\\footron.net

As far as the blogosphere is concerned, I can be classified as very anti-social. I have lost the drive to make myself known on every blog. I am not commenting half as much as I used to and I don’t know anyone, never spoke to any other bloggers and have rarely been contacted by any. MyBlogLog has been more of a burden to me recently as I haven’t found the time to socialize, track and even link-bait. In essence, I’m a tiny speck of water on a hot plate. Ssssst - poof! Never seen or heard of. No big deal. I have no aspirations to be an A-lister nor do I have the content quality to be one.

However, here and there between one or the other router, I have met some nice people. One of them is Zep, the dude who runs the In-Sect. He participates in a very trendy game amongst bloggers - tagging. Either it’s about internet meme’s or about thoughts and impressions. Sometimes they simply tag each other for curious information.

Zep, I must say I’m a bit miffed that I haven’t been tagged by you, yet. I want to play, too. So, as any self-respecting brat would do when not admitted into the play circle, I will simply bully my way in.

Shove, push, kick! Unf! I have decided that I am going to play as well. Like it or not.

The most recent tag game is about “Seven Random Facts about the blogger”. The rules go as follows:

Each player starts with 7 random facts/habits about themselves. People who are tagged need to write their own blog post with their 7 things as well as these rules. You need to tag 7 others (Zep didn’t do it and neither will I.) and list their names on your blog. Remember to leave a comment for them letting them know they have been tagged and to read your blog. (I am too anti-social to even do that. I just want to play!)

Here are my seven random facts about me:

1.Ever since I was six years old, I’ve had a very strong hay-fever allergy. This year, miraculously, it passed on me. Nothing. Instead, I now have a sun allergy.

2. I love my computer with as much passion as Mel Gibson hates Jews. I clean it, I polish it, I never over-stress it, I caress and check it for marks. After long use, I turn it off, flip it over and fix its service and serial stickers back in place. Lots of heat can make them come off. I service it like someone would service a vintage Bugatti. I stare at it like children sometimes stare at a Delorean. Well, most of these children are 28 years old, today.

3. Despite of what you just read, I am engaged. With a human female. Yup.

4. I have watched Blade Runner once every 8-10 months for the last 19 years. I know the dialogue by heart and I wish I had Rutger Hauer’s voice.

5. I look at myself in the mirror a lot. Long. I inspect my face meticulously. I just have to check that everything is okay with it. I have a problem.

6. It took me 25 years to learn how to lose in a game. In the first 15 years I would throw hissy fits and stomp my feet. In the remaining 10 years I would remain calm but would feel very deep envy for the winner. Especially if it was a gloating victor. Only in the last 3 years have I really learned how to deal with it reasonably.

7. I am convinced that I can smell lies. Literally. Something smells when someone lies. I truly believe it to be an olfactory experience. I can’t tell you whether I am mostly right about my ability or not. I rarely confront people with my suspicion.

Contrary to the rules, I’ll only tag one person. Ms. Foo from Foonicate.com. Your turn.

This isn’t as tricky as I thought. Drupal is far more flexible than I had previously known. That makes the platform all the more complex. Now don’t misunderstand. Drupal isn’t rocket science. Far from it, actually. Whoever wants to have a go at Drupal, please consider the following:

• Drupal is an empty box that needs to be filled with toys.
• It is not difficult. You are just used to something else.
• It doesn’t think for you. You still have to tell it what to do.
• If something doesn’t work your way, think about the three points above and find the solution.

Another thing that many people confuse is Drupal’s Taxonomy function. It doesn’t work like Wordpress categories. As a matter of fact Taxonomy doesn’t equal categories. Taxonomy merely gives you the framework for a bookshelf defining all kinds of topics and rules. Wordpress’s categories allow you to organise your posts for the front page. Taxonomy goes way beyond that and creates the structure for your entire page, including the forum, and sub sections of your site. Remember this. Taxonomy classifies everything on your site. If you confuse the two tools, you may run into trouble understanding how Drupal works.

Here is an excerpt of the Taxonomy description:

The taxonomy module allows you to classify content into categories and subcategories; it allows multiple lists of categories for classification (controlled vocabularies) and offers the possibility of creating thesauri (controlled vocabularies that indicate the relationship of terms), taxonomies (controlled vocabularies where relationships are indicated hierarchically), and free vocabularies where terms, or tags, are defined during content creation.

In essence I could have a finished product in a few days. I have a category listing (non-taxonomy), all my tags (meta tags and taxonomy), all the blocks (sidebar widgets) that I need, almost all relevant modules (plugins) such as Akismet directly ported from Wordpress, TinyMCE editor and the general layout. I am only struggling with one thing, now. The theme. I love the Garland theme that comes with the site. But I’m a bit unhappy about the spacing in the header section. It doesn’t leave me enough playroom for my logo and site name. I’ll have to screw with the css some more.

Since this is merely a test project and doesn’t contain any important data, I’ll let you have a look at it. There isn’t much to do as I didn’t bother implementing all the details. Currently it’s all about seeing if my ideas for the site can work. That is why you don’t see proper posts and merely one category. Click here to have a look around the site.

One last thing: Should you consider giving Drupal a go, familiarize yourself with cron jobs (chronometrically executed scripts). Most hosts who offer cpanel, make cron jobbing very easy. Otherwise you’ll have to run cron jobs manually. The benefit of a cron job is that it will spit out a script at your Drupal site, making it update itself and in this case re-index the content. Some sites use php scripts to trigger such tasks, but in these cases you have little control of when this happens. Having full control over when such tasks are performed can give you far better performance.

Judging from the amount of time I haven’t posted here, it would seem that I am officially under construction. I have been growing increasingly tired of the limitations set upon me by specialized blogging software such as Wordpress. While its a great platform for blogging, it limits you tremendously as soon as you wish to expand beyond the blogging horizon. I’m not a fan of half-assed workarounds and stuffing WP full of plugins to make it more flexible isn’t really a viable solution.

I looked at all my options and remembered using Drupal some time ago. I didn’t delve too much into it but I remember liking its flexibility and performance. So I’ve set up a test subdomain in which I will be taking Drupal apart, learning more about configuration and working on required modules, SEO and a template. I want more than just listed text. Though I won’t create a full-blown media portal, I just feel the need to make a more flexible blogging platform that offers more user participation and gives me more freedom to create separate static content. While many may argue that Drupal is just over-kill for a blog, I beg to differ. Drupal is perfect for an enhanced blog that wishes to break boundaries set by single-minded Wordpress, or bloated Movable Type implementations.

Perhaps by next week I’ll have a working result. If not, I’ll just stick with Wordpress. I’ve been looking for reasons not to continue Severin. Don’t ask me why. I don’t know myself. Call me odd, but if I don’t like the paper I’m writing on, I will not enjoy writing. It’s not playing alone that makes me happy. It’s the toy that has to please me, as well.

Bare with me. You still love me, don’t you?

Update:

The whole sidebar code widgets issue seems to have been resolved. Looking at the sidebar now, I must admit that it works far cleaner than previously and easily replaces the need for K2. As you can see, this blog has moved away from K2 entirely and now uses Wordpress’ vanilla functions without modifications.

Yes. I haven’t been posting. But believe me, I didn’t do it on purpose. Sort of.

First I was on vacation. That isn’t so bad, right? A little break. No big deal. So I relax, I don’t write, I don’t think and I play lots of World of Warcraft. After some much needed rest I decide to pick up writing again and I notice that Wordpress 2.2 is out. Integrated widgets! Awesome. I can ditch my modified K2 theme and make something of my own. I never liked the way how K2 was merely a bulky workaround to a utopian version of Wordpress. I thus decide to upgrade immediately. It took me about 4 minutes to do so and I try my URL.

Everything is broken!

PHP errors, display errors, et cetera. Horrible. I rush over to the K2 website to see that this is quite normal. Wow. This blows. I go through the forum and find that there is a workaround. I implement it and everything works again, save for a few graphical errors which I fixed only 10 minutes ago. But this isn’t what I wanted! I didn’t want a damn workaround. I wanted a fully compatible K2 with a fucking radio button that lets me choose whether I want to use Wordpress’s native widget function or the modified K2 version.

Admittedly, the K2 version is by far better. It automatically handles PHP in widgets and simply offers a much higher amount of flexibility. Let me tell you, the native Wordpress widgets suck. Enormously. If you’re trying to execute more than one code widget, it’ll merely read the first one in the list. The others get ignored. Fix? I couldn’t find one that worked, really. There probably is one but forget looking for it. I don’t want to dig through dev blogs to find it. I am already running on a nightly build of K2 that fixed my php errors. A final build for K2? Not sure when that will be out. Over at K2’s main dev blog, all I can see is tumbleweed.

Either way, I’m still a bit miffed that things didn’t work out smoothly. I’m a big fan of simple architecture. I like it when things are compact, easy to track, clean and simple. With all the workarounds, incompatibilities and latency in updates, the only impression I get is big coding chaos. Even though that shouldn’t bother me since I only use this blog to write and not to code, it still irks me in the back of my mind that the machine I am using is running on crutches.

So to all the weird people coding the Wordpress software, please just make K2 the default theme and use their widget code. It is better. Much. Better.