MyGridPool.com

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.

MyFantasyLeague Drupal Module

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.

9 Essential Tools for Professional Drupal Development | Forum One: Internet Strategy, Social Media, User Experience and Web Site Development

9 Essential Tools for Professional Drupal Development | Forum One: Internet Strategy, Social Media, User Experience and Web Site Development:

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!

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!

GoDaddy and Drupal

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.