My web story

...or how I grew to know that Drupal can solve many problems.

Back in the mid-1990's the world had just begun to learn of Mosaic and the early versions of a new markup language called Hypertext. Much like the child discovering Applesoft it was a fantastic thing. Text could be made to blink and well, bilnk. The potential of the medium was immediately apparent to many even if the ultimate impacts were still underestimated.

As with all new inventions the web can be used for good and evil. On April 19, 1995 in the hours following the tragic bombing of the federal building in Oklahoma City, the media lacked for solid information. Persistent speculation on the broadcasts of the networks suggested The Internet might somehow be responsible for the morning's tragedy. The need for a way for the worldwide internet community to come together in support of Oklahoma City was critical. The first Internet Sympathy Card was born later that night and went online in the early hours of April 21. From a technical standpoint the effort involved simple web forms, email, a bunch of hand-editing and some Frontier scripting.

In 1995 a program surfaced to make managing content on websites easier. Clay Basket was a scripting tool designed to make updating websites easier and keeping the content straight. Over the next years Clay Basket merged back into Frontier where it's roots were. By that time things seemed pretty slick with this online thing. Online Brochures replaced their print predecessors.

The fall of 1995 brought the first cybercast of a college football game. Man were those days great. With laptops few and far between, not to mention expensive as all get out, we setup a mobile production studio by carting desktop computers to and fro. Not only did the desktops get schlepped from location to location but we used this stuff called film that used to go in cameras. Man we were pretty advanced for the day.

By the close of 1996 I'd added a gig as an Internet Editor to my bag of tricks. Not long after starting we created a whole new brand that combined several related publications online. Scripts played a key roll in several parts of many sites like a comprehensive list of all personal home pages at Colorado State University and another that converted the university's stream of emailed press releases into web pages. As an aside it is a great way to win friends when your script doesn't know about press embargoes and merrily publishes embargoed material.

In the midst of the .com boom an offer to join forces with Rivals.com led to moving away from running that site on my own server. At the same time Frontier had become more expensive than I could support for the things I was doing. So around 2000 I started doing a couple sites using Zope to maintain them. The transition from Frontier's usertalk to Python was comfortable as was the similarity in the object database that powers both systems.

Time passed and I was doing more hardware support and call center management instead of web development. Keeping my fingers in the web, however, had set about moving one of my Zope object databases and found that I had no end of trouble. Although I eventually got the data back I was more convinced that I wanted a system that wasn't so dependent on a single database that I didn't have a lot of power to manipulate. So in the late winter of 2003 the search for a new content management system was on and this Drupal 4.1 system looked great. It worked with MySQL and it had an incredibly developed taxonomy system which my background in life sciences made easy to grok and wonderful to work with. With a few weeks of testing and countless installs I flipped the switch and posted my first blog post using Drupal in March of 2003.

In the years since my work in the community has gone up and down as time permitted. There are a few dozen Drupal-powered websites on the web. They run the gamut from simple 2-3 page 'brochure ware' sites with the power to expand to large multi-site implementations that use complex stored procedures to manage new data and legacy data side by side. Late in 2007 I made the fortunate decision to make Drupal a major focus of what I do. What this means is a variety of things from a bit of spit polishing on existing sites to helping new sites get off the ground. It also means joining the Drupal Association and taking some classes to expand my understanding and learn some ninja tricks and trips. It also means doing more work in the issue queues and getting a couple of modules that I've had brewing out the door. It even means getting more comfortable using IRC which is one of the easiest steps.

While showing a friend some of my recent Drupal work recently he asked in an instant message, "is there an aspect of ur life that drupal isn't a part of?"

Not really.