blog

I accidentally hosed a post last night. I was trying to delete an attachment to a post but instead deleted the entire post. Luckily I have nightly backups, so restore was quick and easy. It was the first time in a LONG time that I've had to restore the database, but I am extremely relieved that my backup system is working perfectly. I also rsync the backups to my home computer they are stored in two different places.,

Finally got rid of spam from my site. It had caused me problems to no end. I have been using Akismet, but it is not perfect and has the odd false positive so I can't have it delete messages it thinks are spam. I have to have it put them in a spam moderation queue. But unfortunately I have to scan through them quickly before deleting which takes some time. When I was on holidays in May the spam actually caused my disk space on the server to run out.

Finally the Drupal Captcha module actually works and can do image captchas, not just text captchas. Now I have gone 2 days spam free so far.

Just upgraded my site to the latest amadou theme. Thanks Jay Wolf! It Doesn't it look great now? I'd rather have some sort of logo at the top rather than plain text, but oh well, I don't feel like wasting any time on that.

I just upgraded to Drupal 5. Seemed to go fairly smoothly except for a few glitches involving the location module. What a PITA is was though. I took my old site's mysql database dump, copied into a local Drupal 4 installation, disabled all modules, dumped the database, copied it to a local Drupal 5 installation with all my modules installed, then started enabling modules 1-4-ish at a time, and running update.php after each, making sure that the schema upgrades worked properly. Then finally, grabbed the mysql dump, uploaded it to my web host, checked out my Drupal 5 installation from my subversion repository, and imported the sql dump to a new database. Then tested.

So this is my first post with Drupal 5. Uh-oh, looks like the collapsible regions of this form are not working... I hope that's easy to fix.

Update: looks like it was an easy fix. Just had to refresh pages in the browser.

I got pissed off at that crappy old sands_css theme I was using. I realized it wasn't working in Konqueror properly (and therefore probably screwed up in Safari as well). Anyways I always thought it looked kind of ugly so I just switched quickly to some random theme I found in 5 minutes on Drupal's theme page. It's a lot nicer and it has 3 columns so all those widgets in the sidebar are now all closer to the top of the page.

A while ago I mentioned that I was waiting for a few modules to be ported to Drupal 5.x before I upgrade this site to Drupal 5.0. Well the final two modules, gmap and location were ported recently and I started creating a Drupal 5.0 installation in my subversion repository and starting testing. Everything has gone smoothly so far, including many schema upgrades by the various modules. My map of authentic Mexican restaurants in Vancouver also loads much faster now under Drupal 5.0 and the new gmap module. I also like the new default theme, Garland, that comes with Drupal 5.0. I like using default themes because it always themes all the elements correctly, provides for easy upgrades when the next version of Drupal comes out, and I just don't have time to invest in my making my own Drupal template that actually looks any better than the default. This site should be running Drupal 5 within a couple of weeks.

I am really looking forward to upgrading this site to Drupal 5.0. I really like the new default theme and I am thinking of using it along with a customized colour scheme. I am a big fan of using default themes by the way because it means I never have to monkey around with my theme if anything in the underlying API changes from version-to-version. For a simple site like mine, using a default theme makes the most sense. Especially for someone who is by no means an expert in HTML and CSS. I have made a few sites using only CSS (no tables) that were fully XHTML 1.0 compliant and worked on all browsers but only after much work and late nights.

I am going to keep a little list here of modules that I am waiting to be upgraded to Drupal 5.x before I upgrade to Drupal 5.0. I will scratch them off by crossing them out once each of them is ported. Any remaining ones I will port myself if possible.

• Akismet module - port available
• Codefilter module - port available
• CCK E-Mail field - port available
• GMap module - port available
• XML Sitemap - port available
• Image module - port available
• Inline module - port available
• Location module - port available
• Month - port available
• Phone CCK module - port available
• Poormanscron module - port available
• Quotes - port available
• Tagadelic - port available
• Taxonomy DHTML - pretty much done
• View Field - port available

I am excited to be a part of Planet Larry. I don't write about Gentoo too often, but once in a while I might have something interesting to say about it. For those that are interested, my past articles on Gentoo, and my past articles on Linux.

Due to the insane amount of trackback spam I have been getting, I had to disable trackbacks altogether. As soon as the akismet drupal module<?a> supports trackbacks, I might be able to re-enable them. I really think trackbacks are a useful feature.

Ok, after adding the captcha module I still got one comment spam in a very short amount of time, so I found that there is an Akismet module for Drupal, although it isn't listed on the Drupal module list. It is truly amazing and works wonders.

I just got assaulted with blogspam in the past few days. The Drupal Badbehavior module just wasn't doing it's job. Probably because it isn't using badbehavior 2.x. So I have had to bring back the captcha module for anonymous comments.

Just updated to Drupal 4.7.3. Drupal says there are no feature enhancements, but looking at the diff it looks like they added support for zip compression if the server and client both support it.

Updated (2006-09-09): Actually I was wrong about the gzip compression thing. See comments

Just found the program I was looking for, a blog client for Linux called Blogtk. I found it by doing eix blog in Gentoo and it was the only "stable" one listed that sounded like it would do what I want. Hopefully this will allow me to post quickly to my blog without having to use the browser (which I find slow and clumsy at least in Drupal).

How annoying. When I try to make a blog entry on my drupal site it posts the entire thing into the title of the post. That makes it pretty much unusable. I'll have to look for another blogger-api xml-rpc clients that I can use,

I'm still trying to figure out how exactly to structure the taxonomy/categories of this site. I have the tagadelic and taxonomy_dhtml modules and I am playing around with them a bit. Drupal is fairly robust when it comes to categorization and I'd like to just go with something and get it right the first time. Right now I'm leaning towards flat-hierarchy free-tagging for the "stories" (blog articles) with a tag cloud or alphabetized list on the right hand side, along with archival listings. And static pages using multi-level categories with a collapsable menu. Drupal is just so damn configurable, that's the trouble and there are so many modules and different ways of doing things.