Getting Started With Drupal

Drupal is a very powerful content management solution. It powered an earlier version of this website as well as zoopframework.com. Drupal is a relatively easy to use system, but there are a few key concepts that you really need to understand in getting started. I often find that...

Vim Plugins: snipMate

Why use it It’s super easy to use It has tons of snippets It’s pretty well compatible with TextMate snippets for easy portability Dynamic variables, for all the times you use the same string multiple times It’s really easy to define your own snippets It’s better than anyt...

Checking Vendor References

One task that should be part of every IT managers is performing reference checks on potential vendors. A vendor reference check goes beyond the sales pitch to reveal the true nature of a product or company. If you’re not performing reference checks you are susceptible of fallin...

A Better Follow Friday

Follow Friday is a common practice on Twitter where many people spend friday posting things like #FF @aplusk @guykawasaki … This practice is distracting at best and fails to accomplish the single purpose it intends. Follow friday began as way to share lesser known twitter use...

Engaging Employees

There is one trait that if possessed can virtually ensure success, the ability to nurture a culture of engaged workers. Engaged workers do work harder or longer, but that’s not the core benefit, rather an engaged employee will demonstrate commitment, dedication, initiative and...

Installing Git on a Shared Host

Git is a fantastic tool and is very useful for deployment. If you can’t install git system wide or don’t want to mess with installing it on the entire system here is an easy way to install it for a single user. This also works well on Mac OS X where installing git is more cha...

Apple's iconic presentations

Recently a book came out The Presentation Secrets of Steve Jobs: How to be Insanely Great in Front of Any Audience. Jobs has mastered the art of presenting. I thought it would be interesting to look at his presentations over the years. Here are the three biggest announcements...

Vim Plugins: NERD Commenter

The NERD Commenter is an indispensable tool when programming in VIM. It understands like a zillion different file types and properly comments each. It can handle single line, multi line, partial line commenting as well as nesting. If you’re programming in VIM you really should...

Mastering the Command Line

If you use *nix, no doubt you’ve spent some time on the command line. Here are a few of the most helpful tricks you can use in the bash shell to really optimize your time, impress your friends, and make everyone else feel inferior… not to mention become more productive. Peop...

Conclusion of the Blog-a-thon

Today marks the last post of my blog-a-thon. It has been a learning and growing experience. I have blogged more time in the past 4 weeks as I did the prior 52. It was challenging and rewarding. I feel I have developed as a blogger and having 3 posts a week has brought the blog to...