My first Drupal module(s)!

I'd nearly given up learning the Drupal content management system, after it took me two hours to change a font on a static web page. But I needed to procrastinate something even more difficult than changing fonts in Drupal, so I decided to try, try again.

The first interesting thing I wanted to try in Drupal was feed aggregation. I love the idea of feed aggregators like Tumblr, FriendFeed, and Swurl, but I'm unsatisfied with the limitations on what or how many feeds you can use. The output (from Tumblr in particular) can also be rough-looking. Why oh why can't they handle quotation marks in titles right. I'm no regex champion, but I suspect even I, PHP fledgling, could write the fix to that. Surely they've noticed that posts titled "Barack Obama - "Yes We Can"" aren't very appealing? (I had to go out of my way for Blogger to let me make it that ugly.) Finally, I'd like to enhance the output of at least one feed with additional content from my own database, which is completely impossible with Tumblr, Swurl, or FriendFeed.

So I've been checking out Drupal's feed aggregators. I tried Aggregator and FeedAPI my first day using Drupal, so I doubt I assessed their usability fairly. I'll try them again when (if) I understand CCK and Views. But when I tried the ActivityStream module, my enthusiasm for Drupal was restored! Not only did it do significant portions of what I want done (Flickr, last.fm, and delicious feeds), but it looked dead easy to add new feeds by making new sub-modules.

It was indeed dead easy. To add a Goodreads sub-module, I copied and pasted the delicious sub-module. I opened the two delicious files and replaced the word "delicious" with "goodreads". I opened my module list and saw my new module. I turned it on, entered my Goodreads info, and holy shit it worked! My recent Goodreads activity was interspersed with the Twitter, delicious, last.fm, and Flickr info I'd already added. I decided sleep could wait until I made five modules like my Goodreads modules, for Blogger, StumbleUpon, YouTube videos, YouTube favorites, and Hulu.

My new modules are far from perfect. I have a list a page long of improvements I want to make (like handling quotation marks in titles...). But the beauty of Drupal, and open source in general, is that I have access to the code to make those improvements. All I can do with Tumblr is gripe and hope they fix it.

Thus far, it seems to me that in Drupal, it's much more fun doing hard things like feed aggregation than doing easy things like changing fonts. I think this explains why people hate Drupal, then love it. To beginners doing something "easy" like trying to change fonts and put files where they want them, Drupal seems like a ridiculous thing to be excited about. To people who've just done something "hard" that they've wanted to do for years in the space of ten minutes (that's what she said), Drupal seems pretty awesome.

I shoulda learned Java

Alas, my bank account has little more than tumbleweeds in it, so my year or so of un-/self-employment is coming to an end. I must job search in earnest and stop turning up my liberal elite nose at corporations looking for automated pollutant emitters and chicken torturers.

The question now is what programming skills such corporations want me to use to design their new improved Humvee fan sites, and since I've sent out my quota of three resumes today, I get to blog those skills.

As I've opened various job postings, hoping the single handful of programming languages I'm truly comfortable with are just what they're looking for (FORTRAN anyone? Anyone?), I've been keeping track of what they are, in fact, looking for. This is completely non-scientific, of course. One glaring flaw, for example: every third company wants a straight-up Java programmer. I want to know Java (that's how the awesome, awesome, awesome Legend of Zelda for your phone! was written), but I don't honestly know Java, so I don't open those ones.

Here are the programming languages/skills companies are looking for in order of popularity in my unscientific survey:

Javascript - 8 companies
Green Ventures, Inc.
Mystery Company
Auction company
Smarsh
Mystery Company
Dealerpeak
Inspiration
ConceroTechnology

HTML - 6 companies
Sharepoint
Smarsh
Intersoft
Mystery Company
Auction company
ConceroTechnology

Java - 6 companies
Amazon
Sharepoint
Axiom
Mystery Company
Dealerpeak
DB Professionals

Linux - 4 companies
Amazon
Mystery Company
Intersoft
VxWorks

PHP - 3 companies
Green Ventures, Inc.
Mystery Company
Intersoft

MySQL - 3 companies
Green Ventures, Inc.
Mystery Company
Auction company

Visual Basic - 3 companies
Smarsh
Axiom
Selectron

Visual Basic.NET - 3 companies
Lifeport
Sharepoint
ConceroTechnology

XML - 2 companies
Intersoft
Dealerpeak

Perl - 2 companies
Amazon
Intersoft

C++ - 2 companies
Amazon
Axiom

C# - 2 companies
Selectron
ConceroTechnology

C - 2 companies
VxWorks
Mystery Company

Coldfusion - 2 companies
Mystery Company
Dealerpeak

.NET - 2 companies
Sharepoint
Intersoft

CGI - 1 company
Intersoft

CSS - 2 companies
Smarsh
Mystery Company

ASP - 2 companies
Sharepoint
Smarsh

Flash - 2 companies
Auction company
Inspiration

SQL - 1 company
Dealerpeak

AJAX - 1 company
Green Ventures, Inc.

Joomla - 1 company
Green Ventures, Inc.

Drupal - 1 company
Inspiration

SQL Server - 1 company
Smarsh

ActiveX - 1 company
Smarsh