Chaoselbows.com Life, like your elbow, is chaos

I am working on upgrades to the eist and website family. i.e. the various sites that I am supposed to be keeping working here. The good news is that the site upgrade process is pretty straight forward. The bad news is that as soon as I upgrade a site, I get a redirect error on it. Soo, I am still working on this. I have about an hour a day to devote to this process, which doesent seem like much.

What I have to do to upgrade:
1. back up the database
2. back up the site.
3. upgrade to drupal 4.7.1
4. upgrade to 5.0
5. upgrade to 5.1(possibly the dev pack, still investigating an issue with the upgrade file.)
6. test.

So I am stuck on testing now.

add to that and the ongoing yet mysterious mail problem (mail usually gets through, but not always) and this is a pretty busy hour. I have started getting up at 5 am to give me time to futz with it.

I just placed the Tagadelic module in service, it gives you a cloud of tag information (thats the line that reads Chaoselbows: under categories and allows you to search all the keywords within your view. keen. visit it at http://www.chaoselbows.com/tagadelic

I have found that it usually takes 2 calls to ipower to get them to do something, so I have started making a practice of calling them twice in succession, waiting through their repetitive new age calming hold music and asking them to do the same thing again. Usually this works.

Of course, since my domain "expired" for them and i have my domain for "life" and it is "locked' there is a huge hassle getting my domain back from them. I thought I transferred it successfully last week, but friday they claimed it back (or I never transferred it?) and on october 3 it expired. Since I registered this back in 2002, and I have changed emails since then, and I can't get the email address back (it was on a different a roadrunner account and once you create it it is in use for all time) my only choice to keep the site running is to pay ipower a different 7.00 fee to renew my domain. and I can't get them to just subtract it from the 200 dollars or so they owe me for work they never did and renewing my whole account without warning which I told them I didn't want.

I now have test.chaoselbows.com running as a separate web address. it is completely separate configuration from here, but uses the same "codebase" meaning that I only have to maintain one copy of the working web page code

Wheee!

This is so cool!

Today is an "interesting" day. I spent a minor amount of money and purchased a couple of domains. This is good. In a few days I am going to be able to experiment with domain pointing. What this means is that I am supposed to be able to host multiple web sites on one install of the core file system. This is *THE* big advantage of drupal over Phpnuke. I am going to experiment with the settings for this.

One behavior I have found to be interesting is that for the purposes of logging into the site, "chaoselbows.com" and "www.chaoselbows.com" are different and will set different cookies. This is good - I can test things logged into the site as different users at different login points, but bad in that it is confusing. I will probably fix it shortly.

I have also spend the idle few minutes experimenting with the import of the old information. Basically, I have to take the old database, which is relatively large, and run a script against it to populate a new table with all the correct formats. This is good, in that the old data is preserved. This is bad in that I was out of databases I was able to use.

I just updated the website. Since This website serves three purposes I am happy to say that the update appears to have gone swimmingly. however, if you notice something more odd than usual, feel free to tell me about it by commenting here, or assigning me a task to fix it, or whatever strikes your fancy.

This was a security update, so no cause to be alarmed. go about your business as usual....

I think that I am going to switch from taxonomy access control to organic group access control. I think this may work better for our needs. Basically this means that you can create groups and allow people to join them, but also restrict content based on group memberships. For example, restrict the dragon forums to members whom have demonstrated an interest in them.

What do you think?

What tools do you use for building web sites? this site is built with Drupal. I have used Wordpress, as well as phpnuke. So far, I like this one best. It seems much more flexable than the others, plus more "extensible" in that I could host several sites with the same codebase.

Other tools I like are cyberduck, an FTP client, and Taco HTML Edit, both Macintosh programs. Both have the engaging quality: free.