Now I am no fan of censorship, but there is one banner ad that has recently appeared all over the place titled “Flat Stomach Rule.” I usually find it right next to an article I am trying to read, and after being completely distracted and disgusted, I usually give up on the article. I rarely click on banner ads because I prefer text ads myself. This one in particular is simply too hard to ignore. The only way it could be worse is if it was animated. I won’t show it on this page, because then you would be too distracted to read the rest of my blog, but you can glance at it here.

What ever happened to ad content quality standards? I know they exist because I have been both an advertiser and a content publisher. As an advertiser I had to comply with certain standards to fit into a criteria for certain target websites. Although these standards usually only restricted adult content and profanity, the content publisher has even more control by blocking certain ads from appearing. I thought the system worked fairly well until now.

Are we now too sensitive to bogus diet ads to block them? Am I the only one who finds this distracting and distasteful? At the very least they could have put a little more effort into the design of the ad. In any case, I hope content publishers will find these soon and start blocking them. I also hope that bogus dieting companies will find better ways to trick me into shelling out a monthly fee (if I ever require their services). Until then, I’ll just have to try harder to ignore it.

My current email address is webmaster at [firstlast] dot net, which is nice, but I really always wanted [first] at [last] dot com. Mazza, and even David Mazza is a popular name. It’s estimated that around 7500 people have my last name. David doesn’t help make my full name any more unique because it is the sixth most common name in the US. It’s so popular that even Anonymous has taken it on as an alias; “David Davidson from Davidsonville.” Apparently 96 other men in the US share my full name.

Mazza.com may be taken, but that wasn’t going to stop me from finally getting the email address I’ve always wanted. I finally decided to search again for other options and found that Mazza.me is still available. I purchased it, making mazza.me the shortest domain I own at only 7 characters. You can now find this website at http://david.mazza.me/ (or just mazza.me) and you can send an email to david at mazza dot me.

HowManyOfMe.com

There are 96 people with my name in the U.S.A. How many have your name?

I have a late winter break this year. My last final was on December 23, and I still have 2 weeks left. I decided to spend my break doing freelance and volunteered web development, as well as looking for a summer internship. I am still working on THiNK Magazine’s Drupal website, which became a much larger project than I expected.

We started in september deciding between WordPress, Joomla, Movable Type and Drupal. I’ve known about Drupal for a while from old hosting clients, but this was the first time I actually worked with it. It isn’t as easy to start using Drupal as they claim it is, and using it for a magazine presents a unique set of challenges. A magazine is focused on strategically placed articles and imagery. Drupal is not inherently good at handling article placement or featuring images. Both require a wide array of modules. Behind the website there also needs to be separation of issues and a special hierarchy of users. Luckily I found an installation profile developed at RIT called “Innovation News.”

I had a lot of hope that Innovation News would make the project easy, but the project grew to be much larger than I expected. I am facing layout problems that I thought would be very simple. I haven’t touched the CSS much yet in order to keep it simple. The other main component we want is a “slider” on top of the front page to showcase the featured articles. This requires some information to be dynamically exported to an xml file, and there really isn’t any module written to do that. There is one that is similar for Drupal 5, but I am using Drupal 6. I have decided to take the module and modify for my needs with Drupal 5, and then try to upgrade it to Drupal 6. If anyone has suggestions please leave it in the comments.

I’ve learned how a team could really help to complete this project. I would love to bounce ideas off of people, and also handle the project in parts. It would be easier to look at the big picture that way. Sometimes I get lost in the details. I don’t have access for a project like this that was supposed to be small. On top of that, I am volunteering my time for it, but it has been fun to learn more about the concepts of a CMS. I’ve jumped right into the fire, what a mess…