This day marks the third anniversary of my blog. Or at least, of the blog being moved from BlogSpot to my own domain, switching from being powered by Blogger to the Drupal CMS (in fact, the second Drupal site I ever installed and the oldest one that still remains), and of course being renamed from "Arancaytar's Little Corner" (a name that was exactly as cheesy as the posts) to "Aranfoolcaytar" (in other words, the blog is still cheesy but at least now it's a bit self-mocking).

Since that time, the blog has survived many trials: One change of hosts (to DreamHost), the best decision I ever made (and no, I didn't get paid for this), because friendly and tech-savvy support is worth way more than some three extra nines of uptime. Two separate major version upgrades in Drupal, from 4.7.x to 5.x to 6.x (and any Drupal user can attest to how much fun those are). My own increasingly invasive meddling with the core code as I learnt to develop for Drupal myself - though for the current code base, I managed to get back down to six core hacks. I tried out at least four different approaches to spam: Manual moderation, admin-approved registration required, Akismet auto-moderation, and finally ReCAPTCHA which rocks. Around 5-6 custom modules in various states of disrepair (though I can say I'm proud of how xbbcode turned out).

More theme changes than I can remember. My archives say I started out using the Slash theme that imitates Slashdot. I probably used Pleroma which I also used on the Grand Endeavor while it was still online. For a long time I simply used a green-shifted color mod (yay for color.module) of Garland, similar to what you can now see at proxydb). The last theme I invested much time in was Agregado which I eventually got rid of because of its poor support for fluid width and wide screens.

I didn't quite manage to break the 200 nodes mark at the same time, but at least I'm pretty close, this post being nid #196. Thanks to comment spam and the flood of notices generated by shoddily written contrib modules, the other two indicator numbers are the cid (comment ID) #1549, and the wid (error log ID) #1191949.

One of the more significant changes in this time has been that I finally found a desktop client I liked, namely Drivel. It was a bit tricky to get it to work with inline tags (you see, the Movable Type API separates post saving and taxonomy saving into two actions, and so Inline Tags has some trouble saving the inline taxonomy without getting it overwritten a second later), but it works very well.

Here's to three more years! I hope all my regular readers will stay with me that long - all three of you.

This is my first post with the new, custom-created article content type. There is very little to outwardly distinguish it from the blog content type provided by Drupal's blog.module, except that the latter does not have a link to "Arancaytar's blog" below each entry (which is superfluous seeing as I am the only author on this site, and my blog is equivalent to the front page).

I am exploring a way out of blog.module because I do follow Drupal's core development very closely, and I have the feeling that this module is becoming an unloved stepchild (and not without reason, since most of its features are hard-coded versions of what could be done with contributed modules like Views). Ultimately, since this is a single-user blog, the recommended content type for me is the article type (what used to be story in Drupal 5).

This post serves as a kind of prototype. If I can make sure article nodes have the same settings as blog nodes, I will begin experimenting with switching my old nodes to the new type all at once.

It's been a good while since this blog software was updated. The problem was that the thing had just gotten too dirty. I know this sounds strange to non-programmers, but it is a well-known fact that code rots when you don't look at it for a while - and databases do the same.

Finally, the desperate wish to see this site on the shiny new Drupal 6 grew too strong, and so I rushed into the upgrade.

Of course, I have learned my lesson (and a hard lesson it was), and therefore I copied the site's database to a test environment and let loose there. As I write this, I am still in the test environment, but I will shortly copy this new site back over, and disable the old.

This was a very wise idea, as it turns out. The upgrade was a total disaster; the site was broken in a dozen places; it was full of trash tables that had belonged to inactive modules or modules that were not compatible with Drupal 6. In the end, I found it easier to install the site from scratch and simply copy posts, users and other such important data over manually. Unfortunately, the audio module is only partially ported for Drupal 6, and my recordings are unavailable for now.

While recreating my site, I also picked a new theme. I think this one's rather spiffy. It's called Agregado, you can find the credits at the bottom of the page. Originally a Wordpress theme. Drupal is more powerful than WP, but I have to admit that their themes are way more beautiful. It's high time this site actually looked like a blog.