I consider myself extremely fortunate to have landed on Drupal so early in my web development learning journey. Drupal was a technology I was able to start using very early without any programming skills and still was able to create real, working websites for myself and others. It’s still a technology I encourage generally tech-phobic people to try since it can be extremely empowering to build and customize your own site, instead being forced to hire out the entire web application build process to an external company or programmer.

A few days ago, I gave a presentation on Introduction to Open Source, Web Development with Drupal, which I embedded the full presentation below and will hopefully post the video soon.

The presentation itself covered quite a few general introduction points (what is a CMS, Drupal vs. WordPress, and Drupal as a “Site Builder CMS”), but mainly I wanted to show the attendees that you can actually build stuff without knowing how to code, so I did a live demo creating a members directory for the co-working space where the event was hosted. Live demos are tough sometimes, but this one went quite well. I was able to cover what I consider the two keys to using Drupal: adding fields and managing data display by using Views.

While I mentioned it during the presentation, one of the points I don’t think I covered fully enough was how I went from basically knowing very little about programming and web development to running my own Drupal web shop. Just a few years ago, I was basically a novice to Drupal and web technologies in general, but through curiosity and a few “failed” projects, I was able to learn an amazing amount about Drupal, site building, information architecture, project management and slow-but-surely php module development.

When someone asked during the question and answer part at the end, “How do you recommend learning Drupal?,” my answer gave two suggestions: First, I suggested that the best way to learn is to have a project or something you want to build and then try to build it with Drupal. This advice is valid for any new technology you want to learn. It’s tough to learn something without having a clear situation where you’ll use it. Second, I provided a few decent resources for learning Drupal, including Lynda.com’s Drupal 7 video series, Drupalize.me and the book “Understanding Drupal.” I also praised how helpful and kind the Drupal community can be towards newbies.

In this post about Drupal (which I normally blog about here), I’d like to discuss how I came to become a web developer and site builder. It’s the tale of a couple “failed” businesses and my effort, in spite the setbacks, to “build it myself” using open source technologies. Finally it’s a bit of a “love story” in how I came to embrase Drupal and develop a business around this open source, site builders CMS.

I read a lot. I tend to read about a pretty wide range of subjects and use various devices and apps (even the paper-bound ones) for consuming my reading material. I like reading, and I could easily spend an entire day just reading. Sometimes I do.

Good reading requires more than just good reading materials (which there is a ton of today!). It requires good conditions and mindset for reading.

Unfortunately, researchers claim that reading via your computer screen is less effective for retention and concentration than reading paper materials. I largely agree. It’s not ideal to read articles in the browser.

I don’t think that the poor quality of computer reading is necessarily only caused by the technical characteristics of screen-reading. In my opinion, many of the issues with computer-based reading is due to all the distractions and multiple stimuli pulling for our attention when we find and read articles through the browser and through social media like Twitter and Facebook. When we try to reading in these contexts, it seems to feel like there is always something else, something next begging for us to read that first, even before finishing the article we are reading.

I don’t necessarily think the browser is a bad place to do part of your reading and researching, since I find almost all of my new reading, books and articles online. While blogs and social media are great sources of links and new information, reading the articles themselves in their original context via a computer or mobile browser tends to put us in a state of distracted reading. We are reading that article but we are already potentially distracted by the next link or the other information further down your feed. It’s hard to focus and concentrate, which conscious reading reading requires.

Recently, I’ve been trying to segment my reading habits into two phases. During the distracted, expository reading phase, I gather links, collect articles and read the initial words. I filter my reading to locate potentially valuable things to read. And during what I called conscious reading phase, I attempt to eliminate distractions and focus on the article itself in order to understand and get the most out of it.

In this post, I’d like to talk about how I employ different technologies and mindsets to optimize both kinds of reading.

I’m on a productivity kick, which means I’m currently spending more time working on being productive than actually being productive. That’s likely a product of my borderline OCD. But I suppose those are both subjects for another day.

Along with tracking my time and decreasing my usage on non-value-adding social media sites like Facebook, I’ve been trying to figure out areas of my life and work that are cluttered, ineffecient and, in the words of productivity expert David Allen, “open loops,” meaning ill-defined project we are committed to but don’t define the next action to take it towards completion.

For me and I imagine most people, one obvious culprit of wasted time and uncluttered and unfinished loops is Email.

My Inbox was a mess. While I’m sure there are others out there who get a lot more email than me, I still manage to get a lot, and they’re scattered across multiple accounts and contexts. Worse than the amount is the on-going accumulation.

My Inbox had grown into unexplored wasteland of messages no longer needing my attention and of new messages from services I don’t want to read about and should have probably deleted initially. And, of course, hidden among all the garbage, there were emails I needed to take a next step on or set aside for later analysis, action or kept as a reference. My Inbox was not an ideal place to seek inner calm and tranquillity.

This week’s target of self-improvement was simple: clean up my inbox and optimize my email management/workflow in order to gain greater clarity in my thinking and to improve my general productivity.

In reality though, the goal was even simpler: Inbox Zero.

A digital friend of mine recently announced being “Post Facebook”, meaning he had canceled his user account on Facebook. It seems to be a growing trend in some countries with decreasing Facebook users.

(note: I define a “digital friend” as someone whose friendship and acquaintance generally takes place on digital media, like Twitter or a blog or something, over traditional proximity-based friendship where you actually “see” peope.)

It’s an interesting and radical step to cancel your Facebook account, which, even though I don’t know his specific reasoning, I tend to agree with from time-to-time.

I don’t really like Facebook anymore, if I ever did. There is not a ton of value out of my using Facebook since there are so many voices on some many topics fired at me at the same time via a single stream. But perhaps this problem about random info in a social media stream isn’t limited to Facebook, but it’s perhaps one of the first digitial places to really suffer from it.

I’ll admit that I’ve never really loved Facebook as one of my earliest posts on this blog reveals:

Suddenly I have too many “friends” for me to handle. How did this nifty way to stay connected and “keep in touch” with people turn so cruelly nightmarish? This Pandora-like book of faced “contacts” has got me all turned inside out. So, let’s face it, I’m face-book-out. And once opened, Facebook is strangely difficult to close.

Just like 5 years ago, I think this Facebook burn-out or fatigue still seems true today. For me, sheer fatigue is not the only issue I have with Facebook.

I think my current issues with Facebook comes down to the following points: 1. much of the information I get from facebook is both worthless and irrelevant, 2. I don’t really have a way to segment the info, and 3. the ads are ridiculously and annoyingly mistargeted to me.

In spite of these problems, there are a these rare instances where Facebook has extreme value for me, so even though ultimately the value of Facebook is less Facebook, there is value on being on and connecting through Facebook.

(NOTE: If you want to skip Facebook trash talk, head to the last section on a Morocco Anecdote/)

While some of my friends think I’m some kind of an all-knowing web technology guru, I tend to be much more honest about what I know and know about (which is never enough!) vs. what I don’t know and don’t even know about.

The image above (which I recommend clicking on to view the full version) from Chiefmartec.com makes me a lot more humble about what technologies I truly master.

What an incredible landscape of startup and well-established technologies to build with and amongst today.

Language learning is hard but not impossible. It’s also something can improve at doing.

For the last several years, I have been giving a speech about “Tips and Techniques for Language Learning.” It’s one of my favorite presentations I do. I’ve given it at a few universities and a few informal meeups. I like giving it because I really believe the message.

In the first part, I present the stories about my learning journey, learning French or Chinese. After, I go into some of the advice on best language learning techniques and how I approach learning a foreign language. The goal of the speech is make students (in recent years, Chinese students) more aware of the learning process and how to be a more effective as an independant language learner. All in all it’s a real-person example that you can learn outside of classes and paid teachers.

Even though I offer tons of advice about using flashcards, spaced repetition learning, and my favorite sites (ChinesePod) and apps (Anki), it all comes down to a simple message: Language Learning is all about Persistance. It’s about not giving up.

All of the best resources, books, videos and audio clips for learning this or that language are crap unless you commit to learning. If you don’t commit to making a habit out of your language learning, your learning will stutter and stall. You’ll end up with occassional bursts of learning, but tons of lapses.

You’ll fail in the epic challenge of learning a foreign tongue not because of bad intentions but because of poorly maintained habits.

Recently I’ve been working on improving my goal setting cycle in the hopes of becoming better at achieving my goals. While learning a language is definitely a goal in the true sense of the word, I generally think learning a language is more about creating a goal-driven habit such that learning occurs more in the odd moments of the day than in specifically set-aside periods.

It’s about persisting in your pursuit throughout the day than finding x-time of day to study.

Here are a collection of thoughts on what is language, how to better visualize this learning activity and finally the importance of passive persistence (=daily habits) in learning a language.

Every year I scribble away my New Year’s resolutions. It makes me happy to know that I at least make the effort once a year or so to evaluate where I’m going. Half journal entry, half list, they’re stored away somewhere waiting, waiting for me to look back at some point in my life and see how many things I resolved to do, but didn’t.

Everybody knows that New Year’s Resolutions are pretty notorious in their failure rate. I still think they are a good thing, though perhaps we can do better.

For me, time passes and we forget to keep going. On the metaphorical road of goals, I tend to lose focus on where I was supposed to be driving. It sometimes feels like I’ve been asleep at the wheel and a couple months have already passed by without even checking the map. Establishing a destination and then failing to drive in that direction is no way to get there.

Personally, I try journalling and blogging occassionally about my goals and use various apps to get me on track. But all the same, I’d really like to improve my ability to set correct goals and acheive them.

Perhaps it’s time to step back and work on the “goal setting and iteration of those goals” process. Time to establish a proper goal setting cycle. Here are some thoughts.

We live in a world with a ton of things competiting for our time. It’s not surprising that we try to think more about where our time goes. For me, thinking and counting, organizing and analysizing my time have become somewhat second nature. There are two reasons for why I am personally so involved in thinking about time in general and my time specifically. The first reason is existential or philsophical: time is basically the the only thing we have and in life we only got a limited amount of it, so our temporality is deep part of who we are. You don’t need to know Heidegger to know the vital importance of time-life. This isn’t the first time I’ve blogged on this point about the value of time.

The second reason why time as a countable thing is such an important reflex in my life is that I largely work on a freelance basis. This means I exchange my work-time-expertise for money. I spend my time on X in exchange for Y money in return. I occassionally take on projects that are on a fixed budget but generally I work on flexible projects such that the need and functions are changing so a one-time budget would be pretty hard. (As a word to the wise, don’t hire on a fixed budget when you aren’t 100% sure what you want, since it’ll annoy your developer.) In any case, I basically have to always know what I am working on, for who and for how long.

A friend of mine who is starting to do similiar time-based freelance computer work asked me the other day how I keep track and manage my time. This more or less led into a description of all the tools and things I use to track my time. In this post, I’d like to describe some of the tools and methods I use to track my personal and professional time.

So, More Geek Talk:

I’ve been on a bit of an obcessive exploration of new storage options for my data. There are really a ton of options. Some are both the best in terms of ease of use and in terms of price (i.e. Free). Others require a bit of an evaluation of price vs. quality. Once you get to a lot of data though, you’re going to have pay something.

In this post, I’d like to talk about an exploratory attempt at backing up my iPhoto Library to S3. So, you want your photos safely guarded in AWS S3?

(Admittedly I’m increasinly nervous about how my data is tied up with any vendor-specific program, i.e. Everything Apple, like iPhoto, but let’s leave that point aside for now.)

I really like Github’s Jekyll “baking” system for managing my personal blog. Unfortuately, I couldn’t really imagine this solution working on most client sites. At least not until I came across Prose.io, which is a browser-based editor for github files or more specifically the web-based content editor for managing a jekyll site.

Let’s look at the advantages of the Jekyll system as such, the major problem of this approach (=the content editor) and finally how Prose.io provides a potential first step towards solving this problem.

The Advantages of Jekyll-based Site

I’ve been spending quite a bit of personal “geek out” time working with Jekyll and Octopress. The key advantage for site building is that you completely remove the server-side element with programming languages and databases, and instead, you take a well-structred grouping of documents and “bake” them into an html site. For a hacker, it’s zen-site-creation heaven.