Site news

And so it becomes Drupal 7

July 21, 2013

It has taken far longer than one might have guessed but after many months of sitting mostly dormant this site finally got an upgrade to Drupal 7. Eventually maybe it will get some new functionality but for now we'll settle for a clean, responsive design.

The responsive design comes from a theme based on the contributed Corolla theme. Otherwise things are quite similar.

So while it's true what they say about the cobbler's children going barefoot the public view at least matches what I've been seeing for a while. And we won't talk about the state of the children's websites.

Comments return

January 31, 2009

After a really long week I finally had a moment to look at my blog and see that comments have been broken. In a moment of sleep-deprived administration I updated the site but failed to run the update script. As a result the content monitoring routine (the awesome Mollom didn't have the table in the database necessary to properly accept comments.

The log files show it would have been a busy comment week had they been enabled. And so it goes.

Opting out of Drupal Planet

December 8, 2008

Sure the title is a little overly dramatic. Really I'm not opting out of Drupal Planet in its entirety but I am being more selective about what gets posted there. This has been on my to-do list for a while so it's easier to post some little notes about Drupal here and there for readers of the site without the self-imposed weight of making sure a post is up to snuff to take the time of all the Drupalistas around the globe. A post that was only tangentially related to Drupal being posted to Drupal Planet yesterday reminded me to finally get it done.

So as of this morning a few new views of Drupal information are available on the site. If you're a die-hard Drupaler and want to add a feed to your newsreader the Drupal Feed is available.

A few other subtle changes happened over the weekend.

This includes some cleanup of the "In Brief" section and getting rid of the Atom feed, mostly because the module that provides it has an overly-broad embedded link in page headers which limits more useful specific feeds from sections of the site.

A little site cleanup

November 16, 2008

A redesign of the site has been on my to-do list for some time now. It is a bit of a cobblers children have no shoes problem. Between the book chapters to be edited, the site work to be done and the need to solve customer problems there aren't enough hours in the day. Today was a great day to get out and do some non-computer work so it left even less time. However tonight I finally decided to just jump in and do it.

I still haven't decided between modifying an existing theme and doing it from scratch. Each time I think I've found the reason to go one way or another something else comes up. Among other changes the Twitter feed and Archive made their way from pages buried in the site to Ajax-based slots in the footer of the page. Even managed to do a good deed and file a bug report on some broken parts of the otherwise awesome Nitobe theme.

If you have feedback on the changes please feel free to leave a comment.

Inspired by walkah

August 12, 2008

I've been meaning to get it done and walkah finally pushed me over the edge. The blog is now up on Drupal 6. A few of the things that were here will be re-worked and and the theme will need some tweaking to get it looking right. Nitobe is a cool theme but there are a few things I have in mind for this space so it will evolve for sure.

We'll be right back after these messages...

December 11, 2007


My unintended and extended hiatus here will soon come to an end. This unintentional break has been brought to you by a series of rather interesting stories that will soon enough be told here. Long story short, never, never do business with a builder who puts falsified sold signs on their properties to try and pump up the market. Yes I should have known better but one always holds out hope that people will just plain be straight shooters even when the evidence suggests otherwise. Now if I could just locate some sane people in the real estate market. As I said more will follow probably next week when I'm back up to speed.

Upgrade to Drupal 5.0

January 14, 2007

This afternoon brought with it the opportunity to run the upgrade on this site to the latest version of Drupal. Along with the latest version comes a new theme and some new modules. For example it will take a while for me to get used to the WYSIWYG editor that I now have. Old habits die hard. Something with the upgrade caused the Color Picker in the Garland theme to refuse to work for a while. Finally I disabled all the modules and then brought them back one by one. That seems to have made things happier.

Unfortunately it is too late to stop by the bread store on the way home. I may have to settle for Frys. The problem with Frys is that I'll go and look for the sixth time for a keyboard. I won't find a good one there and will resolve to order one from Amazon, or maybe order two and test them out. Either way I'll go home later and not any happier. 

Updating old content

November 26, 2006

Readers subscribed to the RSS version of this site have seen several articles from before 1998 appear in the feed this morning. While doing a routine (if not frequent enough) check using Google's Webmaster tools, I discovered that there was some old content that had never been migrated into the content management system. A few minutes later and they were all imported. If you want a trip down memory lane check out the notes section from the old site. It was fun to see some of this old content and remember just how far we've come.

It does bring up a feature request for Drupal, however. It would be nice to have a way to add blog posts and selectively not have them appear in the RSS feed. This way when older updates are made they don't plaster readers' feed readers with tips on how to work with ten year old software.

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