I had a problem appear this week that I've seen before, but couldn't remember the best resolution for it.
If you don't setup your ImageCache Presets correctly, you sometimes get caught with black stripes down the sides of your images. In my case, this was happening in a view used on the Tyler Brothers website, in this case the page for Youth and Children's Carhartt clothing.
The solution to the black stripes is to define your "canvas" color within your imagecache preset. Here's what I believe to be the best way:
First, install the ImageCache Actions module. This module gives you a great number of options to transform your uploaded images.
Then, add a Define Canvas action. The position of this action is important. In my case, it needs to go between the Scale and Crop actions.
In my situation, I set the canvas to white (#ffffff), make it appear under the image, and it works like a charm.
Seth Godin had a good post called "What did you ship in 2010?", which listed out all his accomplishments for 2010 and asked readers to think about our own. Read it at Seth's Blog.
Sometimes we get caught up in the daily busy-ness of business and don't take a breather to see what we've accomplished. Well, here's a list of things we've done Broadstreet Consulting, 2010.
Spoke about Drupal at DrupalCamp SC, DrupalCamp Asheville, and BarCamp Charleston
On a personal note, it's been a year of wins and losses.
I lost my Dad at age 79, who was always a good friend and supporter, and my favorite golf partner.
I've seen my youngest daughter complete her first year of college with excellent grades, and make some great decisions along the way.
I've seen my son earn his college degree and demonstrate amazing talent in music, art, and Web design.
I've seen my oldest graduate from Law School at the top of her class, and demonstrate a servant's heart and a mother's heart with consistency and grace.
All in all, it's been a year to remember, and 2011 is shaping up to be even more memorable.
I'm a little late sharing this but I just wanted to take moment to mention the very successful Bar Camp Charleston (www.BarCampChS.org).
There were dozens of interesting sessions covering everything from Linux to Web Design to Salsa dancing. There were 3 Drupal sessions. The first was 'Intro to Drupal' which was given by Nikolai Burton. Nikolai runs Charleston Drupal Users Group (http://chsdug.org/) and also presented a session called "A Whirlwind World Tour of Film." Nikolai was asked to do this session att the last minute and he filled in admirably. He presented to a packed classroom of more than forty people and it was a valuable session.
My second Drupal session was at 5 pm when most of us were approaching a brain-dead state after a full day of information consumption. The Topic for this session was 'Drupal Next Steps - an Introduction to Drush & Performance Tuning'. By this time the Drupal crowd had thinned considerably. It didn't help that the time slot put me in competition with he very popular 'How to Make Your Own Beer' session. All in all, it was a very productive day and I want to express congratulations and thanks to the team that made it happen.
We tested Boost on www.busbeetruckparts.com and a test version of www.tylerbrothers.net. Both of these sites have mostly anonymous users and fairly static content. They are both hosted on a shared hosting service. These factors make them good candidates for Boost.
Apache Bench (ab) is a performance measurement tool that comes with Apache. It comes natively on a Mac. If you are using a PC, you need to load the WAMP or XAMPP stack to get Apache and ab. Some links about ab and XAMPP:
Like most people, I started doing business with GoDaddy a long time ago, when I first started registering Domain names. Actually, my first domain—sliker.com in 1997—was done through Network Solutions, who I think had a monopoly back then. But like most people, when GoDaddy came out with $9.99 domains it was irresistible. Since then I have had hundreds of domain registrations and renewals at GoDaddy, and two different hosting accounts for my various customer sites and my own Web properties.
While I still host my domains their, I left Godaddy hosting for HostGator In 2007, when I first got turned on to Drupal. GoDaddy has a very unorthodox hosting system and does not support standard tools such as CPanel and Web Host Manager (WHM) for managing LAMP hosting. (LAMP is an acronym for Linux-Apache-MySQL-PHP, which is the open source platform that Drupal runs on. At the time I left, the only way to install and run Drupal was using Fantastico, which was very limiting. Since then, they’ve improved their Drupal support—I recent did a job for [county bounty] and created a Drupal Multi-site on GoDaddy’s hosting system. It worked out fine, but it was difficult due to the odd programs and interfaces we had to use.
The other reason I was glad to leave GoDaddy was due to the company’s marketing and the general attitude of the owner, Bob Parsons. When I want to login and check on my domains, I don’t want to feel like I’m checking in to a strip club. Now granted, there is no pornography or nudity on the site, but there is a lot of scantily clad women and a general attitude that makes me feel kind of … dirty. I would just prefer not to participate, or limit my participation to a bare minimum.
Meanwhile… HostGator has been great! They have great service. Their ticketing system and engineers are top notch. Their phone support is very good. And I love the online chat support—I can talk to a tech support agent via chat at any time of day or night. The HostGator experience has been all good, and I highly recommend them for your Drupal hosting.
Whenever I hear something that makes me want to read a certain book, I right it down in my Outlook To-Do list. I have an Agenda item called "Books to Read"-- I add it to my list.
The first ever Drupal Camp South Carolina is coming up this Sunday and I am giving a presentation called "Which Drupal Modules Should I Use?" The presentation is geared toward people who are new to Drupal and lost in determining which of the 5000+ contributed modules to use.
Broadstreet has been in business in its current form for about 4 years. By all measurements, business is good. We have a handful of excellent customers that really understand the Web and how it can transform their business. We continue to grow, mostly by word of mouth, and we become more productive and more efficient, making more powerful and better looking websites, and branching more and more into the marketing end of the business.
So now we enter a new phase - old school paper-based advertising which supports a paper that supports our community. I like it. What do you think?
Monday night we had our third Drupal Columbia meet-up at the Richland County Public Library and had 7 attendees. It was exciting and very encouraging since the first two meetings were only 3 people.
Most people attending were new to Drupal but I was glad to see some representatives from Pure Fishing (www.purefishing.com) there. Pure Fishing is a company that owns several well known fishing brands, including Shakespeare, which has long had a presence here in Columbia, and Mitchell, which has a very attractive Drupal Site at www.fishmitchell.com.
We agreed to have future meetings at RCPL, 6:00 pm on the Second Monday of each month. The next meetings are April 12 and May 10. Be there or be square!
This month we ran our first advertisement in the 
