csquared.org

Drupal travels pretty well -- here's how to do it.

Finally got it to work... phew.

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