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Part 1 of a series: Building out a full Drupal site in a weekend.

Before you start building your website, you need to get all the parts of the site together, and have a good plan for what you'll need and how you'll do it. For many organizations, this can be a huge hassle, as you'll have to go through planning meetings, make diagrams, have all kinds of changes, and end up pre-stressed... and that's before you start working on putting the site together!

Luckily, for this website, the requirements are pretty simple: I can do whatever I want. But I can't get started from that point, so I put a few requirements down on paper, then grabbed everything I needed.

This weekend I am going to attend the Catholic New Media Celebration. I'll be on two plane flights, I'll be sitting at an airport for a few hours before each flight, and I'll be at a convention all day Saturday. I'm hoping to build out a new site idea I've had lurking in the back of my head for some time: Open Source Catholic.

In the past 45 minutes, I've been jumping around Drupal.org downloading all the different modules and tutorials I think I'll need. I've also saved some of my previous work on other Drupal sites in case I need to refer to a code snippet along the way while I don't have Internet access. I'm going to call it a night for now (I need to pack!), but tomorrow, beginning at the airport, I'm going to start working on the site.

Taken earlier today, for Steubenville St. Louis Mid-America:

More information about the photo can be found on the Flickr page (click on the photo to view). I really, really, really like the D90 paired with the 50mm f/1.4 lens!!

Be sure to check back in over the next few days—tons of information from the Archdiocese and the Review about the Pallium pilgrimage in Rome, and tons more about the Catholic New Media Celebration!

Alongside today's news that Apple has finally released the iPhone/iPod Touch OS 3.0 to the public (download it by opening iTunes, connecting your iPhone or iPod Touch and clicking the 'Check for Update' button), some websites are noting that it is easy to enable tethering on your iPhone, even if AT&T hasn't officially announced support for this feature.

Tethering is great for small Internet browsing sessions, or when your iPhone just isn't enough to do what you need to do (for instance, adding content to a website, or uploading a large file). But don't Tether too much: First, if a lot of people are tethering, it can slow down the network for everyone else, and second, your iPhone's battery takes a huge hit (even if charging) while you're using it's 3G signal for tethering.

[NOTE: Visual Voicemail may stop working after you follow the steps below. To get it back, simply go to the Settings app, tap on General, then Network, then Cellular Data Network; tap on the "Visual Voicemail" APN and change it from wap.cingular to acds.voicemail.]

[Update: I have chosen... based on feedback, I needed a little more of a smile. And I'm glad for it, because I'm usually not as serious as I was in the pictures below anyways! Check out the About page to see the final picture.]

Last night I glanced at my old portrait I was using for most of my social media purposes (and on this site). I noticed three things: 1) It's more than five years old now, 2) I wear glasses now... pretty much all day every day, and 3) I don't think I even have the original file, so making a larger copy of it is out of the question.

So I decided to take some pictures. Grabbed the D90, aimed a flash at the far wall, and stood in a corner in front of the large white wall, setting the 50mm to AF with the remote control. After about 40 frames in two outfits (really, two shirts... who am I kidding?), I picked the two photos below: