N. Lippincott

Every so often, a computer comes my way that is suffering from "Broken Windows"; a perfectly good piece of hardware that is rendered useless by virtue of catastrophic software problems within the Windows operating system. It's a shame, really. I have see perfectly good computers thrown in the trash just because Windows doesn't work any more. Of course, there are Windows recovery tools (e.g. restore points) to revert the system to previous configurations, which may or may not get the system working again.

Next in building my site from the ground up, I'll add the administration overlay. This is provided by default in the standard Drupal installation, but is available only to administrators. The administrative overlay is nice, and makes working with content a much nicer experience. So, I want my editor to be able to use this interface as well.

In this third installment, I'm going to add a user to my site. This user is responsible for the content of the site. The user should be able to create content (articles and pages), hook pages into the menu system, manage the publishing settings, and delete content. This is not something that is provided in the standard Drupal installation. But for my purposes, this is something I need very often for sites I build. The user should not have access to the administration functions; that's my job.

For the second instalment in this series, we'll add three features to our minimal site that are normally included in the standard site installation; a main menu, a "Basic Page" content type, and a "Filtered HTML" text format.

Some time ago, I set out to use and learn Drupal. Inspired by an article in Linux Journal on Angela Byron, I began to deploy a number of sites on this platform. The learning curve is steep, but I think it's well worthwhile. It's a very powerful system, but quite complex as well.

I was talking with a friend the other day, and he told me that he had a passage he was working to memorize. He talked about recording the passage and putting it on his iPod so that he could play it repeatedly, but was having some difficulty in converting to the proper file formats. I had done something similar in the past using text-to-speech. Personally, when trying to memorize a passage, I find that listening to my own voice over and over again is distracting. So, my solution was text-to-speech conversion. I offered to do that same type of conversion for my friend.

Build a home entertainment system with a big screen TV, satellite receiver, surround sound system, DVD/Blu Ray player, Roku, and a game console, and what do you get? Remote clutter. I had five remote controls, three of which were required just to turn on the morning news. This is where the Logitech Harmony remote control comes in, pushing aside the pile of remote controls and replacing them with a single, easy-to-use device.

I manage several web servers, and a solid backup strategy is absolutely essential. I have been using Amazon S3 (Amazon Web Services, Simple Storage Service) for quite some time, for the purposes of storing backup files for the long-term, and keeping those backup files away from my production systems (essentially "off-site"). One item which I have needed to address since I have been using S3 is the subject of backup retention, or more specifically, automated purging of backup files no longer needed. Well, just sometimes, good things come to those who wait.

I hate snow. For me, it represents a lot of manual labor for the sole benefit of being able to get out of my driveway. I found myself into about three hours of shoveling the day after an unusual October nor'easter, looking out at my back yard, and reveling in the fact that the predicted warm temperatures for the week ahead will make this 14 inches of snow all go away. Then it hit me. This would make a great time-lapse video; watch it melt over the next eight hours.

I am fairly new to Drupal, having installed my first test site about five months ago (as of this writing). Some three and a half months later I launched my first live Drupal site, the very site you are reading right now. I have found Drupal to be an excellent content management system in its basic form, but going beyond the basics takes a lot of patience and a lot of time. It provides a very powerful and very extensible framework, for which many modules exist to provide all kinds of functionality.