The idea for my own website came about in fall 2008, shortly after I decided to pursue my Need A Techie idea. My initial and so far lasting idea for the site was a basic information portal about me and what I do, just like every other website. From late 2008 up to early June of 2009 I was slowly but surely trying to develop my website entirely in HTML through Adobe Dreamweaver. I have never had any formal training with HTML, and the vast amount of information about HTML on the internet is far too deep to dive into. Basically I was slowly plodding along while developing a website that looked like crap and performed even worse.

Then I was introduced to Drupal.

Oh what a wondrous world Drupal is for developers at any skill level. After a weekend of learning and playing with Drupal I began operating a website that far surpassed my previous HTML attempts on both the front end and back end. There is much to say about Drupal, but the long and short is that Drupal is a CMS, or Content Management System. The beauty of a CMS is that the focus of the product is the content, and not the code behind the content. This focus is what makes the Drupal base perfect for someone like me, as it lets me focus on the content on my actual pages rather than the code behind the content that makes the content look pretty. With enough time I could learn and write a fairly effective website that works the same as this one currently does, but ‘enough time’ could easily turn into two years with my current work and school schedule. With Drupal I install the database (3 clicks), configure the site (maybe 10 clicks), and then I have a site that looks better than the majority of ‘personal’ sites out there. After that I pick the modules I want, select a nice theme, and viola! It is now content time…

So with that background of how awesome Drupal is lets preview the actual content:

• I’ve arranged the bulk of my content into four main sections. Each section is a Primary Link and is arranged as my main navigation drop down menu on every page. Each section has its own page as well as at least two sub pages. The general rule I’ve latched onto for web development is increase your content page count exponentially through children. I.E. if you have 4 main navigation links, each main page should have 4 or so children, so on and so forth. Even though you can’t always strictly stick to that, it makes for much easier site navigation
• My ‘home page’ is the default home page deployment for Drupal. The way Drupal does homepages is that they don’t actually create a specific node or page for it in the way we think of one, but rather aggregates all the news from your site RSS style. This is beneficial for emerging blogs and various other website formats, and since I plan on writing a regular blog it works well for me.
• My Home primary link houses my About Me and my About This Site pages, appropriately enough. Depending on how my site progresses other links like My Blog and My Recent Pictures/Videos might appear as Home children as well.
• My Career is the next primary link in the menu. It is fairly evident what my career, my education, and my work experience will contain. I also have an instructional page in this section as well for formal resume requests. For now the resume request just links back to my contact page with the instruction to select the Resume Request category, but I plan on streamlining that a bit more. The My Education section will eventually come to include a section specifically about my experiences at Georgia Tech, complete with professor, class, and degree path reviews as well as Tech history and such.
• The My Interests section is the main non-business related meat of my site. I plan on having everything from case mod work logs in the Computers section, to DIY hovercraft overviews in the Hovercraft child, to videos, pictures, and reviews of my rides in the Motorcycle section. The content of my blog will focus dually around this section as well as the next section.
• My Need A Techie service node rounds out the content on this site. This primary link has the most children currently as I have structured the service into eight separate service areas for the time being. The main point of this portion is an overview of my services and ability, but I will also post various product and services reviews as well as guides that let you complete most of what I am capable of completing.

Okay, I have a plan and I have some content. That is great and all, but what actually makes this site run? Simply saying, “I run Drupal!” obviously wasn’t good enough for you, so here is a bullet list of everything that goes on behind the scenes.

• Drupal 6.12
• Apache 2.2.10 (from my web host)
• PHP 5.2 (web host)
• MySQL 5.051(web host)
• Theme: Salamander 14 (white page), from Salamander Skins
• Core - optional's enabled
  • Blog
  • Color
  • Comment
  • Contact
  • Database logging
  • Help
  • Menu
  • Path
  • Search
  • Statistics
  • Taxonomy
  • Update Status
  • Upload
• Installed Modules:
  • CCK
  • Image
  • Advanced Help
  • Cumulus
  • FCK Editor
  • Lightbox2
  • Gallery Manage
  • Google Analytics
  • Mollom
  • Pathauto
  • Poormanscron
  • Tagadelic
  • Taxonomy Manager
  • Token
  • Twitter
  • Views
• All of the graphics were either created by me or one of the great guys over at The Best Case Scenario, with specific mention to Charles Gantt for the logo.

That should cover all of the basic and most of the in depth information about www.danielvanbeek.com, but if you have any other questions about the site just drop me a line through the Contact Me form.