I've got some exciting news. Over the weekend, Zcodo officially launched! Zcodo is a PHP5 framework built for rapid prototyping web applications that is based upon the Qcodo framework.

The motivation for creating Zcodo could more than fill this blog post. Suffice it to say that contributing to Qcodo was becoming difficult and my efforts for the last year to change this were uneffective.

Additionally, the future of QDrupal will be based upon Zcodo, so stay tuned for exciting news in that area.

http://zcodo.com

I came across these demo's of TileCache, a component in an open source GIS application I'm working on. If you've ever wanted to see maps of all 32 original Super Mario Bro's levels, this site is for you.

BONUS: It's also got maps for The Legend of Zelda, Zelda a Link to the Past and a few others! So cool.

I've been looking for something like this for a long time. Having used Gmail for 4 years now, I've accumulated around 20k emails and used 1.5Gb.

A Mountain Top has been privileged to work with Minted, a new online store. Built on Drupal and QDrupal, Minted will be offering fresh, modern custom stationery and invitations.

In preparation for launch, Minted has announced their first Freshly Minted design challenge. The challenge is to design a sophisticated and modern "Save the Date" card for engaged couples. Cash prizes are being offered for the top 5 designs.

Details are available on Minted.com.

A friend of mine has started sharing his personal knowledge base of linux tips with the world. The best part is that the site was built with Drupal.

Drupalcon is wrapping up today with a code sprint hosted at MIT's Stata Center. At least 100 drupal developers are all gathered in this beautiful building right now.

My goal for the day was to submit one patch back to the Drupal project. The ways of collaboration in Drupal are designed to keep the project quality high. The effort required to download the code, change something, test it isn't new. However, the extra steps of creating a patch, explaining what the patch does, submitting the patch to the issue queue, receiving feedback from other developers, changing my patch, uploading it again, etc, etc is new.

So, as of 4pm, I was finally able to submit not just 1, but 4 patches back to the Drupal project. Surpassing my goal is pretty exciting, but contributing back to a project that's given me so much is even more exciting. If you don't know about Drupal, check it out at http://drupal.org.

Day 3 of Drupalcon just wrapped up. I'd definitely have to say that I enjoyed today the most. I'm not sure if it was the sessions, just knowing more people, sleeping in this morning (soooo nice), but I just really enjoyed today.

I've learned a few lessons while I've been here at Drupalcon. The first lesson is that I need to blog more, a LOT more. I don't really blog because I don't have a lot of extra time and I honestly don't think much of what I do. I help a lot of open source projects because I enjoy it, not for the glory. However, now that I've launched my own company based upon consulting in the open source world, I definitely need to start telling the world more about what I do.  read more »

I'll be in Boston this week for Drupalcon. If you're at Drupalcon and would like to meet up, feel free to contact me. I'll also be attending the jQuery BoF session on Wednesday night!

The past few months have brought many changes to my life. As I've blogged about before, I am a new father!!! My daughter was born in December 2007. In addition, today I'm announcing that I have founded a new consulting company, A Mountain Top, LLC, and will be leaving the ranks of Crowd Favorite.

This is an exciting opportunity for me. Alex has been very gracious and we are parting as friends.

A Mountain Top, LLC will be focused on jQuery, Qcodo and Drupal. If you have a project, or are thinking of starting a project using any of these technologies, we'd love to hear from you!

Time to update my blog!