Welcome.mp3

Things are quieter than usual at work (Trophy Specialists) and its time to look at other ways to make money. So I've been putting together a website to help serve our customers better, help my colleagues through an up to date catalogue, and to get new leads. I've been using Drupal + Ubercart. Problems with these are:-

• Attaching files to orders
• Editing text comments in the cart
• Rich text displayed in cart
• Rich text in site admin emails solved by installing the HTML Mail module
• The ability to add a one off charge to a product. At the moment all product attributes are multiplied when the customer enters the quantity required
• The default Ubercart product page layout causes overlap of the pictures and attribute select boxes solved by installing Display Suite module
• Pictures are not deleted from the server when they are deleted from a node
• Drupal doesn't reuse identical pictures. Instead it creates a new file
• A customer who wants a 100 trophies has to manually enter all the details for each one
• SVG is not supported in Drupal's image modules
• Drupal has no inhouse graphs for showing visitor data

I'm also keen on Software Development in general - particularly games, animation, and linux.  So I've come up with a plan:-

• Build a reputation through  serving the FOSS community by:-
  1. Blogging
  2. Writing documentation for FOSS projects
  3. Submitting bug fixes
  4. Writing new code
• Getting a Bachelor of Science degree majoring in Computer Science

Whilst I wait for my first extra mural paper I'm working through a book on PHP. In the short term this has the biggest payoff. My work website will make more money through the improvements I can make with PHP. Javascript, HTML and CSS would also be useful.