csquared.org

Recently, I've been playing around with Drupal. As a test case, I've converted 99.9% of a certain author's static website on my linux box, and the more I play with it, the more impressed I get.

Setup was pretty easy, and the only real issue I had was figuring Drupal's category system. As opposed to WordPress's intuitive categorization system, Drupal requires you to have at least one "term" in a "vocabulary".

At the moment, I don't have the patience to get "clean urls" working. It's not a failure on Drupal's part. Rather, it's the default Apache 2 configuration on SuSE 9.1 that's the issue. Despite "mod_rewrite" being available, it steadfastly refuses to bend to my will.

The next test will be a "live" deploy to see how well Drupal travels. This entails ftp-ing the stuff up to ciulla.org, backing up the local MySQL database, then restoring it on a hosted db instance. Too bad I can't just gzip it and remotely unzip it on the server side -- although I could fake out the server and deploy it as a .war file...

Woe to comment spammers everywhere -- Dr Dave has released Spam Karma 2 final. I haven't been spammed since I installed SK2 Beta 4 earlier this month. And, this is despite completely unrestriciting comments. A great piece of work!

The Tech Gadgets Blog has a nice WordPress navigation bar that I've appropriated.

Check it out.

"WordPress database error: (Errcode: 17)" -- panic-inducing words indeed.

As you may or may not know, I moved WordPress up to ciulla.org's root directory. At least I don't have to worry about the homepage getting stale. This got me about half way -- I think I still need a more flexible content management system to do quick hits against the rest of the static content around here.

Anyway, I put the finishing touches upon the tableless version of my resume. After fighting with unordered lists and list elements for the better part of today, I threw in the towel and changed everything to paragraph tags. Despite this, I think it looks pretty sharp. It just bugs me that CSS doesn't do what I think it should do. Either that, or the way IE and FireFox renders stuff.

I've been investigating options to maintain ciulla.org via a content management system. Most of them have been overkill for maintaining the few static pages I have laying around.

Then it occured to me that I could use WordPress to maintain the static stuff.

So, I read the instructions on the WordPress Codex. Several times. And I changed my options, moved the files, then updated the permalink structure. Several times. I even deleted .htaccess. Several times.

All to no avail.

Whoever decided this was a good idea needs to be flayed...

Since I installed Spam Karma 2 (SK2), I've been an absolute fiend about checking to see if any spam has been harvested. Before, I'd get about 20 "please moderate such and such comment" emails a week... Sometimes more.

It's been so effective, I have to write about something else, I suppose...

So, here's what I've been doing for the past couple of days (besides working, of course):

• Working on a CSS-only (read: non-table) version of my resume
• Looking for a very lite content mangement system for the site's static content
• Fixing overheating issues on the other computers laying around the house and playing family System Administrator
• Playing around with a second-hand copy of SuSE Professional 9.1

Ok, now that Spam Karma's installed, I've turned off the Users must be registered and logged in to comment option.

Let 'em try to comment.

Mwahahahahahaha.

Dr Dave has published Spam Karma 2 for beta testing.

I've installed it, and will discuss its efficiency in the future.

edit: Wow, just looked at the options. I wish I would have found this plugin earlier.