Sheldon Rampton's blog

Today I got the following email from an obvious spam/scammer who is promising to send me $250,000 in compensation for having been scammed in the past by spam/scammers:

From The Desk of Minister of Finance:
E.F.F.C/ F.B.I representatives/ Metropolitan police,
ANTI– crime unit world wide.

Introduce this as a notification to get the legal transaction to you.

This country Nigeria, In conjunction with government officials and some force agencies from different countries has come together that result to this as a medium to

A few friends recently have asked me for advice on how to get started developing websites using Drupal. I put together some information and thought I should post it to the web in case other people find it useful.

For starters, there are two books I would recommend:

• Using Drupal by Angela Byron and a number of other authors.
• Pro Drupal Development, Second Edition, by John VanDyk & Matt Westgate. (Make sure you gets the second edition, which specifically covers Drupal 6. There is an earlier edition for Drupal 5 which is now out of date.)

Click on the thumbnails below to see video clips explaining some of the websites developed by Sheldon Rampton. You can also click through to visit the websites directly:

PR Watch
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SourceWatch
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WCCN
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Global Corp Forum
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Family Matters
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Kenny Rampton
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Information

I built most of the websites showcased here using Drupal, a popular, PHP-based content management system. I like Drupal because it is designed to enable developers to add additional functionality by writing their own PHP modules. Website developers have taken advantage of this by writing literally thousands of modules that are now available as free downloads from the "contrib" section of Drupal's website. I've used other people's contrib modules to quickly add functionality to websites including audio podcasting, videos, maps, and bilingual translation assistance (English/Chinese).

After exhaustive research using spreadsheets and math and stuff, I've figured out how to save some money on my iPhone bill.

I've had the phone since August, on AT&T's $59.99/month plan, which gives me 900 minutes/month, with leftover minutes accumulating as rollovers. I only actually use an average of 500 minutes/month, so in the time I've had the phone I've accumulated 2,800 rollover minutes.

Palm Inc. investor Roger McNamee is predicting that iPhone customers will be switching en masse to the Palm Pre once it goes on sale. Here's why I know already that I won't be making the switch:

• I generally don't like buying new products until after they've had their shakeout tour.
• Aside from the slideout keyboard, most of the features on the Pre look like iPhones knockoffs.

In the past I've experienced some dilemmas in creating FileMaker databases, but I think the release of Filemaker 10 provides tools for solving most of them.

I set up my first FileMaker database to manage contacts and donations for Working Capital for Community Needs (formerly the Wisconsin Coordinating Council on Nicaragua). Over the years, it has grown in complexity as the organization's needs have evolved. Originally it was a flat-file database (which was all FileMaker could do when I first started using it back in the 1980s). Then FileMaker added relational database capabilities, I started having one table for "contacts," one for "donations," and other related fields (for example, a "letters" field that is used to generate and keep track of correspondence with WCCN's contacts).

I posted something awhile back about the "Stairmaster desk" that set up so I could work on my computer from my Stairmaster rather than sitting down.

Originally, the Stairmaster desk was just a piece of cardboard folded into the shape I wanted. As I expected, the cardboard didn't hold up very long, so I had Chris Breunig (the husband of my wife's niece, who works as builder) make me a more permanent solution out of wood. Here are some photos.

The wooden wedge by itself, sitting within my plastic book rack atop the Stairmaster's control panel.

I've written previously about Time Capsule's problems and my preferred alternative of using Airport Extreme and an external hard drive. Another option worth considering would be a Network-attached storage (NAS) device.

QNAP, a company that makes NAS devices, has a forum post titled "How to use your NAS with Time Machine" that explains the setup procedure, which is similar to the procedure for setting up Airport Extreme with an external hard drive.

After several more days spent trying to get my Time Capsule working properly, I finally returned it to the Apple Store and bought an external hard drive and an Airport Extreme to take its place. The price for the two items together was almost the same as the price of the Time Capsule by itself -- only $40 more. It took a few hours to get them set up, but everything is going smoothly now -- at least for the time being.

I was an early adopter of Apple's "Time Capsule," which in theory sounds like a great idea but has been a disaster for me in practice. This is the story of my nightmare.

In theory, Time Capsule is supposed to enable wireless, automatic backups of my hard drive via wifi. I liked the idea because I thought it would save me time and make backups so convenient that they'd be sure to happen.

In practice, it's been slow, aggravating and buggy as hell.