Thomas Styron

I have temporarily switched to the Inove Coolwater theme designed by mg12 styleshout. It is similar to what I am planning to do with my own theme, but it lacks some fine detail tuning that seems to have been ignored.

I have picked up Drupal 6 Themes by Ric Shreves. I have read several brilliant reviews of this book, and decided it was best for me to look into to get into creating a theme for Thomas-Styron.com and possibly other future projects. I am looking to start my graphic design position at AvenArk sometime this week, and quite possibly may be able to incorporate my hopefully new-found expertise in Drupal to use for some of the projects that have been proposed for the site.

Frequent viewers to Thomas-Styron.com may be wondering what has been going on in the last few days with the site. Rest assured that everything will be up and running relatively soon (hopefully within the next week). I simply got tired of WordPress. As a blog it is a great service, but anyone who knows me fairly well knows that I absolutely loathe the architecture of a simple blog. They are terribly unorganized, and the only way you can find any real content on any given blog is if the planets line up in a row, you know exactly what was already in the blog (which, by the way, kind of defeats the purpose of looking for it in the first place seeing as you already know what it is if that is that case), and you search for very specific key words that hopefully the author used to make searching for older entries feasible.

My biggest gripe with WordPress sites is that a lot of them are quite obviously content driven, and usually in the form of tutorials or other such how-to write-ups. (Why have a WordPress for any other reason when there are already sites like LiveJournal that are much easier to set up)? This poses a problem because it is not organized in any other fashion than by tags and chronological order. Either that or I have simply missed all of the intuitively designed WordPress sites out there. I have decided to switch over to Drupal because it seems to be a powerful CMS that is much more tailored to a content-driven, organized web development process. I much look forward to the experience, and am looking into creating my own theme. Because of the nature of Drupal, I am also looking into starting to write tutorials on various things I have personally done, which would include this particular process.

In addition, I have switched my web host from GoDaddy to HostGator. I read many negative reviews of GoDaddy in conjunction with Drupal, and even had a hell of a time simply setting up WordPress with GoDaddy in the first place. The site navigation is terribly unintuitive. My domain is still registered with GoDaddy, and if you can work through all the promotional garbage that is thrown at you it is certainly a viable and inexpensive solution to your domain needs. Those familiar with administrating a phpnuke site may immediately find the control panel of HostGator easy to use and browse, and it is very attractive. Oh, by the way, their customer support is absolutely brilliant! (Speaking of customer support, I vow to never buy another HP product, haha). Anyway, I hope to have things up and running, and it looks like things are going very smooth so far.