It's 11:23pm on November 1st and I'm just over 1k into this year's National Novel Writing Month (NanoWriMo) Novel.

Already I'm struggling.

Granted, I didn't actually have an *idea* until around 4pm this afternoon, but still... I thought it would be a good idea to think about my triumphs in years past, but instead I ended up thinking about all the reasons I have not suceeded.

SO, in order of Worst to Best excuses I've had for not winning Nanowrimo:

If you work with a multilingual Drupal site with any amount of custom code, you'll run into the issue of how to give translators access to strings from those modules -- either user-entered and stored in the database or (gasp!) hardcoded.

By default, Drupal will dump these into the default "Built-in interface" textgroup -- along with about 40 million administrative strings from every other module you're running (think of every line of text from the views UI for example).

See Also http://drupal.org/node/789286

I recently had a client start working with the popular Go To Webinar service and they need to export user data as users completed the Ubercart-backed registration process on their Drupal site.

GTW does a good job hiding the fact that you *can* directly submit users to their system without using their forms.  The only place I could find any decent information on it is on the Hubspot wiki (stay tuned for a "Ubercart / Hubspot integration post coming soon!).

Part Twenty in A Series...

My short story "Mother's Little Helper" appears in Vehicule Press's Anthology "Minority Reports: New English Writing from Quebec "

You can pre-order directly from Vehicule or Amazon.ca

Hopefully I'll get to do some appearances when it launches!

Even if you've followed the, long, winding path to multlingual support for Ubercart, there are still a few, less well documented issues that need to be resolved before you can go live.

My very, very short story "A New Life Awaits" won first place in the Oddessy Con OddContest. Here are the judge's kind comments:

My YA sci-fi short story "Take My Waking Slow" has been purchased by Edge Science Fiction and Fantasy Publishing for their upcoming anthology "Tesseracts Fifteen: A Case of Quite Curious Tales", edited by Julie Czerneda, and Susan MacGregor. From their site:

My short story, "Mother's Little Helper" won second place in the Quebec Writing Competition.

You can read it over at Maisonneuve Magazine, or listen to me read it on CBC's Cinq a Six show (I come in around :41, but go ahead and listen to the amazing first and other second place winners too!)

Or : Enough Rope To Hang Yourself

I'm migrating a client from an ancient custom CMS into Drupal. This didn't worry me, at first, as I'm the veteran of over a dozen migrations and pretty handy with the regex + field mapping stuff. Plus, I've used both the Node Import and Migration modules in the past, so I figured one or the other would be an easy fit for this project.

Only, not so much.