Archive for July, 2005

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Drupal Clean URLs Working!

Thursday, July 28th, 2005

Welp, finally got “Clean URLs” to work on Drupal.

Other than a lot of STFW-ing and swearing, this is what it took…

Please note that my linux box is running a SuSE 9.1 pro install with Apache2.

First, create a directory structure off of your Drupal root like so:

$ cd $DRUPAL_HOME
$ mkdir system
$ mkdir system/test

Second, modify either your httpd.conf or httpd.conf.local thusly:

<Directory $DRUPAL_HOME>
AllowOverride All
</Directory>

Third, from the command line or webmin, restart your Apache daemon (remember, this is SuSE 9.1, so ymmv):

$ httpd-prefork -k restart

Forth, from your web browser, navigate to http://yoursite/?q=admin/settings, “Enable Clean URLs”, and save your changes.

Worked for me!

Posted in Drupal | No Comments »

Drupal

Thursday, July 28th, 2005

Recently, I’ve been playing around with Drupal. As a test case, I’ve converted 99.9% of a certain author’s static website on my linux box, and the more I play with it, the more impressed I get.

Setup was pretty easy, and the only real issue I had was figuring Drupal’s category system. As opposed to WordPress’s intuitive categorization system, Drupal requires you to have at least one “term” in a “vocabulary”.

At the moment, I don’t have the patience to get “clean urls” working. It’s not a failure on Drupal’s part. Rather, it’s the default Apache 2 configuration on SuSE 9.1 that’s the issue. Despite “mod_rewrite” being available, it steadfastly refuses to bend to my will.

The next test will be a “live” deploy to see how well Drupal travels. This entails ftp-ing the stuff up to ciulla.org, backing up the local MySQL database, then restoring it on a hosted db instance. Too bad I can’t just gzip it and remotely unzip it on the server side — although I could fake out the server and deploy it as a .war file…

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Spam Karma 2 Final Released!

Thursday, July 28th, 2005

Woe to comment spammers everywhere — Dr Dave has released Spam Karma 2 final. I haven’t been spammed since I installed SK2 Beta 4 earlier this month. And, this is despite completely unrestriciting comments. A great piece of work!

Posted in Random Geekyness | No Comments »

WordPress Nav Bar

Saturday, July 23rd, 2005

The Tech Gadgets Blog has a nice WordPress navigation bar that I’ve appropriated.

Check it out.

Posted in Random Geekyness | No Comments »

Two moments of panic…

Monday, July 18th, 2005

Imagine my discomfort when I hit the site this evening and saw,

WordPress database error: [Can't create/write to file '/tmp/#sql_52d8_0.MYI' (Errcode: 17)]

Within seconds, I was on the horn to tech support. After waiting on hold for less than 5 minutes, the tech support guy checked with the “guys in the back room” and confirmed there was an issue on the server where my WordPress DB resides. While he couldn’t give me an ETA, he did try to sell me an additional year or two of service.

After watching Hell’s Kitchen for a bit, I checked again, and normalcy was restored.

Phew.

Then, when I initially attempted to save this post, I got the same error.

As a professional geek, I truly understand that this kind of shit happens. Let’s hope this doesn’t happen again.

At least not in the near future.

Posted in Random Geekyness | No Comments »

Half-way there…

Saturday, July 16th, 2005

As you may or may not know, I moved WordPress up to ciulla.org’s root directory. At least I don’t have to worry about the homepage getting stale. This got me about half way — I think I still need a more flexible content management system to do quick hits against the rest of the static content around here.

Anyway, I put the finishing touches upon the tableless version of my resume. After fighting with unordered lists and list elements for the better part of today, I threw in the towel and changed everything to paragraph tags. Despite this, I think it looks pretty sharp. It just bugs me that CSS doesn’t do what I think it should do. Either that, or the way IE and FireFox renders stuff.

Posted in Random Geekyness | No Comments »

Moving the Blog

Thursday, July 14th, 2005

I’ve been investigating options to maintain ciulla.org via a content management system. Most of them have been overkill for maintaining the few static pages I have laying around.

Then it occured to me that I could use WordPress to maintain the static stuff.

So, I read the instructions on the WordPress Codex. Several times. And I changed my options, moved the files, then updated the permalink structure. Several times. I even deleted .htaccess. Several times.

All to no avail.

Then, magically, it just started working. I hate it when stuff just starts to work. That is, provided it didn’t initially work.

edit: I think GoDaddy uses be some kind of caching mechanism. That would explain a lot.

Posted in Content Mangement Systems, Minor Annoyances | No Comments »

Are we there yet?

Wednesday, July 13th, 2005

Anyone who has (or was) a kid is familiar with the backseat chorus of, “Are we there yet?” This becomes a kind of Chinese Water Torture, and is the very reason we will never drive further than 1 hour away from Chez Ciulla. Well, at least with the kids in the backseat.

Here’s the computer equivalent:

Are we there yet?

Once you allow WinXP to install updates, it generally prompts you to “restart your computer for changes to take effect.” I invariably select, “Restart Later.”

I’ll need to create a new category just for this type of thing, because while this does piss me off, it’s not nearly as bad as comment spammers, blue-haired drivers in vintage Detroit steel, or korinthenkackers.

Back in the good old days, “Restart Later” meant, “Yes, I am aware that I need to restart my computer. I just want to do it later.” Now, it means, “Restart later, but please remind me I need to do so with the precision of a mercilessly sadistic Swiss watchmaker.”

Posted in Minor Annoyances | No Comments »

It’s LIN-you-ex

Tuesday, July 12th, 2005

Since I installed Spam Karma 2 (SK2), I’ve been an absolute fiend about checking to see if any spam has been harvested. Before, I’d get about 20 “please moderate such and such comment” emails a week… Sometimes more.

It’s been so effective, I have to write about something else, I suppose…

So, here’s what I’ve been doing for the past couple of days (besides working, of course):

  • Working on a CSS-only (read: non-table) version of my resume
  • Looking for a very lite content mangement system for the site’s static content
  • Fixing overheating issues on the other computers laying around the house and playing family System Administrator
  • Playing around with a second-hand copy of SuSE Professional 9.1

(more…)

Posted in Comment Spammers, Content Mangement Systems, Minor Annoyances, Random Geekyness | No Comments »

Bring it on…

Sunday, July 10th, 2005

Ok, now that Spam Karma’s installed, I’ve turned off the Users must be registered and logged in to comment option.

Let ‘em try to comment.

Mwahahahahahaha.

Posted in Comment Spammers | No Comments »

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