default: break;

Now, a feature we were trying to get out the window ASAP, in order to minimize the amount of duplicate submissions to our site, was a widget that showed the user similar articles, related to the article the user was typing.

A coding spree last night, taking advantage of Drupal's wonderful autocomplete AJAX support resulted in this:

Head on to the site and try it out!

Ah the start of another adventure.

Always exciting, it is, to birth something into this wild world. Not a child offcourse but surely something out of your blood, sweat and tears, a piece of you, albeit in digital form.

So, as usual, it is my duty to formally present the intricate details of how iloveazores.com came to be, for the technically inclined.

During 2008, and some time after establishing our partnership with IOL/MCM, we realized that if belacena.com was to grow in a scalable way, we had to rebuild the site from scratch mainly due to some bottlenecks regarding the software platform we were using (CakePHP). As debatable as that decision may be, it was what we set out to do.

Unfortunatly, that coincided with a period of major personal change for most of us, which dragged the whole process into what could almost be described as a duke nukem forever reprise.

Meanwhile, with the belacena.com version 2 design finished, Rui, frustrated by the slow pace of development started drawing what is now the iloveazores.com image and we started discussing what the site could be -- a social mashup for the Azores with a mapping component that would appeal to both locals and tourists.

As we pounded code week after week, it became clear that the new IOL/MCM management team wasn't as proactive promoting belacena as we hoped for, so motivation got very low and things basically halted to a crawl. We actually took a few weeks off just to clear our minds of everything web related.

Then, in early 2009 and with a complete site layout for iloveazores.com, Rui, desperate to bring the site to life but enable to because we were (poorly) concentrated on BCv2, got hold of an Indian freelance developer to build the site using CodeIgniter's cousin, Kohana, much to our dislike.

After a few weeks, Rui had a buggy site that kind of worked as supposed but when we took a peek at the source code that was delivered to do some bug-fixing, we had a fit of laughter and tears. We warned about the risk of outsourcing such an important thing but Rui didn't listen.

Tired and burned out, we made pretty clear that bug-fixing the 'Indian' site was not an option.

Having thrown myself around Drupal for another website in June 2008, it seemed a natural choice for showing Rui how quickly one could build the site we envisioned in a short time-frame.

Filipe quickly converted Rui's layout into a Drupal-compatible CSS theme and we hacked for a few weeks, trying out different modules and setting up a development site.

In a matter of a few days, we had reproduced 80% of the desired functionality with Drupal modules alone. The module parafernalia took a while to get hold of but as Filipe also got more comfortable with the platform, we climbed that initally steep learning curve and managed to select and patch existing modules and developed our own along the way.

As of today, I continue to be very satisfied with the Drupal platform, not only because it's very well engineered but because it's also easily customized in non-compromisable ways.

No wonder the whitehouse chose it for their site :)

So, we've got very ambitions plans for iloveazores.com, even extending to the mobile platform and services. We welcome your contributions and hope to benefit not only our local users but the community at large, promoting our beautiful islands.

-mgcm

don't know how could I've missed such a pearl from woody.

another masterpiece by woody.

Sometimes, spreading myself thinly has it's rewards.

Now available on the iTunes App Store is my first publicly released iPhone / iPod Touch App, SATA Lookup.

A couple of screenshots follow:

Try it out and send us some feedback!