The Decision: Wanting to learn how to make a website and generally interested in business, I eyed an issue of Entrepreneur magazine at the airport a little more than a year ago, I bought the magazine and read it over a flight. The magazine covered CMS systems and making the choice between the big 3, wordpress, joomla, and drupal. I decided if I was going to make a website, it was going to be a big one. So it then became to choosing either Joomla or Drupal. I learned the basic outline of the systems, and played around with both, first with Joomla, and second with Drupal. I was very close to choosing Joomla due the fact that it was a lot more intuitive to work with, however I read various articles about drupal performance over joomla, the modular nature of drupal, and because Joomla had a lot of paid modules (Not a bad thing) but considering I'm finishing up college and don't have much money I choose Drupal.
The Learning Curve: So after finally settling on drupal, I dove right in and had a lot of difficulty learning the in's and out's but after watching 15+ hours of video tutorials from GotDrupal, Lullabot, and MustardSeed I kind got the hang of the interface (admin menu really needs to be installed by default in core if it's not in 7). In the mean time I was learning html/css and SQL via W3C tutorials, and learning php via TuxRadar's free online php book. I also picked up a copy of Pro Drupal Development a few months later.
The Idea: I've always considered myself a decent writer and a bit of a smart-ass. I usually watched The Daily Show, and Colbert Report a couple times a week, and have a pretty good sense of humor. I enjoyed the Onion but found the articles a bit dry and lacking. I liked cracked.com but their forum/submission system seemed a bit of work, rather inefficient, and bias. I spent way too much time on facebook, and because i'm a dude and not some slutty girl my posts were generally ignored. So I took this and decided to fuse all these ideas into a single website. I decided I would create a social network of satirical writers with the intention of making fun of the news and allowing for people to create a fan-base as a result of actual writing talent. The idea for SarcaNews was born.
The Execution: Getting my head around the basics of all the required languages with the exception of javascript, I really got started developing SarcaNews in December of 2010 during winter break. My best friend at the time was supposed to help me create it after I introduced him to drupal during the end of the fall semester but he ended up bailing on me altogether for unknown reasons when we were supposed working out as much as possible before school started up again in January. I was left alone to do it all by myself. I got around 40% done by the end of January and spent most of my free time during school to create what I could. My hopes of launching a BETA by February turned into an actual launch in mid July. As a result I ended up watching the Social Network quite a few times during long periods of exhaustion and frustration for much needed motivation. I researched the best drupal hosting for performance and after hours of research I settled on Omega8. On July 19th, I finished the majority of all the noticeable issues and decided it was time for BETA.
The offer: So I've finished what I call SarcaNews V1.0 despite the fact that I still have a lot of cool ideas and cool features I want to add. I had to draw a line in the sand and decided enough with the procrastinating and launched the website last Tuesday. The website is www.sarcanews.com . It's still not 100% finished but it's >95% done. I still have to add a few forms and information pages.
Sarcanews is a community site for writers to post primarily satirical/comedic articles, blog posts, and pictures with each other. All the content is ranked and the best pieces make it to the front pages as a result of an algorithm I wrote. If you fancy yourself as a funny guy and a writer I strongly urge you to check it out yourself and give it a whirl, right now I only have 2 people registered because as I said my facebook posts are largely ignored.
SarcaNews Features
- Ability to submit/create Articles, Pictures, and Blog entries (eventually cartoons will be added)
- Abilility to subscribe to other users and get a combined or separate personal stream of your favorite content
- Bookmarking
- FriendsList
- A Board for friends to post on
- Commenting
- Voting
- Statistics Tracking
- Send and receive private messages
- A personal profile
- And finally you have a chance to build a cult of followers/fans that are interested in your creative/writing abilities. Unlike twitter and facebook in which people often post mindless and idiotic statuses, here you have the chance to really show off your comedic/clever insights that with enough time will hopefully be noticed by an appreciative fan base.
The website will only work if I can get people to join and write content so please create an account. If you like it then share a link with your friends, and invite them to come as well. I also really need experienced developers to test my site for security loopholes as I don't know if I really followed all the security guidelines correctly when writing my modules, it would help me sleep better at night.
If you have any questions please ask them below. I didn't want to print a list of the modules I used because it's too long and i'm a bit lazy, but If you want to know how i made something specific I will try to respond. It's my first website, so if you have any tips please do share. I offer much thanks to the drupal community. I'd really like to get the ball rolling on this one considering all the work I put into it.
