Drupal Gardens' hosted web service offers a great way for designers to get up and running quickly with a Drupal website. Art Director Joy Burke shares the pros and cons of working with this new tool from the fine folks at Acquia.

Joy is building a website with Drupal Gardens for the first time. A hosted solution for rapid creation of Drupal-based websites, Drupal Gardens offers a wealth of features that streamline development time for creating page layouts, adding image galleries, and theming on the fly. It also offers Typekit integration, which allows for great web typography customization. Joy has found that Drupal Gardens simplifies the design process while also throwing in some restrictions as well. Here’s Joy’s take on the Drupal Gardens workflow as well as some tips for getting it up and running quickly.

Marya Hornbacher says she'll start tweeting when she can fit a Russian novel into 140 characters. The Pulitzer and Pushcart-nominated author and I sat down to discuss new work, social media, the collapse of publishing, and writing to your passions.

I first met Marya Hornbacher in 2008 when I interviewed her for Bookstream just before her third book, Madness: A Bipolar Life, was released. We had a great rapport in the interview, found we have a lot in common, and have since kept in touch. I was thrilled to learn that she is currently in Chicago a few days per week teaching at Northwestern University and will be reading almost entirely new work at Women and Children First bookstore on Friday, February 25th. We sat down in her room at the Dana Hotel for a quick chat between meetings and classes.

Having met Tim Frick in a fiction writing workshop, I knew his pen and paper and fiction writing before anything else. Soon, I came to know that Tim brings humor, creativity and passion to all the things he does, from pixels to pork and squash stew. Now, a quick byte with Tim in our arts and creative profile series.

Stacy scouts for technology news and trends, creates keyword-rich content and digital marketing for Mightybytes and its clients, as well as writes fiction. Her profile continues our support of the arts throughout October and conversations with the MB team.

Tai is part of the theater and education company, Barrel of Monkeys and is their Graphic Designer. This theater ensemble works with some of the most under-served students in Chicago utilizing creative writing, self-esteem building, and adapting student-written stories for the stage. All of this is part of their mission presented in a ‘smart, funny theatre experience.’