Over the easter long weekend I setup a new blog that I plan to grow over the next 6 months. Zero RC is a RC hobby blog running Drupal 5.1, the Aurora theme (that I customised to be 760px wide and not full screen), and a lot of different modules. My aim is to get several key authors who each have a different expertise (RC Cars, RC Planes, RC Helicopters and RC Boats).

The modules I'm currently using are:

• Blogs (to handle multiple blog authors)
• Path, Pathauto, Metatags
• Google Analytics, XML Sitemap, Adsense
• Ping, Diggthis
• Search
• Comments, Trackback, Akismet, Captcha, Textimage

I've also customized the node.tpl.php file to insert Adsense code between paragraphs like this:

<?php
  //Split the content based on closing paragraph (</p>) tags
  $content_array = explode("</p>", $content);
  //Rebuild the content and add adsense in between
  $new_content = '';
  foreach ($content_array as $key => $value) {
    if ($key > 0) $new_content .= "</p>";
    if ($key == 1) $new_content .= adsense_display($format = '468x60', $group = 1, $channel = 1);
    if ($key == 4) $new_content .= adsense_display($format = '468x60', $group = 1, $channel = 1);
    $new_content .= $value;
  }
  $content = $new_content;
?>

So, if you're a fan of RC toys, check out the site and contact me if you would like to become an author (paid of course).

I recently setup a small website for the owner of some apartments in the Chevron Renaissance resort in Surfers Paradise on the Gold Coast. The apartments are used as holiday rentals, and we wanted to be able to differentiate these apartments from the other Chevron Renaissance apartments on the market.

The site is very simple, and only required a few of my standard Drupal modules. These were:

• Webform - to create the large enquiry form
• Google Analytics
• Google Sitemap
• TinyMCE

I will soon be adding the GMap module to allow users to view the resort from above.

When I went looking for an opensource content management system to use mid last year, I only knew of a couple, these were Mambo, and PHP Nuke. I had heard mixed reviews about these systems, and wanted to make sure I was using the best, I went in search of one that would do everything that I needed.

After a bit of searching I came across two of the most useful sites on the web (in my opinion)... OpenSourceCMS and CMSMatrix.

I am currently building a lot of Drupal powered sites, something that I will go into more detail a bit later on when I have some time. But because of this I find myself searching Drupal.org more than I search Google, and it was getting annoying and time consuming to type in Drupal.org, then type my search from there, when I am used to using the Quicksearch form in Firefox.

For this reason I had a bit of a look around and found that someone (LouCypher) had already created one and hosted it on MozDev.org.There is even one for DrupalDocs there as well.

Last week I was modifying the default Drupal Bluemarine theme to incorporate a custom designed layout for a client, and was getting some strange image padding issues when viewing the web site in Firefox. Each of the <img> tags in the web site has about 2 or 3 pixels of padding below each image, and thus causing horizontal white lines between images in the heading of the site.

I tried everything I could to try to remove the padding but nothing worked. So I did a search around and came across the Quirksmode site, which deals with the different ways browsers interpret the CSS, in particular Strict mode and Quirks mode. At the beginning of every HTML document should be a <!DOCTYPE> tag, which tells the browser which version of HTML or XHTML specification the document uses.