drupal

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

I just started using flickr recently with a pro account. I'm gradually moving all my pictures there. There is some Drupal integration using the flickr module. There is a page that shows all my flickr sets within my website.

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 can't seem to get Digg.com's "blog this" feature to work with my Drupal blog. I was able to get it to work at one point but it is really inconsistent and unrepeatable. One of the main issues I have been having is with my username having a space in it (it was "David Grant" before). Now I have changed it to "David Grant" to remove any possibility of that being a problem. I keep getting this stupid error: "You either tried to edit somebody else's blog or you don't have permission to edit your own blog." But I did have it working with these same settings before.

The same problem applies with 43things.com blog integration feature... I tried setting my blog-type to Wordpress but no dice...

Update (2006-07-29): Almost got it working. The key was enabling the blog module and enabling the "edit own stories" permission under "blog" under "access control." It turns out that there is no problem with having a space in my username. There is one small rinkle, however, and that is that with digg.com it always wants to create a "blog" content-type, not a "story." By putting a watchdog statement in the blogapi.module I was able to see that digg.com is sending "1" as the "type" argument to the blogapi_blogger_new_post function whereas the gaim-blogger plugin is sending "story". The numeric type causes drupal to create a blog entry, even though I have explictly told the blogapi to only create story nodes, at the blogapi settings page (admin/settings/blogapi). I haven't figured out exactly why this is happening yet.

Update (2006-07-29): Got it working to my satisfaction but it's an ugly hard-coded hack. I hard coded $blogid='story'; to force all new nodes created with the blogapi to be of type "story". This will obviously fail miserably for any user that doesn't have access to create stories although that doesn't matter for me since I have just a single-user blog. Well all this has made me wonder if I should use the "blog" content type as my main content type. Here's the patch anyways:

--- blogapi.module.orig 2006-07-30 00:43:52.000000000 -0400
+++ blogapi.module      2006-07-30 02:41:20.000000000 -0400
@@ -191,6 +191,7 @@
   }
 
   $edit = array();
+  $blogid = 'story';
   $edit['type'] = _blogapi_blogid($blogid);
   // get the node type defaults
   $node_type_default = variable_get('node_options_'. $edit['type'], array('status', 'promote'));

Great, simple little MySQL backup script here at B&T's Tips & Scripts. I just got it set up and so dumps of my database are now being made every night at midnight or whenever I call the script (as I did right now before installed the gsitemap drupal module).

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.

Finally installed my new Drupal website. Just getting it set up now.