This site is no longer being updated. My new technology site is at Technology at Burningbird. My primary website is at Burningbird.
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Category: Burningbird
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The unbearable lightness of new
I’m still delighted with my new Linode VPS. I added one button backup to my plan, and that’s made all the difference in the world. Now, when I’m about to try something tricky, such as setting up a site firewall, I can make a snapshot backup first. Then, if my site gets toasted, I can restore a good copy with a click of a button. Lovely.
After five years I finally broke down a bought a new laptop, a Toshiba. Not only am I trying to find my way around a new machine, but also a new operating system. My current older computers are a PowerPC Mac, and an old Dell running Windows XP.
I saw the writing on the wall about getting a new machine when first, Google wouldn’t create Chrome for the PowerPC, then Microsoft released IE9, but only for Vista and up, and recently, neither Opera nor Firefox would continue supporting PowerPC. Plus, my keyboard is failing on the Mac—forcing me to pound the space key, then the comma, and now the C, V, B keys. You don’t how hard I had to type just to create that last sentence.
What I wasn’t expecting, though, is finding out that some of the open source software I use has not been ported to 64-bit Windows 7. I now have to consider what to use for editing photographs that won’t cost me more than my computer.
Speaking of new, Drupal 7 has released. As I wrote recently, I ported Just Shelley to Drupal 7, but I’m still not ready to port my other sites. My existing theme won’t work with Drupal 7, and I’m not sure if I want to port it, or just continue to use the default or other pre-defined themes. In addition, not all the modules I use have made their way over to Drupal 7.
My new site, Puppies @ Burningbird is based in Drupal 7. I’m happy about using Drupal 7, but less happy about having to create the site.
Unfortunately, bills have been introduced into both the Missouri Senate and the House of Representatives to repeal Proposition B, so the battle has begun anew. If you all like dogs and don’t like puppy mills, I hope you’ll stop by from time to time and leave an encouraging comment. I’m using Disqus to manage the comments, having enjoyed using the services at other sites. I figured if I end up turning off comment support, people still have their comments. Plus, Disqus provides some nice editing and other functionality. I may end up adding Disqus support to other of my sites, over time.
I’m also writing a new change proposal for the HTML5 Working Group. Yes, the more things change, the more they remain the same. I’ll post the proposal when I finish it. And I’m still working on books —no rest for the wicked.
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Happy New Year
As you can see if you’re reading this, the move to a new hosting company went very well. I’m already exceptionally pleased with Linode, not the least of which the dashboard the company provides makes maintaining the site so much easier.
The only real challenges I faced were setting up the email system, and porting my Just Shelley web site; the former is just plain cumbersome, and the latter did not like the move to a PHP 5.3 environment. After the move I discovered that Drupal 7 is PHP 5.3 friendly, Drupal 6 is not. There is something in Just Shelley that triggered problems, though luckily the other sites ported without any problems.
So, I’ve upgrade Just Shelley to Drupal 7, as well as having installed a new Drupal 7 account, and I’m finally getting a chance to take the new version for a run. I can already see I have a lot of work to do. Yes, a lot of work.
In the meantime, we had a exciting day here in New Year’s Eve. We kept getting tornado warnings, and I spent most of the morning hovering around the downstairs interior bathroom.
Just around noon, the siren went off again and the news said a funnel was spotted over Webster Groves or Shrewsbury. I looked outside, and the winds had suddenly reversed direction. There was a rushing sound, but not exceptionally loud. A few minutes later, the winds reversed back and things started calming down.
We didn’t get hit but the F3 tornado did a major amount of damage a couple of miles away. I don’t know if a tornado that far away could impact on wind in our area, or if there was another funnel cloud forming over us that didn’t form into a full tornado. Regardless, we lucked out. So did the people in Sunset Hills, because for the amount of damage done—and it is significant— folks only suffered minor injuries. Unfortunately, there were folks in other parts of the state not as lucky.
I haven’t been to my favorite walking place, since it’s on the other side of the damage path and I don’t want to add to the traffic. There have been a lot of gawkers, but the folks at Sunset Hills came up with the idea of borrowing firemen boots and taking up a collection for the tornado victims from the gawkers. Absolutely brilliant idea.
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End of year shenanigans
As I detail in RealTech, not only am I upgrading to Drupal 7, I’m also moving to a new host. I figured it was time to move to a server where I have more control over the environment.
I’m also doing other work, which may leave my site in a tangled mess at times. If you don’t see any web pages, or don’t get an immediate email reply, it’s just me deep in the inner workings of the Burningbird Monster, trying to determine what happens when I pull this, push that.
Drupal 7 is right around the corner, and my efforts to see how it would work on my existing server made me decide it is time to move to another hosting company. I need more control over my own space, and what is, or is not, installed. After discussions with the inestimable Laura Scott (@lauras), my go-to person for anything Drupal, I’ve decided on a Linode VPS account.
Linode has attracted a good Drupal community, which is important to me. In addition, it provides an extremely easy to use interface, which makes it quite simple to manage the space. I also like the fact that the company provides a good selection of documentation on how to do things geared to its own environment.
Since I’m making a major Drupal upgrade and moving to a new server, now is the time to look seriously at how my web sites are configured and designed, and make changes. I think this is one of the advantages to major releases—they provide a time to stop, think, and decide if you want to keep what you, or if now is the time to make all those other little changes you’ve been thinking about.
Since I’ve designed my own Drupal themes, I need to upgrade them to Drupal 7, as well as incorporate new HTML5/RDFa features. I may even do a re-design, not sure yet. I don’t like web site designing, so I may just grab one of the existing Drupal themes, and tweak it.
Several of my sites haven’t been updated in a donkey’s age, so I need to figure out if I’m going to continue writing at the sites. I probably will keep most, if not all, but I may do some major re-organizing.
I’ve not been taking many photos this year, as some of you have noticed. I need to re-design my photo pages to incorporate Drupal 7 changes and also my changed photography habits.
I’ve become much more interested in eBooks and the ePub format this last year. I was looking at creating an ePub module for Drupal, but someone already started this effort(Drupal ePub Module). However, there’s been little work on the module, and I’m thinking that an extension to the Print Module is a better approach. Or perhaps the best thing to do is just create an ePub friendly XHTML theme, and do a wget or curl on a book’s pages and use one of the many existing ePub publishing tools to create an ePub eBook. It’s better to be a smart developer than a clever one, and smart developers use what exists. Plus the same pages can be used to create a Kindle book, a Nook, and others.
I have been thinking of incorporating Disqus into some of my web sites. I’ve used this service at other sites, and I like how it works. Commenters can edit their comments, track their discussions across many sites, and they don’t have to provide a username and password for each web site (*cough* Gawker) to expose to hackers. Plus, if I turn comments off, the people still have access to their own writing. And Drupal has a module for Disqus, though I’ve not been able to get it to work with my theme (another reason to re-design my pages).
One thing I really like about Drupal 7 is if you don’t like the new administration interface, you can turn off all the new bits. You can turn off the overlay (don’t like), the page-top toolbar (still considering), and the new Dashboard (a keeper). I also like the fact that all the modules I use now are either incorporated directly into Drupal 7, or the developers have guaranteed a first day Drupal 7 release. Most of the modules have also committed to accessibility—that’s something you don’t often see with content management systems. Or W3C specifications.