Brandon Belew

After a brief lunch (  hit up the deli room and had a chicken sub )  and a trip back to my hotel room to drop off some stuff.   I came back and immediately ran over to the google gears booth to absorb more info.  

Out of all of the stuff here,  Google Gears is the most interesting to me.   Google Gears has so much potential,  but i'm having problems coming up with practical applications in my field.   

So as most of the people that would ever look at my site know.  I spent most of yesterday traveling to San Francisco to attend Google IO this week.   

So far,  today I checked out the keynote and boy did it get the gears in my head turning.    Out of all of it,  the stuff that interests me mostly is "Open Social" and "Google Gears".     The possibilities are endless with these tools.  

So a few days ago I sat down and started messing with drupal again.   I took the rockford template from Gatehouse and drupalized it in little time.   

I spent quite a bit of time awhile back griping about drupal and theming, but when someone else does the design work it's actually quite easy.  

Like I said before,  I fail at design......

Now.. back to module developement - which wasn't too hard the first time I did it with drupal 5.  

So long long ago,  back when I was into the whole online gaming scene.   I got bored one weekend so a buddy of mine said,  why not start working on a league website similar to CAL ( www.caleague.com )..   So I thought, why not?   So I sat down and started working,  a day and a couple 12 packs of mountain dew later..  I had a working league website, with most of the features it took CAL several thousand dollars and years to complete.     

So since most of the advanced topics discussed at Google IO this year seem to be python related.    I have until May 27 to learn enough python to not look like a complete idiot,  fun eh?  

I've rolled through a couple tutorials,  but have problems learning something unless I have a need to build a practical application with it.    Anyone happen to have any ideas?   

Howard Owens linked me to this really interesting video the other day by the CIO of Google.    The video is on "Innovation at Google".    

I like the way they operate,  there are quite a few good tips in the video that people should take and use in their businesses. 

So i'm not the most active blogger!  Sew me!        

Here in the last couple weeks,  I have been digging deeper, and deeper into the wonder that is the Google API.    One of my first projects?   A generic search engine in use on 9 websites currently.   Utilizing Google Custom Business Search as well as Yahoo Web Search ,  PHP 5 and  a few cuss words...  the product:   http://search.morningsun.net        

­The verdict is still not in on how I place Drupal on the list of content management systems i've used in the past. 

This program compared to everything else i've ever written or used is just strange,  will it grow on me?  Most likely,  after I plug away at it some more and build some sample sites on it.   I think I am going to use Drupal as the platform to build my fathers website for his machine shop.

Main complaints with Drupal?  

There has been a ton of conversation as of late about SEO. We are almost bombarded with the term either by spam email or by popping up in general development related conversations. I get at least 2 emails a week promising to "Improve your sites page ranking on popular search engines!".