The past few days (November 2008), I've had several contacts from worried users of Snews. Demon Internet are changing their arrangements for provision of access to Usenet by their customers.

September 20th this year was Software Freedom Day, time to put in an appearance and help out at my local venue.

I hope some good came out of it. Quite a lot of CDs and leaflets given out, quite a lot of interest ("Dur, what are you selling then, how do you make your money?").

Of course, it's always good to remember, ask questions, listen -- we have 2 ears and only one mouth. I especially liked the episode when one of us on the stand tried a hard sell, pressed a Ubuntu 8.04 CD into this girl's hand and got a serious lack of interest. "Why don't you want it?". "Because I'm already running KDE4 and it's absolutely GREAT!" :)

Having moved this site from static HTML to Drupal 5.7 a few months ago, it now seems all the add-ons I want are available for Drupal 6. So I upgraded.

OUCH! Broken menus. Visitors lost everything except the Contact link. Since the site is quite small, it seems likely the only unusual thing is a lot of content that remain as .htm files, outside Drupal. Thank goodness for the backup I took immediately before the upgrade... I've given up investigating the problem and returned to 5.7.

For more detail, see http://drupal.org/node/302272 and http://drupal.org/node/303405

It's a big disappointment, because even during the short time I used 6.4 I could see worthwhile improvements

It's nice that Drupal comes with a few pre-defined themes, but one of my reasons for choosing this CMS was to have control myself over the look of the site. Having been recommended the Zen theme as a starting point, it's time to explore. Zen doesn't use tables and is minimal so you're free to do your own "CSS thing".

Watching pages load, Firefox is flicking away, why so many files? A glance at the source shows why:

I've not added much lately. Oops, how many blog entries start that way? Hang on, this is not a blog! Though I have to admit the default layout Drupal sets up does make the front page look terribly like a blog.

This is the best book I've read in quite a long time. CSS, The Definitive Guide, by Eric Meyer, published by O'Reilly. It's hard to find a second rate book from O'Reilly. And I'm also reading

Before I get too far into Drupal, I should list where I've been, what I've found interesting and helpful. This will serve me as a list of places to revisit, and perhaps also provide some pointers for other Drupal beginners who are bored with life and haven't already found a million other lists of places to go!

First, of course, http://www.drupal.org/ and I ought to list the places I've gone within that site. Mainly the installation guide and various handbooks.

http://drupal.org/handbook/customization/tutorials/beginners-cookbook The Drupal Cookbook for Beginners

My old site had been hosted somewhere I had no facilities beyond static HTML. Rather than go through each page putting it into Drupal manually or figuring out how to migrate them all with a clever script (there weren't that many pages!), I went for the simplest solution I could think of.

First requirement, I wanted them to retain their existing URLs. It would be really mean to break old links from elsewhere. And changing the URLs would affect my Google page ranking -- instead of being somewhere down beyond 7 billion I would sink to 20 billion! :)

The method I came up with

Notes, things I need to find out in Drupal. Temp, delete when all topics dealt with and doc'd elsewhere.

Q: Best way of migrating a site with static content
A: May not be best, but here's how I did it
* How to make some pages take the full width
* How to get images within content
Q: There must be better editors?
A: There are, pity there isn't one built in. I must try TinyMCE.
Q: Having enabled clean URLs, why can't I specify them easily when creating a new page?

Before I get too deep into it and start taking it for granted, perhaps it's worth trying to document the steps. Not that that's an original idea, I found quite a lot of help out on the web and within nearlyfreespeech's forums. Maybe it's just me, but I find a lot of howto type material doesn't quite tell me what I need to know.

Site makeover, of course. I've no plans for cosmetic surgery or a new wardrobe!

This site has been static for about ten years, so it's overdue for a look at new possibilities. First, the decision where to move hosting to, then the how.