October 2008

All Natural Vida Tea

Vida TeaSo I was at Walgreens and saw something next to the Arizona Iced Tea that caught my eye; something new and exciting was just waiting to be picked up. I Picked up the can, read the side, looked at the can again, and put it back down. "VidaTea".

A couple days went by and I kept wondering if that can would be delicious, so I bought it. Wow, that's it?

At first glance, it looks like an amazing drink. It's in one of those small cans associated with energy drinks, sans-serif text and promising statements like "ultra premium sparking tea" and "all natural" which just made it seem like the thing to have. It's funny that I'm in a a media studies class at school (where you learn how companies suck you into their product) and everything we've learned applies to this little can.

When I cracked open the Wild Berry Green Tea, it wasn't very good. I was expecting something a bit sweeter and more like actual tea. This was just sparkling water with some berry taste. I'd drink it again, though, it would just take some getting used to.

PomegranateNext I bought the pomegranate Green Tea. The taste is so disgusting. Sour, unsweetened, and again just sparkling water. Maybe I just don't like pomegranate, but wow that was bad.

Finally I have the Desert Pear Green Tea. At first I didn't like it, but I kept drinking some and it's not bad. I'd rank it above the pomegranate.

If you're in your local drugstore and you see this stuff, stay clear of the pomegranate. I would only recommend trying wild berry or desert pear. It's overall not a horrible product, maybe I'm just used to things being sweetened with sugar instead of "organic blue agave". Read more about All Natural Vida Tea

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Moving to Drupal

Drupal headI recently moved my Web site (noobbox.com) over to the Drupal Content Management System. This won't mean much to anyone who just browses the web, but to site owners, a CMS can be a life saver.

Recently I was working on a Web site for somebody and they needed a way to allow multiple users to upload pictures. Being the idiot I am, I started writing one from scratch. There is an incredible number of things to take into consideration from password recovery to permissions and the possibility of needing to extend/add features. I started looking at Drupal because in Web Team, we're migrating the district's Web sites over to Drupal.

What a nice system. It has everything you need, and it's modular which means anybody can develop add-ons for it. One thing that takes a little work is moving existing templates/layouts over to being a Drupal theme. If you take a look at my site, you'll see that some things are still a little whacky (I'm having issues with the breadcrumbs div) but overall it's much easier to maintain my site as well as log information about my visitors.

The only thing that Drupal could use (and I mean this as a module, so you developers out there may want to look at this) is a Download manager. I need a section of my site to have categories, files with descriptions and download counter, password-protection per-file option, with upload and mirror capabilities. I couldn't find one so right now I'm using Olate Download.

So if you're looking for a way to manage your Web site without having to type in HTML or PHP constantly, I'd suggest using a CMS like Drupal, Joomla!, Xoops or PHPNuke. Read more about Moving to Drupal

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New Web Site

Noobbox.com has officially switched over to using Drupal as a content management system.  It took a little bit of work, but it's paying off and making it a lot easier to update pages and content.

I'm still looking for a way to setup a file manager for my Downloads section that is a module for Drupal.  The downloads will be unavailable until I get the new Download Manager setup and working.  You can take a look at http://download.noobbox.com if you want to. Read more about New Web Site