradition, I need to pin this list of sterling advice from 37signals on my door, bathroom mirror, and the inside of my eyelid. Some of these maxims are hugely important for people working with drupal. For example:

Fight Features: Build half a product, not a half-ass product

So Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols says Drupal is hard to install. I disagree: its hard to design a good looking site; its hard to write content that people bother reading; its hard to organize content so people can find it; its hard to focus your mind on key features, and avoid making your website a portal O' bloat packed with features that serve no particular purpose.

Its particular hard to keep your site up to date. I swear that staying up with, and enduring major updates is about as difficult as quiting smoking AND starting to floss. Moreover getting 12+ sites to behave well when running off of one codebase with 8 different admins -- most of whom may not know what goes on behind the interface -- is a constant battle of the wits -- mainly with me, myself, and my ingenious stupidity.

I've mentioned Larry King before. A few paragraphs after mentioning him, I realized how bored I was, and ended my post. I made note that it probably wasn't a coincidence that I was overcome by such boredom after mentioning Larry King.

So, Bill Maher guest hosted Larry King's crappy, boring, please-pour-lysergic-acid-over-my-body-as-an-alternative-to -watching-the-horse-shit of a show, and after watching it, I say: fire Larry King, that dumb, movie reviewer, talentless, elitist chucking bastard, and launch a phoenix from it ashes [quicktime of Bill Maher guest hosting].

I just noticed that someone came into this blog via the search, "dog lamp-post sex position."

Now -- I'm not exactly sure what aspect of this I find more disturbing. 1) The fact that someone, somewhere felt they needed knowledge to which this search might reveal or, 2) the mental picture that was evoked by the combination of words.

For you short attention span, impatient types, here is the bottom line link that this best god damn link -- ever.

Now for that link with commentary: I'm asked directly, at least once a week, where someone should host a civicspace or drupal site. I always say site5.com. Its not that site5.com pays me, or I hope that they someday will. With my hand on the holy bible, I swear that now -- as I have in the past, and will in the future -- openly admit any conflicts of interest that involve the dollar sign when discussing anything.