Star Shaped - A weblog of knitting, beer, and Drupal goodness.

DrupalCamp Montreal 2009

aubrey — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 02:53:34 +0000

The DrupalCamp Montreal 2009 crowd!

This past weekend, myself, along with a few cohorts at Commonplaces (@sethcohn, @himerus, @bymiche, and @ebeyrent) traveled by van up to the faraway land of Canada to attend DrupalCamp Montreal! My coworkers each presented at least one session over the two day camp, and I was there to cheer them on from the sidelines.

Among some of my favorite sessions were, of course, my coworker Jake Strawn's presentation on Advanced 960.gs theming with his awesome Omega theme, my coworker Michelle Lauer's presentation on Advanced Views: Arguments and Relationships, and my boss Erich Beyrent's case study on Twolia.com, a site I worked on a little bit at the very end of the project when I first started working for Commonplaces.

I also enjoyed Michael Collins's Extreme Navigation Tactics, Lisa Rex's presentation on an awesome site she worked on with Jake called What's the Soup, implementing Google Map goodness, and Angie Byron's BOF on patching Drupal. Her presentation made me want to dive on in and see what I can help with! So, now I'm excited.

Of course, I was also reminded that Drupalers love to get their beer on afterhours. Two thumbs up to Benelux and their awesome, delicious brews!

I am happy to have become part of the Drupal community during the past six months. I love the people, I love the comraderie, and I love the project. I am hoping to give a presentation of my own in December at DrupalCamp NYC; I'm considering giving a talk on the basics of Ubercart. The prospect of this has me very excited.

Thanks to everyone who put together such a great DrupalCamp! I'm very excited to see the quality of the video recordings for each session; props go to DNB for their awesome job recording, and I can't wait to see what the results look like! Thanks for the good times, Montreal!

Nanowrimo 2009

aubrey — Sat, 03 Oct 2009 22:37:14 +0000

It's started again; National Novel Writing Month! This will be my seventh year participating in the madness that is writing a 50,000 word novel in 30 days, and I look forward to it every year. The madness starts on November 1st, but I will be spending the month of October getting ready for hardcore novel writing.

This year's Nano will be strange; I met a very awesome group of people who became some of my best friends when I lived in South Bend, and doing NaNoWriMo without them will be an adjustment. However, I've joined the New Hampshire region of the forums this year and the region seems to be fairly active with meetups and write-ins, so I'm optimistic I will find new writing friends here. Still, I will miss my South Bend writing buddies.

This year I am going to attempt my grocery store romance yet again. I've tried writing this for NaNoWriMo both in 2005 and 2007 and failed miserably, so I'm crossing my fingers I can finish it this year. I plan on outlining, fleshing out my characters, and having a general idea of where I want the story to go, so hopefully that will help me out this year. Either way, I am excited! And writing a funny, cheesy novel about grocery store employees is right up my alley, I have to say.

Is anyone else participating in NaNoWriMo this year?

Nine (with pictures!)

aubrey — Tue, 01 Sep 2009 00:54:00 +0000

Today, this domain turns nine years old. ~~I will refrain from posting a screenshot of the very first layout I made for this domain~~ Wait, no I won't. Here are a few screenshots from the past nine years (please don't laugh too much):

Red, Black, and Cheesy

Okay. This is one of the first layouts I ever made for this domain, way back in October 2000! I had not started my blog just yet; kids, in 2000, online journals were all the rage, at least in the circles I traveled online. And no, my online journal no longer exists on the internets, thankfully.

Adventures with Bad Scanners

I apparently loved using bad pictures of myself as part of the layout back in the day, 'back in the day' being sometime during the spring of 2001. Notice my rockin' Paint Shop Pro 5 skills and the even more rockin' frames I used. My blog was powered by Blogger. Oh yes, I was awesome.

Yummy Starfruit

If you've been reading my site for a long, long time, you knew this layout would be posted; the starfruit layout. I graduated from frames to tables, keeping with the 'latest and greatest' at the time (I believe I made this in summer of 2001?). I also changed my layout way, way more often in the early days than I do now.

Man, I Loved That Plant

At long last, in 2003, I moved away from the tables and started using divs and css to create my layouts. I also moved from Blogger to Movable Type to b2, which I used up through 2004 when I switched to Wordpress. (I only recently switched to Drupal.) I liked this layout.

I Apparently Love Purple.

Circa 2004. I remember making this layout while sitting in the library on the IU campus. I folded the stars myself and took the pictures of them myself. I've rarely used stock photography in my layouts (the starfruit layout being one of the few exceptions).

Twilight for Wordpress

Oh, Twilight. I later released this theme as a Wordpress theme, but I haven't updated it since 2005 when I first created it. I really liked this one; I created it while sitting in the loft of my first apartment in South Bend.

. . . . .

So, yes. What better way to celebrate my domain-a-versary by posting old layouts? Happy birthday, Star Shaped!

A long overdue update.

aubrey — Mon, 10 Aug 2009 02:27:03 +0000

It has been over one month since I have posted an entry to this blog. (Sidenote, I hate the word 'blog'. Lame.) I've been busy this past month, visiting my family, going white water rafting, learning Drupal, and hanging out with some of the new people I've met in this area. Life's been exciting, but I have been slacking in maintaining this site.

I'm not sure what to write in here anymore. I sometimes write about my knitting, sometimes about what I'm cooking, and on the rare occasion, I write about my experiences with Drupal so far. I liked this place when I focused on what I do, and really, I haven't been documenting that very much recently.

I am hopefully going to keep a better track of what's going on my life the next couple months. I started a new paper journal at the end of July and would love to take pictures of it, and I've finished a shawl and a camera case and other various and assorted knitting goodness this summer. I've also spun a few skeins of yarn, and I've made the switch from Windows to Linux (Ubuntu, to be more specific). I've been busy, but I haven't felt like writing about it at all.

This changes now.

From Wordpress to Drupal

aubrey — Thu, 09 Jul 2009 02:12:01 +0000

So. After five great years with Wordpress, I've made the decision to convert my site to Drupal. It's nothing to do with Wordpress as a blogging platform; I work with Drupal every day at work and wish to familiarize myself with it, so I figured running my day to day blog with the framework I use at my job would be the easiest way to do this. I've spent some time over the past few weeks learning how to theme the Drupal way, and I'm pleased to find that the theming process isn't as cumbersome as I initially thought. Obviously I still have things I need to tweak, and one of these days I want to actually design a new theme, but for now, this will do.

Later on I may write more regarding what modules I'm using, how I went about configuring things, and so on, but tonight I am tired and just happy I got this up and running tonight.