As you can probably tell, I have switched from the default theme (Garland) to one of my own creation. More accurately, I took the Garland theme and made it my own. I know it's not that pretty, but it's a work in progress.

Neat things I learned:

• .info pages are FSM's gift to Drupal
• modules/system/page.tpl.php is also FSM's gift to Drupal
• To change the style of an area of your website, open the page.tpl.php file in your theme and find the corresponding id or class of the area. Then open style.css and find that id or class and change it.
• Fun.

I've just learned something potentially annoying about Taxonomy and CCK. It seems that if you create a new content type using CCK, you need to go into Taxonomy and manually assign the content type to the corresponding vocabularies in order to use Taxonomy in the new content type.

I can see why this would be the case, but if I have new content type that I want all my vocabularies to access, it gets quite tedious. A 'select all' function would be nice.

Maybe the point here is to create specific vocabularies for specific content types. I'll have to continue to think this through.

Ohhhh. Enabling the Tag function in my Taxonomy vocabulary is pretty cool because it gives you existing terms when you type in a tag.

I wonder if it saves a tag that doesn't exist as a term yet. Only saving this blog entry will tell...

I'm trying to grasp Taxonomy as it applies to Drupal. I'm using this entry to test faceted tagging.

According to Drupal 6, by David Mercer,

Facted tagging uses a bottom up system of classification, where facets or properties of the content are described by the terms.

Virginia is going through Building powerful and robust websites with Drupal 6, by David Mercer, from cover to cover and is using this website as a test site and me and Alpha as test users.

While this book is a general resource for beginners, so far Virginia is very happy with it because right now she IS a beginner in need of a general resource to get the hang of this.

Virginia has been looking at two books for Library Usability:

1. Usability Testing for Library Websites, by Elaina Norlin
2. Making Library Web Sites Usable, by Tom Lehman and Terry Nikkel

Usability Testing for Library Websites was published in 2002, so while its concepts are sound, it is a bit outdated.

I suspect establishing a solid Taxonomy for ppld.org will be quite a challenge. I hope that this is the sort of thing that can be altered as the redesign progresses. I fear that I'll need to have a set Taxonomy ready from the beginning and I'm not sure if I can do that.

I'm also not sure exactly how Taxonomies work yet. I mean, I see I can add Vocabularies to this entry, but I really want this entry to fall into the Taxonomy category, not the list items for Taxonomy.

Wish me luck!

Virginia was really excited about a book she read called, Don't Make Me Think!, by Steve Krug.

She was even more excited by it than I am when I find a nice patch of dirt to roll in.

Good thing she still paid attention to me, or I would've been forced to pee on it in retribution.

Virginia's VirgiBlog entry

I have included photos of my dogs, Freya and Luna, as a test for attaching files.

They've been kind enough to allow me to use them as Users on this website, providing I continue to supply them with plenty of frisbee, walks, and attention. It's a tough job, but someone has to do it.