Morisy.com

Last Thursday, at 4:37 PM, I got an e-mail from a team at MIT I've been developing for: We need brand new feature X, and we need it up and working by tomorrow morning.

Unfortunately, I had an out of town guest, a day job that needed attending, a dog that needed running, and 23 other things that stood in my way. Fortunately, I was using Drupal and was able to pull together the feature, relatively bug-free, between 7 a.m. and 9 a.m. the next morning, fully integrated into the existing site. I didn't even have to install a single new plugin to get exactly what I wanted.

What did this include?

• Create a UGC site that asked visitors a questions and collated their responses
• Tied those responses to a vendor
• Checked for spam and Captcha'd suspicious-looking responses
• Promote this feature throughout the site

Check it out

One thing I've been mildly-yet-obsessively entranced with for a number of years is how nicely Gawker plays with thumbnails:

One of the minor irritations of modern web design is that, even you HTML the hell out a blog post to make it look perfect in terms of graphical layout, by the time you trim, sanitize and otherwise disembowel that HTML for your teaser text, at best you'll have something dull, at worst you'll have something that wreaks havoc on the rest of your page. Gawker, however, automatically crops and resizes a photo as needed to create interesting, all-purpose graphic work that can be popped in wherever it pleases.

I was so jealous of the effect that I began working on my own Drupal module to copy it until I realize that, not only does such a module exist, but it's one of Drupal's most popular: ImageCache.

When I first moved into the Boston area, a priority was finding a civic organization I could volunteer for and make a difference within the community. That ended up being a lot harder than I would've thought: I e-mailed organizations I thought would be a good fit blindly, and often was ignored or informed I was reaching the wrong department, try person X, but person X had left the week before, try again later and maybe ...

You get the idea. Eventually, I tried volunteering for Spare Change News. Since they didn't have control of their own web domain at the time, much less a useful website, that wasn't the easiest challenge either.

Fortunately, Idealist came to the rescue: They have a nice, clean site that allows searching through non-profits for volunteer and even paid positions for those looking for non-profit work. They make tracking down the right contact person, or even just matching your skills with opportunities, much easier.

It's an invaluable resource that helps others help their communities. Recently, however, they've taken a major funding hit because non-profits, like pretty much everyone else, have slowed hiring. Since job placement ads were one of the largest sources of revenue, the site is now turning to the public: Donate $5, $10, or more and help this great organization continue to do good.

SpareChangeNews.net was down for a good chunk of the day yesterday for some weird billing mixup. It was resolved fairly quickly, except HostGator somehow mixed our most recent backup with the site we had a year ago, and all these files conflicted so the site was broken for 6 more hours until I could get my hands on a working FTP terminal.

Sorry if you tried to access the site in that time.

I've given up for the evening on getting repeating events to work with Views Calendar. It took long enough just to get any calendar working, but the Spare Change calendar is once again alive and well.

With that done, the next priority is (against a nagging feeling of impending doom) implementing an Open Atrium installation for the Spare Change Development committee, to better keep the sub-committees organized. I'm worried this is just one more technical feature that will end up unused: A technical solution to a people problem. That said, Open Atrium is a gorgeous Drupal installation profile that includes a lot of nice task tracking features, group documentation, and project management overviews.

My impulse is to turn on as few features as possible, to make actually using it easier. We'll see how that goes.

The other major priority is tackling Facebook integration, which I want to get on ASAP so our staff will actually start posting content.

Editor's Note: In the interest of sanity and others' edification, I thought it might be nice to start logging my travails developing Spare Change News in Drupal. I probably won't post all the updates to Instant History (the main blog), but the major ones will show up there, with everything cross-posted to the new Drupal Developer blog (It's all really just one blog with different categories, but shh ...).

So far, one of the biggest challenges I've run into with Spare Change is getting staff to actually log in and post content. The most common excuse? "I can't remember my user name and password." It's a sentiment I'm sympathetic to, having written about user hatred of password rules. But what's a site admin to do?

Continued>>

I'm bringing the Morisy.com design up to the latest version of Instant Design. Overall it's not too drastic a change, but some images will likely break for a bit and the front page will require some heavy lifting. I've mostly been prepping it over at Spare Change News, which has forced me to get rid of much of the Morisy-specific cruft.

Also, it'll introduce drop-down menus. Let me know if you hate it in the comments!

By day, I primarily wear the "journalist" hat, but lately I've gotten involved with Spare Change News as a volunteer on the Development Committee. I'm sure I'll be writing more about them in the future, but suffice to say Spare Change is a street newspaper that's designed to be an accessible form of self-employment for homeless or formerly homeless individuals.

I was asked to help re-design their website:

So I'm working on the re-design which is going swimmingly and forcing me to work a bit more on Instant Design, but while I've found an excellent Drupal drop-down menu tutorial, I can't get rid of the damn unordered list bullet stylings, despite using the style: blank; tag or whatever it is.

The result is not pretty:
Spot

And that's why you're getting this wonky design rant rather than a post on SEO for journalists, like I've been planning for weeks.

Updated: I removed some spelling errors and a few rather unnecessary snarky remarks.