internet

Drupal 6 is here!

All I can say about this release is wow. Looking at that release note (from the link above) really makes me glad I switched away from WordPress. What Drupal loses in ease of use more than makes up for in functionality and forward thinking. I really do think this is the best Drupal release ever. Congrats, Drupal developers.

Now once some of my modules are updated I can start the upgrade process!

I recently ordered a VPS and began to customize it. Unfortunately, I'm not a linux expert (or geek for that matter) so some of what I needed to do didn't come natural to me.

Like altering the php.ini file. Through SSH command line. Thingy.

But through the power of Google and my sheer determination to do this myself, I managed to increase my VPS' memory limit! (Drupal just won't work well at 8M.) And here's how I did it.

If the developers of WordPress make only one change in the software for its new 2.4 release (which is due out at the end of January) I want it to be this:

Remove the "Howdy, so-and-so" message in the admin section.

Howdy? Come on. We're not juveniles (as much as Matt may think we are.) We're not a bunch of 5 year olds wearing faux cowboy boots and hats running around our yard playing cowboys and Indians. We're grown-ups. And "howdy" is just ridiculous.

Grow Up, Matt and the other developers. Lose the "Howdy."

I received this comment tonight:

've just registered at the forum. This is my first message.
Please don't become angry about me.
Thank you.

The thing is, I didn't get this on my forum. I got it on a blog post about forums.

Are you with me so far?

I think there's a new trend in comment spam. It's a comment that asks about a product but the spammer wants you to look it up and post the website URL.

Here's what I got in my email this afternoon:

New comment on your post #241 "Forums that Integrate with WordPress"
Author : XRumakTheBest (IP: 85.140.223.138 , ppp85-140-223-138.pppoe.mtu-net.ru)
E-mail : iigxxixxiiix@gmail.com
URL : http://www.google.com/
Whois : http://ws.arin.net/cgi-bin/whois.pl?queryinput=85.140.223.138
Comment:

Like many people, I let Feedburner handle my site RSS syndication feed. And for a while, I've been hovering around the 100 reader mark. Until a few days ago.

I went to check on my feed stats and discovered I went from about 130 readers to 40. A 90 reader drop. Which is a lot for such a short period (of about four days.) Looking closer at the stats, I discovered that Firefox Live Bookmarks weren't showing up.

Just installed WordPress 2.3... begrudgingly. I really had no desire to, but since I was already a couple version behind, I thought, what the hell.

WordPress 2.3 really didn't have anything new for me. Sure, it has tagging, but I use (err, used) Ultimate Tag Warrior and loved it.

And WordPress 2.3 likes to break some installs on upgrades. I just edited my contact page and I got an error. The contact form itself works, but editing the page was a pain.

UPDATE: got it working using single_tag_title(); (which I didn't see listed in the WordPress Codex...)

I'm trying to get my LetoPrime theme ready for WordPress 2.3. The whole purpose of 2.3 (well, the main purpose) is to get tagging posts into the core of WordPress. Now this has been available for quite a while now; I've been using Ultimate Tag Warrior for a long time and I absolutely love it. But the developer of UTW, Christine, is stopping development of it since it's redundant to have two tagging functions. (I disagree with that, however.)

Today I downloaded the 30 day trial of a writing program called Mellel. It's a word processor designed for "creative and technical writing." It looks pretty neat (and much more Mac-centric than Word can ever hope to be.) But...

Every couple of hours an annoying reminder keeps popping up telling me that I'm using a trial version and that I should pay up to use the product.

Every two hours or so. (I've not timed it, though.)

The Packt Open Source Content Management System Award Finalists have been announced. (List and vote here.) I'm a bit disappointed that Habari didn't make the list, but I'm not shocked about that.

Below are the categories with the finalists and my thoughts on the selections.

Best Social Networking Open Source CMS Finalists
Drupal
Elgg
LifeType
Moodle
WordPress