So, I’m sitting here in Starbucks mentally groaning at the weakness of the Wifi (but not my Grande, quad shot, low fat milk, 2 pump caramel latte) and I see a mailshot from the chaps (and chappette) at System i Developer announcing they have launched a new blog. Hosted by their own IBM i Power System, I can see its running Drupal 7. Nice choice for a CMS (I wonder why they didn’t choose WordPress? Which I presonally think would be a better direction for your style of content #butIdigress) and even though the site looks vanilla at the moment I’m sure they will be mastering the intricacies of Droop over coming months.

In my mission to give something back – here is an open letter to the System i Developer folks:

Hi Susan, Jon or Paul (or whoever is the hand behind the site)

Just wanted to say a big thank-you for all the wonderful articles you have written over the years. I cut my teeth on the old S38 and AS400 boxes but evolved away from the platform in the early noughties. After leaving Blighty for the USA in 2008 and deciding to refocus on RPG development, I was fired up by your presentations at iSeries DevCon2009 and regularly refer to your numerous online articles. Your articles are inspiring, motivating and technically thrilling.

I can see your blog is based on Droop7 – I’m a fairly heavy blogger and even heavier DRUPAL addict and have been playing with various CMS (Drupal is my specialty) since they first started evolving.

In the spirit of paying something back, if I can help you setup your new blog site in any way please feel free to reach out.
Free of Charge, Gratis and for Nowt.

Poking around your site I can see you might like to consider the following tweaks already:

Choose a better looking Drupal theme 🙂

Add a bunch of cool modules to enhance the browsing experience and improve SEO. To name a few essentials that you could be using to make your life easier: /top-pops-10-essential-drupal-modules

NOTE: whack PATHAUTO on there to get rid of the ugly /?node=blah URL’s and google/bing will love you for it 🙂

Last but not least – have you considered WordPress as an alternate CMS?

Cheers
Nick Litten

I would love to help out… it makes me feel all happy inside.

/me imagines filming a Pharell Williams “HAPPY” style video filled with aging AS400 gray haired RPG programmers 🙂