First Drupal Site

I first encountered Drupal in mid-2006 when I was a student struggling to navigate the waters of grad school. I had entered the program with the intention of studying online collaborative tools (vague, I know), but had never actually built a website myself. At a dinner party that fall in New York, I met David Kraftsow, a brilliant programmer and interactive designer (who , among many other interesting projects, created first person tetris). After bumbling my way through an amorphous explanation of what I hoped to study, he encouraged me to take a look at Drupal, an open-source content management system that had been recently used to power the Howard Dean campaign.

At the same time, Liz Miller, one of my professors, was looking to have a website built for one of her many projects. When she approached me, I didn't know how to actually build a site, but I knew enough to say she should check out Drupal. That was enough for Liz and it turns out she was willing to pay for it to do it for her - bonus. After a few months of getting my head around Drupal, getting lost in the community forums, learning the language and logic of the CMS, and generally banging my head against my desk in frustration, we launched www.documentaryconcordia.org. It wasn't pretty. In fact, the first iteration was downright ugly. But it was my first chance to get my hands dirty and my first exposure to this fascinating Drupal community that seemed to share the same values of openness and cooperation as I did. And for the first time since returning to school, I felt like had actually built something. That first site was likely seen by very few people, but it was a start. And I'm forever grateful to Dave for planting the seed in my head and to Liz for taking a chance on me.