Following along with Gwen Bell's the Best of 2009 Blog Challenge, the official question for today is:

Day 4: What book - fiction or non-fiction - touched you?

My reading this year has been all about improving my skills. I started with a book of PHP tutorials, then progressed to Pro Drupal Development. But I spent most of the year studying and applying the techniques in Leveraging Drupal: Getting Your Site Done Right

My work revolves around not only leveraging Drupal, but also my own talents and skills and to a certain extent the talents and skills of my colleagues. Shortly after I started studying Leveraging Drupal, our team decided to make a better effort to organize our workflow. While I have 20 years' experience in managing projects, I've never had any formal training in IT project management. The book gave me the tools I needed to convert my intuitive project management skills into a developer-friendly work process. Simply being able to speak the same language was a big step forward.

The photo doesn't show it, but it's turned into a pretty ragged book.  The pages are covered with orange highlighter and notes. Right now, I have at least three sections bookmarked (a useful purpose for old receipts). This is the kind of book that will never just sit on the shelf. I'm sure that I'll acquire more Drupal technical manuals, but I expect this one to always find a place on my desk... if nothing more than to remind me what elegant Drupal project management can look like.

By the way, Gwen, thanks for forcing me to think about this question. It reminded me of how much my skills have grown this year!

On the St. Ignatius web site, I've set up a photo album section using Gallery 2. The gallery program integrates quite well with Drupal, which makes it easy for those of us who manage the site to upload and edit photos.

The process is easy... Log into your web site administrative account, and navigate to the album. (On the St. Read more >