There were some missing description fields on a site I was working on. I filled them in because that is what one does when you find an empty description field or alt tag. This, of course, made me worried about all the other sites we maintain. So I started in on checking them.

Since the sites I am working on are with Drupal, I needed to figure out the quickest yet easiest way to get a spreadsheet of nodes with missing descriptions. Views popped into my mind right away because Views can make a table. You can quickly set up a view with the fields you need to check on.

Here is my hacky way of getting the info out of Drupal and into a spreadsheet. I was able to get all the information I needed from five sites in under ten minutes with this though.

1. Make a view and name it something you can remember (ex: junk).
2. Make a block in your view and set it to table under format.
3. Add the fields you need to check on. Mine are Title, Description, and Link to Content.
4. Set Link to Content to output the URL as text and to use absolute link.
5. In the preview, you will now have a table of all your content. Copy that table and paste it into your spreadsheet app.
6. Delete the view if you are done with it.

There are probably other ways but this gets the job done for me.

I am having good luck working with a couple simple drum patterns lately. On their own they are simple like lego blocks. When you use them together you can build.

RLLK or LRRK
RRLK or LLRK
RLK or LRK

I am practicing them as both straight and swing. It's good to be able to do both because I think the more solid my swing is makes straight more tight. That is just a theory.

Loaning my vintage Slingerland early 1970s Buddy Rich drum kit to a music school for kids was a good move. They were just sitting around in a MN storage locker. Now they are letting kids learn the drums on them.

They are probably a little too big for children. The kick drum is massive. But it is cool they get to use a classic drum kit before they move on to something newer.

I like practicing and studying things daily. I am not so into the guilt of skipping a day. My way around it is to make sure my daily practice tasks have a number like "five minutes". If I need to skip a day then I defer the task until tomorrow or some date in the future I know there is more space.

I don't mind arriving to a day and having three "practice drums five minutes" tasks. I can get those done at random times in the day and catch up. That way I know I did the work of drum practice. It allows me to keep on practicing without the daily calendar guilt of habit trackers.

A good system for rehearsal and study. Not a good system for things like taking medication.

This site uses the Drupal CMS (content management system) which has a vast amount of modules you can use to have your site do so many things. My thing lately is choosing one module and test/ruminate on it while working on other things.

So instead of just testing content migration using CSV files, I am daydreaming about as many ways to integrate that into this site (and others). Having a source of truth csv file is good way to work on content. It has made my band's website less of a nightmare to update and maintain.

The next module I did a little deep dive into was the Rate module. It lets you have things like five stars or a thumbs up feature. The Rate module is going to be fun for the albums i listen to. I want some sort of marker for albums I should revisit in the future.

The thing to ruminate on with the Rate module is when to use each feature. Do you go with stars or thumbs? If I add a star rating system to albums, am I really going to listen to a two star album in the future?

It's fun to ponder but it is also a little easier to ponder and test the modules one by one.