Mike's Blog

After several months of development, I'm excited to announce that QDrupal for Drupal 6 has just gone into BETA. You can find the download on the new home for QDrupal at Drupal.org.

http://drupal.org/project/qdrupal

This release is the culmination of effort from several people, specifically Cliff Meece.

As this release settles, I will begin work on documentation for this release. Here's a quick overview of some of the exciting new features:

• QForms are now Drupal Node's
• QApplications now provide a way to define QDrupal settings right through your browser
• You can codegen right through your browser

http://drupal.org/project/qdrupal

43 Folders had a great post this morning about an article from the New York Times regarding email overload.

What I find interesting is that this idea is just now going mainstream. Having listened to Merlin Mann's Inbox Zero mantra for a while now, and Timothy Ferriss' opinions about attention management, I am glad to see this catching on. Email overload is one of the biggest sources of lost productivity to businesses today. Thankfully, it's an easy problem to fix.

Tim Ferriss of the 4-hour Work Week published a great article this morning surrounding the subject of Work-Life balance and Psychological Interference. I've enjoyed following Tim's adventures after reading his book last year, and this latest article really stands out.

 read more »

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

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.

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!

After hacking my iPhone a couple of months ago, it's only seen use as a backup cell phone. I love my Blackberry Pearl. I see the Pearl as a tool, and the iPhone as a toy. Given that I love playing with my toys, whenever I'd practice using my iPhone full time, I'd end up playing with it more then I'd work.

I'd thought about purchasing another line through T-Mobile for the iPhone, so I wouldn't need to swap SIM cards, but I could never find a reason to justify the additional expense. Last week, I stumbled across that justification.  read more »