It’s been about a month since I made the switch from WordPress 2 to Drupal 4.7 to power my blog. There have been some ups and downs, but I have to say that I have absolutely no regrets about the move, nor do I plan on moving back any time soon.
Some things I still miss from the WordPress days though -
commenters able to subscribe to a thread of comments via email. sounds old school, but it REALLY helps keep conversations going.
actually, that’s just about it.
There are some little niggles, like not being able to use the Flickr.module to integrate my Flickr sets here, but that’s a limitation of DreamHost’s security setup (disabling fopen), not of Drupal. If that REALLY bugs me, I’ll look at hacking the Flickr.module cache code to not require fopen…
I took my Canon Digital Rebel XT to Evan’s soccer practice/game on Saturday, hoping to get some shots of him and his teammates playing the game. I also wanted an excuse to fiddle around with some of the settings and modes on the XT to see how they perform.
Wow.
I turned on rapidfire/burst mode, which can pump out 14 shots in about 3 seconds. Absolutely perfect for capturing the right shot in a game of soccer. I wound up shooting over 150 pictures during the 25 minute game! 99% were deleted, but the 1% that I kept were amazing - and likely impossible to have captured without this mode.
Patti and I were discussing our ePortfolio project the other day, and we were basically throwing back and forth various versions of “the students won’t it because (a) they don’t have to, and (b) it’s not theirs.”
The “they don’t have to” part could be misconstrued as meaning “their profs didn’t make them do it.” That won’t work, either. The students have to feel that they want to do this. That they have to do it themselves to make sense of what they’re learning and doing.
In another episode of my new All-Drupal-All-The-Time mandate… After downloading the latest build of Flock (Beta 1), I went to the Flock website to create an account to provide some feedback and suggestions.
And I realized that it looks like the whole Flock website is now powered by Drupal. It’s not blatantly obvious - they’re not using a stock theme, or anything like that, but you can see the DNA in some of the URLs, and in the CSS linked on many of the pages.
Flock hit beta 1 (or 0.7, depending on how you count) yesterday, and it seems like a really solid release. My favorite feature isn’t even part of the core Flock code - it’s got more Extensions enabled, including Mouse Gestures!
I’m hoping they nailed down the nasty memory leaks that plagued previous builds, and cleaned up the window opening code, which could take several seconds to spawn a new browser window. But it’s definitely on the right track.
I’ve been a pretty hardcore iPhoto user since the app was originally released several years ago. It’s a pretty clean app, and has done everything I’ve needed of a photo management app. But, lately, I’ve been feeling like it’s a little constraining. The photo retouching tools are a bit simple, and the viewing tools require a fair amount of manual intervention.
I made the mistake of viewing the Aperture online demo video over the weekend, and realized a more advanced app would really be nicer. My home machine can’t run Aperture, so I downloaded the latest beta of Adobe Lightroom and imported all of the images I’ve taken with the XT.
I’ve been running this blog on Drupal for a while now, and am generally quite happy with it. The one thing I’d been missing from my days powered by WordPress was a transparent and effective spam blocker. I was so totally spoiled by Spam Karma 2 that everything else just seems like a kid’s toy in comparison.
I’d installed the Spam module shortly after I switched to Drupal, but it never seemed to actually block spam. It is pretty handy at removing it, but the URL and keyword matches didn’t seem to actually stop spam.
I went for a quick drive this evening, through the Bearspaw region/community just a couple minutes from my house at the far northwest corner of Calgary. I think this was the first actual dedicated photography expedition I’ve taken - certainly in the last couple of years, anyway. I wound up taking 46 shots in about 45 minutes, from a few locations spread over the Bearspaw community. After throwing out the shots that sucked, were uninteresting, or really badly exposed, I was left with 9 shots that didn’t make me cringe .
I hinted at this in a previous post, but it wasn’t “official” yet so I didn’t provide any details. It’s now official. The University of Calgary just finished the official CMS selection process, including input from ~140 web folks on campus and 6 presentations on 6 different CMS options. I was asked to present on Drupal, drawing on what we’ve done on some projects, and how it might fit into a larger community and workflow on campus.
Alan forwarded me a link to this really great presentation by Tim Lindgren at Boston College, documenting some pedagogical and instructional design applications of Drupal. I’m sure much of it would translate to other software platforms, but there are some detailed descriptions and case studies written specifically from the point of view of implementing this in Drupal.
Thanks Alan! And thanks to Tim for putting this together!
A test shot taken with my new Canon Digital Rebel XT. The lense cap was on, and the Vt mode was selected with a 30" exposure. I count 14 visible bad “spots” (pixels?), but Photoshop’s Histogram counted many (i.e., dozens/hundreds) of bright non-black pixels in the image.
This will make photographs of stars basically impossible, as there will always be bright blue/red/gray spots on every dark image.
