Morisy.com

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.

Recently, I've fallen in love with a number of web widgets:

• Feedly, which if you use Firefox and Google Reader, makes both so, so much better
• Google SideWiki, which is much ado about nothing
• Drupal Admin Menu, which makes administering a Drupal site much, much more fun

Unfortunately, all three of these extensions muck around with how HTML is displayed, and ultimately they removed the ability to post articles on my website. Sure, I could have used another computer, or even another browser but ...

Anyways, those issues have been fixed, since I ultimately tossed Admin Menu since it was the lowest hanging fruit. Google Wiki is next to go since it's a waste so far, and Feedly is firmly here to stay until someone else does it more openly and better.

I still won't be blogging here much, but I do blog pretty much every weekday over at the IT Watch Blog. I don't know why I chose that name, but come on over: We're a fun crowd.

I'm bringing the Morisy.com design up to the latest version of Instant Design. Overall it's not too drastic a change, but some images will likely break for a bit and the front page will require some heavy lifting. I've mostly been prepping it over at Spare Change News, which has forced me to get rid of much of the Morisy-specific cruft.

Also, it'll introduce drop-down menus. Let me know if you hate it in the comments!

Since I registered it on April 20th, 2005, Morisy.com has been my home page on the web. Also since pretty much that date, it's been powered by Drupal, my content management system (CMS) of choice. It's not the easiest platform, particularly for beginners, and I wouldn't recommended it for a simple blog platform, but it's an incredibly powerful open source tool if you're willing to dive in and learn a little PHP, CSS and web server configuration.

I recently moved from the Chameleon theme to a custom theme, called Instant Design, that I wrote myself. It's a work in progress, but when it's portable enough I'll upload it here in case anyone else is interested. It's based on the BlueprintCSS framework and the excellent BlueprintCSS Drupal port, without which I would've been sorely stuck. If you really like the theme, let me know and I'll hurry up on getting it ready for public consumption.

The site is hosted by MXHub.com, a company I've been using since the site launched. Their support has continuously improved, as has their up time, and I highly recommend them if you have modest hosting needs like my own.

As of this writing, I average slightly over a hundred unique visitors a day. May 21st, 2009 was the site's most popular day on (Google Analytics) record, with 1,403 unique visitors.

Some services I use on this site:

• Mollom for blocking spam comments
• The aforementioned Google Analytics for statistic tracking

I will always have a soft spot in my heart for one of Drupal's default themes, Chameleon, but it was time for a refresh. Sometime this morning, my own custom theme "Instant Design" will turrned on.

It's based on BlueprintCSS, which truth be told is a rather great CSS framework once you're used to it. The default fonts it provides are gorgeous -- when I can get them to work.

The front page will show the biggest differences, particularly as it now looks more like a front page to a bona fide website rather than just some blog.

The design is still very much a work in progress, but I would estimate it's 85% done and (hopefully) 100% serviceable, so I'm launching it live to work out the bugs and to slowly update the features over the next couple of weeks. This will allow me to hopefully resume my regularly scheduled blog postings.

Some known bugs/to do's:

• Weird graphical glitch on front page images
• PHP problems don't let me put HTML text beneath the list of latest Instant History posts
• Too many links are hardcoded rather than Drupal-administrator editable
• The header is kind of ugly. I have a font I want to use, but it's being tricky
• Did I include a space for ads/promotional?
• The left sidebar images will made mouse overs
• As I build out content to fit, the three columns will include more inbound links
• The analytics information on the front page is made up - and will probably be just deleted
• Site search is only available on a dedicated page
• Images should be better web optimized, for the sake of my poor server

I'm a bit worried about how this will effect Google spidering, but the update shouldn't break any links except possibly the front page RSS. Feel free to e-mail me or comment here with any other problems you notice: ANY feedback is very appreciated.

Coincidentally, I upgraded the spam blocking from manual to Mollom yesterday. It should reduce CAPTCHAs you have to deal with while providing near instant (no pun intended) joy as your comments are moderated in real time.

Further Reading:

• Comment preview removed
• Morisy.com site update feed
• DrupalEasy's BlueprintCss guide, which was an indispensable starting point for this design

A minor update, but after seeing a ratio of about 1 comment/3,000 page views, I removed the forced preview for leaving comments. The way it was set up was a real pain, even for me to moderate, so hopefully this will encourage a bit more dialog for some posts. If you have Drupal and are trying to figure out how to remove forced preview (it's not entirely obvious), here's what you have to do, courtesy Drupal forums:

It looks like comment preferences are edited on a per-content-type basis in Drupal 6.x. For example, if you want to change the settings for comments on blogs, navigate to Administer -> Content Types. On the "Blog Entry" row, click "edit" and scroll down to select "Comment Settings". There you can set preview to optional. It still won't fix having to enter a CAPTCHA for both preview and save, but at least a user can skip the preview.

So just finished deleting the last of the some 1,500 spam comments, installed a new comment filter, and re-enabled comments. If you have trouble commenting, feel free to e-mail me at lastname at gmail dot com.

Without cable for three weeks, postings will be cut back. Regular service will resume Sept. 1.

I've won the Google love, but even my dad Yahoo!'s better. At least Microsoft live likes me, though Technorati doesn't even know I exist. Sigh.

So I still haven't bothered to explore Cron, but the site's working.

And I will be, too, in a couple hours, so good night, and good luck.