Like many full-time web developers, when I am not coding at work I am coding at home. Those projects are usually favors for friends or family who want to post photos or some other simple thing. The project I am going to describe doesn’t fall into that category.

Sometime in the mid 90s I put together my fraternity’s first site on Geocities. Ever since then, I have been attached to this site in one way or another. Sometimes I was the sole editor and developer, other times I just approved new users, and still others I just dealt with really light administrative work like setting up new email addresses.

The fraternity’s current leadership has decided that the site needs to be fully revamped from the ground up. It needs to communicate to the students on campus as well as keep the brothers (both undergraduate and alumni) in touch with each other. Their plans are ambitious, and they’ve asked me to helm the development of this site.

As I work through this project, I thought it might be interesting to share my experiences here.

So far, I have a very rough outline of the requirements. The site will be divided into three major sections:

1. Frontend - the part of the site that all visitors will see. This would include content like a guestbook, photo gallery, and mission statement.
2. Forum - a private forum for communication between fraternity members. For years this has been the primary method of communication between brothers who moved away from the New England area, and was recently subject to an attack.
3. Backend - another private area of the site that will function much like a knowledge base. A member directory and our constitution are examples of what would be stored there. Additionally, this is were site editors will be able to post content.

Given the short amount of time between now and the beginning of the school year, it is unlikely that all three parts will be completed. Once we have specific requirements of what each section does, we’ll need to determine which absolutely must be ready by September.

I have already chosen Drupal as the CMS. I’ve played with it a bit already, and I think it’ll meet the group’s needs easily.

I’ve been harping on and on about audiocasts and videocasts. Below is a list of the shows that I subscribe to (I’ll add links to each feed later on today). These are my main source of entertainment on the bus and at work when my music has bored me and when I don’t feel like gaming, which is most of the time. The below cover video gaming, D&D, and technology. The Adult Swim is still there even though they haven’t updated that feed in three months.

Audio

• 1UP Yours (site) :: video gaming
• Dungeons & Dragons Podcast (site) :: pencil-and-paper gaming (D&D specifically)
• EGM Live* - EGM Magazine’s Weekly Podcast (site) :: video gaming
• Engadget (site) :: consumer technology
• ExtremeTech.com Podcast (site) :: consumer technology
• this WEEK in TECH (site) :: consumer technology
• What’s New Now (site) :: consumer technology
• Xbox Live’s Major Nelson (site) :: Microsoft-centric video gaming

Video

• 1UP.com - 1UP TV (site) :: video gaming
• AdultSwim.com Video Podcast (site) :: Adult Swim-related cartoons
• Attack of the Show Daily Video Podcast (site) :: internet culture
• Cranky Geeks WMV Video (site) :: consumer technology
• dl.tv in WMV (site) :: consumer technology
• Microsoft 10 (site) :: Microsoft-centric consumer technology
• The Daily Feed Video Podcast (site) :: internet culture news
• The Daily Nut (site) :: videos pulled from various video-sharing sites
• X-Play’s Daily Videogame Podcast - G4 TV (site) :: game reviews

Update: I linked each ‘cast to their respective feeds and site, and a quick description of what they cover.

Tabi’s siblings, Todd and Leila, have come to stay with us for a couple of months. Here is Leila with Nadia, shortly after she came out from hiding behind the couch:

[soapbox]f9c3bc8a-515f-4c56-8191-bea51350f889[/soapbox]

She’s been a mix of happy and pissed. The video shows her happily eating food and being affectionate, but at the same time hissing and growling, even biting me at one point. Her brother is still under the bed, and has been there for the past 24 hours.

On a not-so-related topic, I was invited to the MSN Soapbox beta, Microsoft’s answer to YouTube. I find the interface of the service to be superior to Youtube and Google Video, but not by a lot. Since everyone and their mother uses Youtube, I figured that I’d be different and go with the new service.

Over the past few months at work I’ve been focused on Wordpress, particularly in the area of plugins. As much as I like this CMS, I find it to be terribly limited. Every problem I run across needs a user-contributed plugin to solve it; one of those issues is the inclusion of videos that use Flash-based players like YouTube. I came across an excellent plugin named Viper’s Video Quicktags. This plugin allows for easy insertion of all sorts of video formats, including YouTube and Google Video.

This is the part where I bring these seemingly random topics together: I uploaded Leila’s video to Soapbox, and then realized that the video plugin didn’t support it. I made some minor edits to the plugin to support it, and the above is the result of my work. Now I have to send the source code over to the author. Maybe it could be included in the next version of the plugin.