Archive for the ‘Updates’ category

Revamping my website

September 7th, 2009

After debating over this move for a couple of months, I finally migrated my website from Drupal to Wordpress, with the help of the migration SQL code from Mike Smullin. Though I loved Drupal and spent a significant amount of time and effort in building out my site, I had to say farewell to Drupal for the following reasons:

1. Wordpress has a more standard and supported blog platform. What pushed me over was that LinkedIn allowed me to content sync’ing with a Wordpress site.

2. Upgrading is much easier with Wordpress. This is my second biggest reason because I really don’t have the time to maintain the site.

3. Theming is easier with Wordpress as well.

4. Though Drupal provides much finer ACL, I really do not need that since I am just running this one-man site.

5. My Drupal deteriorated by itself rather quickly without me maintaining the site and code. The Wordpress site that I maintained for other friends did not do that. Well, at least, they would warn me to upgrade when I logged into the backend.

So, there you have it. I am parting way with Drupal. And hopefully, I can focus on the content from now on.

Another blogging tool

October 17th, 2008

While Windows Live Writer has served the purpose of offline blogging fairly well, I recently discovered ScribeFire, which works fairly well with my Drupal site. One big disadvantage, as others have pointed out, is that its tagging function does not work yet. I hope the ScribeFire team will fix this soon. Another disadvantage is that selected pictures do not show up on the blog. Else, I am quite satisfied with it because I don’t need to open up another application.

Building web sites with Drupal

April 5th, 2008

In less than one day’s time, I created my personal web site on Drupal 5.7. I decided to roll with 5.x instead of 6.x because there are more modules supporting 5.x at this point. I did play with 6.x and liked its improved features, such as replacing weights with moveable items (e.g. menu items). So, once more modules are ported to work with 6.x, I will make the move. As I install a fresh copy for my personal web site, I upgraded the Infolab site from 4.7 to 5.7. The process was a breeze because of Lullabot’s upgrade video. And I expect that the upgrade from 5.x to 6.x will be a breeze as well.

I like Drupal as a CMS for the following reasons:

- Active development: At the time of writing this blog, Drupal has started its 7.x project development.

- Strong community support: Contributions on theme, modules and documentation.

- Easy to set up a site: Now that I am more and more familiar with the Drupal core, it only takes a day to get a site up with all the bells and whistles.

- Open source: I can learn from other programmers and designers.

If I were to suggest how to improve this already great CMS, here are three:

- More video tutorials: This could be very helpful for first time Drupal users.

- Most frequently used modules: A list of most frequently used modules can be helpful given the large number of modules.

- Module consolidation: I saw this happened for the Flickr module. Module consolidation can reduce the number of modules. This reduction can arguably increase the ease of adoption of Drupal.

My first blog through Windows Live Writer

April 5th, 2008

This is an experimental blog. Just set up my blogger through Google. And I post this blog using Windows Live Writer because I like to write my blog offline and then upload it afterwards…kind of like writing an email. This is an interesting and maybe not so welcomed tag-team between the philosophies of Google and Microsoft.

Some advantages of Windows Live Writer are:

  • Write once, post to many blogs.
  • Write offline.
  • Centralized blog sites and accounts management.
  • Good UI.