Motiv Designs

I have created a new Drupal project website that can be found under the Motiv Drupal Projects block in my right sidebar. On this new project site I am focusing on Drupal SEO techniques and using arguments in views. I also plan on leveraging the context module whenever possible, as I feel it will be an easier to manage system than the default Drupal block system. I will most likely be using Panels as well and passing arguments into the panels to display content dynamically on my pages. The idea of the site is to provide useful information on popular types of vacations and popular vacation destinations around the world. Along with this useful information, the site will also provide up to date vacation deals to these destinations. My new Drupal website is called My Vacation Deals.

Being a professional Drupal web developer, I try to practice my skills in as many environments as possible. That way if the need arises, I can still do my job efficiently. Because of this, I switch between a Macbook Pro laptop and my Windows Workstation to work with HTML, CSS, and PHP code. I choose to use a Linux web server environment, more commonly referred to as a LAMP stack. I do this because of the many advantages of running a Linux web server, which include security and advantages with running Drupal, more specfically Drush to manage my Drupal sites. I have heard a lot of good things about the Notepad ++ source code editor and Windows Notepad replacement, but just finally decided to check it out today. I have to say, so far I am very impressed.  Learn more about why I switched after the jump.

I have been doing Drupal on the side for a while, but within the last year I have gotten really serious about it. I ended up quitting my full-time job doing search engine optimization in the e-commerce and automotive industries to specifically do Drupal development and Drupal consulting in October of 2009. Since then I have created several sites for clients and have been involved on several other contract projects in conjunction with other companies.

I did a website project for a client recently, using the Concrete5 CMS. The site was for the Ontario Blind Sports Association, so website accessibility was a major concern. After starting the project it became evident that perhaps Concrete5 was not the most accessible CMS, but I adapted some custom code into the site in order to get what the client needed. It wasn't perfect, but there was nothing that the Concrete5 CMS offered in it's addons to achieve a text resize function for those with vision impairments.

I have been toying around with the Managing News and Tattler flavors of Drupal for a while, and recently decided to launch a couple websites to really test them out. I build the first website specifically for Drupal News and follows all the top Drupal news sources for the lastest content with Managing News. The other site I built was a site following all the latest Drupal Buzz from any source that is covering the Drupal keywords I entered using the Tattler app.

Avira Antivir Personal Free Anti Virus is a great piece of security software that handles protecting basically all versions of Windows from viruses. It is very lightweight compared to commercial products like Symantec and even F-Prot, which I have both used in the past. The only draw back to this software is that it updates randomly each day, which could be a bit of a pain if you are busy doing something. Avira offers other security applications on their site, as well as commercial versions of their Antivir Anti Virus software.

It has been a long time coming, mainly because I run several Drupal sites under one multi-site, and had to update the main install first, but I have finally updated the site to Drupal 6. Drupal 5 is basically out of date at this point, as community development on Drupal 7 is already in the works. There are some basic enhancements that have been made to Drupal 6 that make it a much better CMS, right out of the box so to speak.

ImgBurn is a free image burning software that allows the burning of CD, DVD, HD-DVD, and Blu-ray discs. It has a pretty slick interface, and should be pretty straightforward. If you are confused, you can check out their website. *Update 3/22/2010 - This software now contains spyware in it's installation files which cannot be turned off. This is in the latest version 2.5.1.0. Previous versions don't seem to have included the spyware. It is advised not to use this software at this point. I have removed all links to the site and files at this point.

Teamspeak is a great application to have around for keeping your hands free of typing while trying to chat with a group of people. All you need is a mic and some speakers, or a headset. This app is mostly used for gaming, but can be used for groups of virtually unlimited amounts of people, as long as you are NOT selling slots on the server. You can also license the software which allows you to do so, but we are pimping the fact that you can use this for talking to large amounts of people as long as you have the right codec set, or bandwidth available. I personally have been using Teamspeak for over 8 years, and it has always satisfied my needs for communication with my gaming friends and other friends online. It is much less commercialized than Ventrilo, and therefore makes my list of favorite files. It is more of an app for the community.

Mozilla Thunderbird is the awesome email counterpart to the ever popular Mozilla Firefox browser. Mozilla has once again created a great, free, open source emailing client. It has built in learning capabilities to combat spam, and can handle multiple email accounts. Aside from that, the Mozilla community also creates addons for Thunderbird, just like they do for Firefox. This means you can extend the already great functionality of the Thunderbird email client to fit more of your personal needs.