November 3rd, 2008
With any luck, this should be my last post to my WordPress blog. If you are followed an old link that led you here, my new blog is now hosted on Drupal at http://davenjudy.org/davesBlog.
I have enjoyed using WordPress to express what I wanted to say and capture a variety of technical articles. Unfortunately, a WordPress blog is fundamentally linear even if specific articles end up in designated categories. My new blog allows me to write on a variety of different subjects and keep the various subjects separate. I hope you enjoy the new format.
Cheers,
Dave
Tags: drupal migrate, WordPress
Posted in Interests: Computers | No Comments »
October 10th, 2008
One of my goals when I set up my server was to have a system that wasn’t likely to fail. To that end, I set up the system with Linux software RAID and an Uninterruptable Power Supply (UPS). The idea was that the UPS would bridge minor power outages, the UPS monitoring software would gracefully shutdown the server if the power failed for a long enough period of time, setting the BIOS to resume when the power was restored meant the system should restart and the RAID array would handle the failure of any single disk.
That was the plan. Read the rest of this entry »
Tags: boot, centos, grub, lilo, mdadm, raid, RHEL
Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »
September 15th, 2008
Besides working on the patio here at the house (expect a posting soon), I’ve been pondering what the best way is to cut over from my old WordPress blog to my new Drupal blog/web site. Given that I’d like to see if things like MyBlogLog can still find my postings, I’m going to finish migrating my blog content to Drupal by re-posting the old articles. This will probably start happening in early October since I have some personal travel coming up that will keep me away from my computer for a while.
In addition to bringing over my old content, I’ll also be updating the artwork for the header. The default, Giordani, artwork is nice but I like the idea of relating the header artwork to my byline. Finally, given the small amount of traffic I’ve seen at my WordPress blog, I’ll probably not bother bringing over any existing users. If this presents a problem for anyone, please reply to this posting. Once all of my content has been migrated I will remove my WordPress blog since I don’t see any point in attempting to maintain something I’m not using.
As for plans, after all of my old content has been migrated and I’m sure that the site is being “found,” I want to publish the book I wrote as a Drupal book with a Creative Commons attribution license.
Cheers,
Dave
Tags: Drupal, migration, WordPress
Posted in Interests: Computers, Projects around the house | 1 Comment »
September 7th, 2008
I think the current incarnation of my Drupal presentation is close enough. It would be nice to have the tabs for the articles (forum topics) be below the logo graphic but I can live with them above the graphic. I now need to figure out how to deal with 1) getting my existing blog content into the Drupal incarnation and 2) how to continue to do development on my internal box while retaining all existing content on the production server.
Getting the blog data into Drupal may be challenge. After doing lots of Google searches for a tool to automate the process, I have come to the conclusion that such a general tool probably doesn’t exist and, for that matter, cannot exist. The problem is that WordPress has a linear view of posting with each new posting sequentially following the previous postings. That’s kind of the whole idea of a blog. Drupal, the way I want to use it, has a hierarchical tree-like view of forum postings and comments.
That is, there are several topic areas and several topics within each topic area. Each topic has associated comments and each comment can be a node from which additional discussions spring. That is, Drupal’s tree-like structure can have lots of branches.
One thought I had is to create a “node editor” module for Drupal that would allow a user to re-assign a node to any compatible location within Drupal’s comment tree. This would mean I could turn Drupal’s generic blog feature back on, come up with a quick way to slurp in my blog, comments and all, and then use the node editor to re-assign blog postings and comments as I see fit.
We’ll see on that one. I don’t have that many blog postings so it may be worth it to just copy and paste from my WordPress blog to Drupal.
The other problem is to come up with a way to continue to develop my site concept on my development machine and then transfer the updated database to the production server to make it available to users. As one posting wryly observed, Drupal doesn’t have a nice clear distinction between a web site’s content and it’s presentation structure. This sort of makes sense since content should drive the presentation. Unfortunately, this means it will be tricky coming up with which tables are strictly content, which ones are strictly structure and how to handle any others.
This one isn’t immediately critical so it may have to wait. On the other hand, it sounds like something a lot of people could use.
Cheers,
Dave
Tags: backup, database, development, Drupal, migrate, production, WordPress
Posted in Interests: Computers | No Comments »
August 26th, 2008
It looks like the more involved access control consideration for a Drupal based web site only really arise for sites that will have multiple user roles. Since this site will, at least initially, be a blog, I don’t see a need for roles beyond administrator (me), registered users and anonymous users. That is, my new site will be a blog that combines elements from my web site but doesn’t attempt to be anything more than a multiple topic blog.
Given this, I decided to migrate the current state of my new Drupal based site to my web server. The Drupal site implementation is way short of what I’m looking for in a final site structure to say nothing of not having any real content. Assuming I don’t run across something like a security flaw that impels me to remove this or any of the subsequent development snapshots, the original Drupal site will be accessible here. The most recent implementation will also be available as http://davenjudy.org/davesBlog/.
UPDATE 29 August 2008: What I had hoped to preserve between versions is actually in the database. That means that there isn’t an easy way to keep old versions around since I only have one database. I’m keeping the database snapshots and will provide the snapshots if there is any interest at some point in the future.
Expect the “current” site to change from time to time as I add content and functionality. I’m a little less than half way through Building powerful and robust web sites with Drupal 6 so expect things to change as I learn more. The lesson learned this time was that turning off “Clean URLs” before migrating to another server really is a must. On the plus side, I found yet another way to get the browser to display a blank screen.
As always, questions, comments or suggestions are welcome.
Cheers,
Dave
Tags: Drupal, migrate, WordPress
Posted in Interests: Computers | 1 Comment »
August 24th, 2008
Why is it that a problem always waits to manifest itself until there is something else to blame?
Here I am trying to figure out how to get the most recent forum topics to show up on the Drupal front page. I find this really neat Drupal package called views, download and install it, go to activate it and I get a blank screen. Now if this were a production quality module, I’d be looking at the system logs right away. But the views module is still considered beta for Drupal 6.
My first thought is that the new module doesn’t “like” something about my system (I’ve been hacking away on my development system). I uninstall it and then reinstall it several times with slightly different approaches each time. Always the same result: blank browser screen. I dig through the on-line documentation which points out the need to install “advanced help” to get the full documentation for the views module which I duly do.
Another blank screen. The difference, this time, is advanced help is a production quality module. This time I check the Apache error log. This time I see the out of memory error messages. ARRRRRRGGGGGGGGHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!
So, I bumped the PHP memory size from 16MB (default) to 64MB. Now both advanced help and Drupal views modules install with no problem. The site sort of looks like I want now since views lets me customize content displayed including letting me have a Drupal block that consists of the most recent forum topics which I plan to use article blogs. The views module even includes a sample view of the most recent forum comments which was the other content I wanted on the front page. Woo Hoo!
Oh, and I started on the “Access Control” chapter in the book I’m using so I’ll, hopefully, be exposing the Drupal site soon.
Cheers,
Dave
Tags: Drupal, memory limit, migrate, php, views, wrodpress
Posted in Interests: Computers | 1 Comment »
August 21st, 2008
Now that I’ve said what I’m going to do (migrate my blog and web site from WordPress to Drupal), I probably ought to say how I’m going to go about doing it. My plan is:
- Get and install Drupal on an internal workstation and start playing with it. The “get and install” parts of this were done about a week ago. The playing with it will probably continue indefinitely.
- I decided to go with the book Building powerful and robust web sites with Drupal 6. I like tree-ware when I’m learning something since I can make notes, read when I’m not at the computer, etc.
- Mess around with Drupal on my internal workstation until I have at least an idea of how to move both my blog and my web site to Drupal. Another criteria is to get through the chapter of the book titled “Access Control” since I want the in-progress and final site to be secure. I’m currently working through Chapter 3 and that’s Chapter 5 so don’t hold your breath.
- Once I feel comfortable that I can control access to the development site I’ll make the current version available as a link from this blog.
- Continue moving content and working out how I want the combined blog/web site to look and function.
- At some point I’ll post a (hopefully) final WordPress posting and move completely to the new site/blog. Depending on how well I’m able to migrate the existing content, comments, etc., I may leave the blog available as a standalone entity for a while. It will go away when maintaining the two capabilities becomes tiresome.
I’m tentatively planning to go with the Giordani theme and use the Drupal “forum” functionality for my various blogging subjects. This could change but I like the way it looks so far.
As always, questions, comments or suggestions are welcome.
Cheers,
Dave
Tags: convert, Drupal, migrate, WordPress
Posted in Interests: Computers | No Comments »
August 20th, 2008
Obviously, I haven’t been writing much lately. Part of the reason is my brother’s death and the other part is I really haven’t had anything to write about. I mainly write on technical subjects that are my way of sharing the lessons I have learned regarding getting a particular functionality working. Fortunately or unfortunately, everything seems to be working just fine so I don’t have any technical issues to write about.
The obvious solution is to this problem is to change something. I’m currently working for an old boss of mine with a co-worker who also reported to her building a web site using Drupal. After taking a look at Drupal, I’ve decided to move my blog from WordPress to Drupal. WordPress is a great blogging platform but I’d really like to have better integration between my blog and my web site. From what I’ve seen of Drupal, it looks like it can provide that integration. This also gets me more acquainted with Drupal so, hopefully, I can better contribute to the web site site development project I just mentioned.
My plan is to have the “in progress” Drupal incarnation of my combined blog/web site available as I make the transition. I want to make sure that any intermediate Drupal implementation is secure and apparently stable but I’m hoping to otherwise show how I go about the transition process. If it appears worthwhile, I may “snapshot” some of the in progress implementations and continue to make them available even after they are “left in the dust.” At some point I will write (and post) perl code to slurp my existing blog out of WordPress and put the content into the Drupal site.
As always, questions or suggestions are welcome.
Cheers,
Dave
Tags: conversion, Drupal, perl, WordPress
Posted in Adventures, Interests: Computers | No Comments »
July 13th, 2008
Of course the release of CentOS 5.2 (corresponding to RHEL 5.2) came the day before I was scheduled to leave to handle my brother’s estate. I had already disabled automatic updates on my systems since I prefer to run the updater manually. I guess this goes back to the bad old days when updates frequently failed. Regardless of my motivation, I had no intention of installing a major maintenance release prior to heading out. Even worse, my brother’s house in Mississippi barely gets cell phone service; Internet access is non-existent other than dial-up and we had already disconnected the land-line.
Once I got back to Colorado, upgrading to 5.2 was a priority. As expected, this was a non-event except on my wife’s computer. It crashed unexpectedly during the upgrade. I was able to complete the upgrade after rebooting so I’m guessing the problem was due to some kind of hardware transient problem. If the system exhibits the behavior again, I’ll have to try to figure out what’s causing the problem, The weather here is hot and dry with a lot of static electricity so there’s a good likelihood that the crash won’t occur again. Read the rest of this entry »
Tags: centos 5.2, conflict, duplicate, RHEL, rpm, upgrade, yum
Posted in Interests: Computers | No Comments »