Drupal

Trying out a new theme for the site. Let me know if you run into any issues.

Customized version of the spiffy A3 Atlantis Drupal theme by Blamcast.

I've updated the site to the newest version of Drupal, and (after some tweaking) most things seem to be working. I'm leaving it with the default theme for now until I decide what look I want to go for.

Let me know if you run into any issues.

By the way, thanks to this Lullabot video for a step-by-step process that makes things relatively painless.

If you encounter a

Call to undefined function module_exist() ...

error, check out this drupal.org article.

UPDATE the old bookmarks are broken at the moment -- I'll have to fix 'em another time.

UPDATE #2 bookmarks are fixed.

After casting about for information on using the blog editor MarsEdit (from the makers of NetNewsWire), I finally amassed all of the necessary settings to successfully post Drupal stories, retrieve older stories, and assign categories.

Within Drupal

1. Obviously, your Drupal user account must have posting permissions.
2. In admin/modules turn on the blogapi module.
3. Under admin/settings/blogapi set the XML-RPC Engine to "Blogger" and turn on the blog types you want to use. I have "story" turned on.
4. Click the "Save Configuration" button.

Within MarsEdit

Creating a new Blog

Each "blog type" that you activated in Drupal ("page", "story", "bookmark", etc.) is treated as a different weblog in MarsEdit -- kind of a pain, but it does make sense.

1. In the Weblogs drawer, click on the + sign to create a new weblog.
2. Enter the blog's name and URL, then click "Add Weblog".
3. Click on the new blog's name in the Weblogs list, then click the "Edit" button below.
4. Some info will already be filled in, but choose "Moveable Type" from the "Software" popup menu.
5. The RPC URL should be something like http://www.yourdomain.com/xmlrpc.php -- if blank, enter it here.
6. Enter the word story for "Blog ID."
7. Click "OK".

Repeat these steps for each of the "blog types" you set up before, substituting its type in step 5.

Posting to your site

1. In the main MarsEdit window, click on the "Refresh" button.
2. Assuming all has gone well, posts will begin to show up in the window. Categories might show up slower than the rest of the info, so give it a second.
3. Once everything's loaded, just click on "New Post", and that should do it.

You'll notice that the categories listed in the drawer aren't set up the same way as your hierarchical taxonomy, but everything is there. For example, this post will have the Drupal tag, but it's actually at geek/programs/drupal in the taxonomy. In MarsEdit, this shows up under programs/drupal, since it seems to be showing only one hierarchical step per "category". Same thing with the os/mac instead of geek/os/mac.

If you have a relatively complicated taxonomy like mine, or at least one that has a lot of nested terms, this will take a bit of getting used to. If yours is simple, then it shouldn't pose a problem.

I'm experimenting with new themes for the website. At the moment, you're seeing one based on http://drupal.org/project/niftyCorners

Not sure about the masthead photo and colors quite yet.

Update

OK, I like this masthead better (the "Pavement Ends" one). Old one here if you want to check it out: http://www.celsius1414.com/images/valley.jpg

Made a few more adjustments, including changing the default fonts, moving some blocks around, tweaking some tags and classes, etc. Digging it so far, apart from the jury still being out on a couple of the colors.</http://www.celsius1414.com/images/valley.jpg></http://drupal.org/project/niftycorners>

Hey, this is the 1000th node on my Drupal installation. :)

All of the previous date-based journal entries from 2002-2005, as well as the WordPress stuff from 2006, are now incorporated into the site--a lot of work that I'm really happy to be done with. Let's hope I can settle on one platform long enough to reach 2000 nodes and beyond. ;D

Thanks for visiting!

Due to some bugs deficiencies in the Atom feed module for Drupal (which I haven't taken the time to fix), I am disabling the Atom feed for this site. Those subscribed to Celsius1414 via an aggregator, please resubscribe to the RSS feed:

http://www.celsius1414.com/node/feed

UPDATE 2008-06-10: the Atom feed module has been updated and seems to be running swimmingly:

http://www.celsius1414.com/atom/feed

There's a known issue with the atom.module for Drupal, which creates an Atom syndication feed to accompanying the built-in RSS feed -- the issue is that if you're also using the Markdown or Textile modules, atom.module doesn't convert the markup to proper HTML, instead showing the Markdown or Textile as is. Like I said, this is a known issue.

After a bit of investigation, I've come up with a temporary solution to the problem, at least for Markdown format. (I don't have Textile installed, so someone else will have to confirm; given the nature of the fix, I imagine it would work.)

If you check out the raw XML atom.module makes, it is creating a proper Atom file with "summary" and "content" fields. The module fills these in with the contents of the Drupal "teaser" and "body" fields respectively for each node. So far so good.

Strangely, the "teaser" field is getting formatted correctly -- in other words, the Markdown markup is being converted to regular HTML, as it should be (and as it is on the regular webpage). But the "body" atom.module is using for the Atom "content" content in is the raw Markdown, sans conversion.

Spending a bit of time familiarizing myself with the system, I've not tracked down the exact problem (though I suspect it might be an issue with the node_invoke_nodeapi usage here), but my temporary fix is to simply replace the line (line 179 in my copy of atom.module) that reads

$output .= check_markup($item->body);

with this:

$output .= check_markup($item->teaser);

All this does is use the same command as on line 173 just above, which calls the properly formatted teaser.

This is not a permanent solution by any means, and is also at the whims of whether or not you use teasers and/or excerpts, but it takes care of things for me until the real fix is in.

UPDATE

After some more experimentation, I've discovered the following:

1. atom.module apparently uses the default Input Format to display the body version of the story.
2. If that Input Format is not Markdown-capable, the story will not display properly.
3. If it is Markdown-capable, but certain HTML tags are forbidden, it will not display those.

Another temporary solution

Although this temporary solution isn't for everybody, if you allow Markdown in your default Input Format, and include appropriate HTML formatting+filtering, you will take care of the problem for now.