Morisy.com

Usually I start beta testing Drupal releases well before it's safe or sane, usually upgrading this site, without any real backups, to the latest, greatest and crashiest. With Drupal 7, I held off because I've been so completely swamped. I'm happy to report that the installation process has been further refined and simplified, particularly when it comes to troubleshooting what you need to jigger a little bit around to get it running properly. I've been so used to modifying sites.default.php, I actually had to go back and undo my modifications to get things up and running, but the changes are all good.

I generally also like the default modules: Drupal now seems to do a lot more out of the box, and feels more ready to go. Very heavy on the light boxification, for example, as well as built in images. The light boxification actually seems to break the ability to do things on Android's browser, but turning it off was quick and painless.

Huge kudos to the Drupal community. I know there's been a lot of high-level complaints, but this release is a huge step in the right direction.

Tried upgrading the site to Drupal v 7 tonight, and made a few mistakes (some in full knowledge) while doing it:

• Backed up nothing, relying on luck and my occasional SQL database dumps
• Didn't read the requirements: Drupal 7 needs a later version of PHP than Drupal 6
• Randomly deleted and added files when trying to get it to work
• Tried and failed at doing an Ubuntu distro upgrade

The real show stopper is the PHP requirement, which took me way too long to figure out. Once I did, I tried upgrading my Ubuntu server but it's having trouble extracting the latest update, so I've reverted back to 6.22 and this ugly Garland theme until I have some time to figure out what's going wrong.

The Drupal 7 installation screen, however, looks really nice.

Editor's Note: I apologize for calling Garland ugly. It's obviously not, and Stefan Nagtegaal and Steven Wittens are both incredibly talented designers. It's just the default and not my theme, which is what bugs me. Wittens, by the way, did the wonderful and thought-provoking TermKit. Check it out if you're geeky.

Last Thursday, at 4:37 PM, I got an e-mail from a team at MIT I've been developing for: We need brand new feature X, and we need it up and working by tomorrow morning.

Unfortunately, I had an out of town guest, a day job that needed attending, a dog that needed running, and 23 other things that stood in my way. Fortunately, I was using Drupal and was able to pull together the feature, relatively bug-free, between 7 a.m. and 9 a.m. the next morning, fully integrated into the existing site. I didn't even have to install a single new plugin to get exactly what I wanted.

What did this include?

• Create a UGC site that asked visitors a questions and collated their responses
• Tied those responses to a vendor
• Checked for spam and Captcha'd suspicious-looking responses
• Promote this feature throughout the site

Check it out

One thing I've been mildly-yet-obsessively entranced with for a number of years is how nicely Gawker plays with thumbnails:

One of the minor irritations of modern web design is that, even you HTML the hell out a blog post to make it look perfect in terms of graphical layout, by the time you trim, sanitize and otherwise disembowel that HTML for your teaser text, at best you'll have something dull, at worst you'll have something that wreaks havoc on the rest of your page. Gawker, however, automatically crops and resizes a photo as needed to create interesting, all-purpose graphic work that can be popped in wherever it pleases.

I was so jealous of the effect that I began working on my own Drupal module to copy it until I realize that, not only does such a module exist, but it's one of Drupal's most popular: ImageCache.

Scary Red Text
Occasionally, logging in to check site comments, I get scary red text like this. It gives me a sick little thrill, realizing how complicated and interconnected everything is, that I can reach in and break stuff on this site, even accidentally, like opening up a mechanical watch and seeing all the gears and springs quietly clicking and whirring along.

Complexity is a beautiful and frightening thing.

I've been working on a (secret-ish!) side project recently that hopes to index a lot of profiles, and allow people to browse through and compare those profiles as convenient.

One thing I'm struggling with at this early stage is the taxonomy architecture. For example, one taxonomy will probably end up being based on geography. My first impulse was to structure the taxonomy like this:
USA
-Northeast
--New England
---Massachusetts
----Greater Boston Area
-----Somerville
-Southeast
--Etc, etc, etc.

I have since been informed that this is insane, or at least a moderately bad idea, particularly in Drupal. So my next idea might be equally insane: Just allow everything to be free tagged with vague prompts and a catch-all parent taxonomy, or perhaps assign some root taxonomies (location, genre, medium) with free tagging.

Editor's Note: In the interest of sanity and others' edification, I thought it might be nice to start logging my travails developing Spare Change News in Drupal. I probably won't post all the updates to Instant History (the main blog), but the major ones will show up there, with everything cross-posted to the new Drupal Developer blog (It's all really just one blog with different categories, but shh ...).

So far, one of the biggest challenges I've run into with Spare Change is getting staff to actually log in and post content. The most common excuse? "I can't remember my user name and password." It's a sentiment I'm sympathetic to, having written about user hatred of password rules. But what's a site admin to do?

Continued>>

By day, I primarily wear the "journalist" hat, but lately I've gotten involved with Spare Change News as a volunteer on the Development Committee. I'm sure I'll be writing more about them in the future, but suffice to say Spare Change is a street newspaper that's designed to be an accessible form of self-employment for homeless or formerly homeless individuals.

I was asked to help re-design their website:

So I'm working on the re-design which is going swimmingly and forcing me to work a bit more on Instant Design, but while I've found an excellent Drupal drop-down menu tutorial, I can't get rid of the damn unordered list bullet stylings, despite using the style: blank; tag or whatever it is.

The result is not pretty:
Spot

And that's why you're getting this wonky design rant rather than a post on SEO for journalists, like I've been planning for weeks.

Updated: I removed some spelling errors and a few rather unnecessary snarky remarks.

For years, I've been telling people I want to get away from Google, but I keep finding myself using more and more Google products: Gmail, GoogleTalk, Gchat, Google Analytics, Google Docs, Picasa ... The list goes on and on. Oh yeah, and Google search.

But while Google's certainly convenient, I'm not really comfortable with having all my data in one company's hands, even if their motto is "Don't be evil." So I've started building my own iGoogle-like dashboard right on my very own site, using Drupal. It's been surprisingly easy, and with about 2 hours work, I could embed my RememberTheMilk to do list, package tracking, my upcoming stories for the week, check Facebook, and more:

A Google-free iGoogle

And it's all within an interface I have complete control over, can back up easily, and can modify to the smallest detail. Drupal even makes it easy to sort things into neat columns.

Full disclosure: I'm kinda cheating a little bit, because I'm still using Google Gadgets for my webpage, but at least it's a step in the right direction, and much of that functionality wouldn't be hard to reproduce piecemeal in a 100% Google-free way.

So, what would you put in your own custom Google-free iGoogle page?