Nerdliness.com - Real life nerds solving real life problems.

Posted by eljustino on September 7, 2007 at 5:00pm

Being one of the contributors, I'm just a little biased, but I'm a big fan of the design Jeremy Caldwell created for our new joint project, http://www.Nerdliness.com. It's clean and pretty, does a great job of letting the content come through.

The idea is to let us three nerds share some of the solutions we've created to solve actual problems we've faced on the job. The level of content will range from beginner to advanced, depending on the particular issue, but we think others could tweak some of the stuff we post to solve their own dilemmas.

We're still in the process of building, but things are coming along smoothly. Jeremy built the template from the ground up and we're using various Drupal modules as we get things going. Of course, we use CCK, Pathauto, and Views, but we're also playing with Google AdSense Injector, XML Sitemaps, Devel (on the dev copy), GeSHi Filter, and FCKeditor, among others.

Most are in their native forms, but we've modified a few things to meet our specific needs. For instance, we had to make some tweaks to the Google AdSense Injector to make it play nice with our custom content types (see http://www.nerdliness.com/article/2007/08/08/drupal-adsense-injector-mod...). We've also had to play around a bit with the template to get the different lengths of teasers we wanted on the front page (http://www.nerdliness.com/article/2007/08/20/drupal-tweak).

Anyway, we appreciate any comments, especially the nice ones. (Jeremy really needs those... you know how sensitive those designer-types can be...).

Thanks,

Justin

Personal: http://www.justinstanley.net
Nerdly: http://www.nerdliness.com

Comments

Hi, cool site, really like

Posted by thomjjames on September 7, 2007 at 6:31pm

Hi,

cool site, really like the design, clean and simple!

I signed up, small note the validation email was simply addressed from "info" with no full email address. just thought you'd like to know.

cheers
Tom
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Thanks, Tom!

Posted by eljustino on September 7, 2007 at 7:16pm

Thanks! I'll fix that info thing.

And I'll make sure Jeremy sees the kudos. Could be the difference between him sleeping well tonight or needing to see a therapist.

Justin

Personal: justinstanley.net
Nerdly: nerdliness.com

Nice!

Posted by .carey on September 7, 2007 at 11:50pm

I love the design of your site.

...Nerds are so cool!

I know...

Posted by eljustino on September 8, 2007 at 1:41am

...Nerds are so cool!

I know... it's our blessing and our curse. :)

Personal: justinstanley.net
Nerdly: nerdliness.com

wow

Posted by datu rocc on September 8, 2007 at 2:36am

i love the design. keep up the goodwork.

Ok, now his head's gonna get big...

Posted by eljustino on September 8, 2007 at 5:25pm

It's amazing the kind of quality work you can get from someone when you take their beloved pets hostage. Talk about motivation...

Personal: justinstanley.net
Nerdly: nerdliness.com

How he did it...

Posted by eljustino on September 10, 2007 at 11:06pm

Jeremy just posted some how-to info on how he goes about theming with Drupal. If you like the nerdliness.com site, you might be interested in http://www.nerdliness.com/article/2007/09/10/drupal-theming.

Personal: justinstanley.net
Nerdly: nerdliness.com

Hey there, what a great site

Posted by that1guy on September 11, 2007 at 1:04pm

Hey there, what a great site - I'm definately subscribing. Do you have a list of all the modules you're using? Like, for the social sites plugins, etc. 2 things, think you might try doing Facebook authentication? Apparently nobody can do it heh. What about the user profiles? Doing anything with those?

Modules, etc...

Posted by eljustino on September 11, 2007 at 5:10pm

We're currently using:

CCK
Views
Adsense
Adsense Injector
Contemplate
Akismet
Code Filter
Comment RSS
FCKeditor
XML Sitemap
Pathauto
Service Links
sifr
Tagadelic
GeSHi Filter

And still playing around with others. The site's a work-in-progress as far as that goes and probably will always be in that we'll constantly be looking at bigger/stronger/faster ways to do things.

As for the Facebook auth stuff... Haven't played with it yet, but will now. :)

And we're not doing a whole lot with the user profiles yet. Right now our profiles are pretty clean and simple. (http://www.nerdliness.com/user/justin for example). Was there something in particular you were thinking of?

Personal: justinstanley.net
Nerdly: nerdliness.com

Don't know what I am

Posted by that1guy on September 11, 2007 at 7:34pm

Don't know what I am thinking, but I love what you're doing. I'm intending to do something similar, but I'm looking for more of a community aspect, trying to allow users to register and login to the site with a Facebook button on the site. From there I'm thinking users can have blogs and a more fleshed out profile like over at http://teamsugar.com/user/PopSugar

I like Drupal but I'm a bit wary as certain things seem to be troublesome, such as a proper forum integration, which is important to me, and the default Drupal forum won't cut it. So far, I like everything you guys are doing and the methodology I'm seeing, I like it a lot. But the Facebook thing is looking most troublesome, just wondering if you think you can get that to work.

Cool idea...

Posted by eljustino on September 11, 2007 at 8:28pm

Even though Nerdliness.com is pretty new, we've already seen it evolve quite a bit. The original idea was to just give a soapbox for three of us nerds to post about some of the things we've done in our professional lives to solve specific problems (and hopefully do so in a way that would be entertaining and useful for others). We didn't think of adding a community aspect as there are already so many out there that do a better job than we could.

That said, though, the comments we receive absolutely affect how things will go... If we get a lot of "man, this is cool, but..." type messages about the same things, we'll definitely address them.

Please let me know when you do get your community up and running. I'd love to take a look.

Oh, and as for the Facebook thing, we'll totally give it a try (on our sandbox first, of course...).

Personal: justinstanley.net
Nerdly: nerdliness.com

Guess I'll comment on your

Posted by that1guy on September 11, 2007 at 9:37pm

Guess I'll comment on your blog and let you know when that happens. Oh and what Version of Drupal are you using? Oh and the main site is a blog, right? Just to make sure.

Drupal Version...

Posted by eljustino on September 11, 2007 at 10:08pm

Nerdliness.com is brought to you by version number 5.2, and the letters N-E-R-D.

Personal: justinstanley.net
Nerdly: nerdliness.com

Facebook authentication

Posted by eljustino on September 12, 2007 at 8:45pm

Played around with the facebook_auth dev module yesterday. Seemed to work as advertised, though the installation wasn't as easy as most modules. Wrote the details up a few minutes ago: http://www.nerdliness.com/article/2007/09/12/facebook-authentication-drupal

Personal: justinstanley.net
Nerdly: nerdliness.com

I just checked the site

Posted by that1guy on September 13, 2007 at 12:39am

I just checked the site actually (told you I'm subscribed) and wow, I am thankful for the info. But how far are you really getting with it? Is it that it is working but you are not pushing it to the live site because of the multiple users issue? And how soon does it look like it will take to get a final, solid version to use?

Since you were so quick on this question, I got another one for you. Drupal and forums. If you're up for it, I'll give you the specs to attempt it!