Nettuts provides a nice list of 10 New Year's resolutions that every web developer should make. It is a good list to look over. I'll certainly work on many of the suggestions and try to make 2012 an even better year than 2011. Personally, I will be starting a new job in 2012, so I am already excited about what is to come in the new year!
I just discovered this website thanks to the Drupal Easy podcast. It is a virtual stock market where you buy and sell Drupal modules. It looks like you start with 250 units and a module’s price is dependent on how many users use that module. So popular modules like views are way out of reach at the beginning. But smaller modules like mine you can get for cheap. Looks like fun!
MyGridPool.com is my newest personal project that I developed with Zend Framework. Take a look at it. You can create a free account and start making grids in seconds!
For those that don’t know, grid pools are a somewhat popular game for groups of friends and family to play during sporting events. It is most commonly played during the Super Bowl, but it can be used for any event. I personally do grids on just about every football game for my alma mater, and even basketball games (which can be real crazy). You can view the guidelines page to get an idea of how it works.
I got my first Drupal contributed module published: MyFantasyLeague!
The point of the module is to let people who are in a MyFantasyLeague.com league show their league standings, weekly results, and live scoring on their Drupal site. It uses the MyFantasyLeague.com public API to get the data from the site. Currently, it only works in head to head leagues (which is far and away the most common format), and you can only set up a global league for your Drupal site.
There are many features I would like to add to the module over time. Here are a few:
1. Allow individual users on the Drupal site to configure their own fantasy league, instead of only having one global league for the whole Drupal site.
Norman Bucknor provides a great list of essential tools for Drupal developers. Many of these tools will help you immensely with your development process. If you are somewhat new to Drupal, make sure and check this out so you know what all of the best tools available are. Even if you are somewhat experienced, it can’t hurt to look over this list. For me personally, I didn’t discover some of these tools as early as I would have liked to.
Tutr.tv Free Drupal Tutorial Videos | Master Drupal. Fast!:
The folks at LevelTen put together this site that provides video tutorials for learning Drupal. There are mostly beginner type videos, so those new to Drupal should find plenty of help there. There are also intermediate and advanced level videos, and hopefully it will continue growing!
Essential TextMate Shortcuts, Tips and Techniques | Nettuts:
I’ve used TextMate for awhile now, but there are still a lot of shortcuts I don’t know. This article presents a lot of the best shortcuts that TextMate offers. A good resource.
I never realized how bad shared hosting could be until I converted a previously static site that was hosted on GoDaddy to Drupal. The performance went down the drain fast. It wasn’t uncommon for a page to take 10 seconds, or even 30 seconds, to load. I did what I could to improve performance, including installing the Boost module. Boost helps quite a bit for anonymous users, but not for authenticated users.
Eventually, we moved the site to Green Geeks and there are no longer any 10+ second page loads! The site is still on shared hosting because that is all the client can afford, but the performance is so much better. It is unreal how bad GoDaddy is with Drupal websites. I get the feeling probably just about any host would outperform GoDaddy.
ShowSlow: How to Monitor Your Site's Performance For Free | LevelTen | Dallas, TX:
Thanks to LevelTen for the recommendation of using ShowSlow.com to monitor your site’s performance! It is open source and completely free and provides an easy way to monitor your site’s performance over time.
What should they know of PHP who only PHP know? | Erskine Labs:
Wil Linssen posts that PHP programmers need to branch out of their comfort zones and explore other languages (or even just other frameworks). I agree wholeheartedly with this advice and it is good advice for all programmers, regardless of your primary language.
