My new web site dedicated to running
Years are passing by, and each year I am running a few marathons and half-marathons. For each of them I generate a write-up and a picture gallery. But there was no centralized place where I could post my war stories. Finally, I created one, with the help of Drupal, a wonderful site building system.
Here is it. You can see a grid of titles, each one representing a single running event. If you click on a title, a web page showing detailed description opens up. It even includes a map of where the marathon took place. Beneath the map and summary you can see my report. And after the report – a picture gallery (I am always trying to snap a few pics as I go along the way, even if organizers also take pictures).
The funny thing is that it was really easy to build this web site. I did not have to write any code to create a data schema or the UI to enter the data. All of this is done completely automatically. I only need to specify what kind of data I want to store – text fields, geo-location, star voting widget, etc. Very high-level and rather intuitive. The only part that needed some coding was the styling part, that is, when you actually want to specify that the map should be aligned on the left-hand side, and the summary block – on the rigt-hand side. For that purpose I used CSS injector plugin.
In addition to My Marathons web page I would like to build My Readings page which will be dedicated to the book reviews. With the proliferation of book readers I noticed that I am reading more books now. Yeah, these book readers are really useful gadgets, even though I don’t have a dedicated book reader. I am using a rather general-purpose inexpensive tablet manufactured by some Chinese manufacturer called ErgoTech.
I am really excited about Drupal now! I think it perfectly fits to the golden middle on the scale of skills one has to posses in order to build a web site. On the one end there are template-based web site builders which don’t make it possible to build custom web apps. On the other extreme is the pure HTML and Javascript, which takes a lot of time to learn. So – Drupal is what I really needed!
Learn Drupal!