After over 2 years, I've finally upgraded this website from Drupal 4.7 to 6.5. It's something I've been meaning to do for a long while. Hopefully, with the new Drupal version management scheme I've developed for Rhombic Networks (article coming soon), along with the advancements in update management within Drupal itself, it will be much easier to keep current with updates.

Like I discussed my last upgrade to Drupal 4.7, there are several new features I'm excited about:

• OpenID support. Instead of having to leave comments anonymously, or waste time creating an account, use your OpenID. If you have your own domain, check out Simon Willison's article how to turn your blog into an OpenID. I've noticed with an OpenID, I find myself commenting and participating on sites much more often. Hopefully I can expect the same of others with my website.
• Drupal's Mollom module. The old site was getting hit with hundreds of spam comments a day. I gave up trying to filter them all, which meant it took a long time for users' comments to show up on the site. Hopefully, with Mollom, that will change, and I will be able to screen comments again instead of screening spam. I like Mollom more than I do Akismet.
• Drupal's Atom module. RSS sucks. You can now aggregate this blog via an Atom feed. Like most home pages on the Internet, most surfers find content on this site via search engines, or via their feed reader.

Hopefully, I can get my development mojo going and finish porting my Drupal Sands and Sands_CSS themes to Drupal 5.x and 6.x. I'm sorry I took so long!

I'm in the process of upgrading this site to Drupal 4.7. Expect a lot to be broken, especially links. Please let me know if you find any problems!

Some changes:

Conversion of Topics taxonomy from a hierarchal taxonomy to a flat, free-tagging taxonomy.

I previously had the "Topics" taxonomy as a hierarchal tree, for example, CentOS would be under Linux. It looked like a good idea before I started to use it, but Drupal and hierarchies don't work as well as I'd like... I converted it to a flat list, and then turned it into a Drupal 4.7 free-tagging taxonomy. Hopefully this will lead to better tagging of my posts.

Modiying page URLs to end in *.html.

I don't need to do this, but I want to. It looks nicer, it makes pages easier to save, and it facilitates moving to another CMS if the need ever arises. For many URLs I've used permanent redirects to prevent old links from breaking.

I've moved my Sands theme to a new location, at samat.org/drupal-themes/sands. The URL is nicer and shorter, and sets me up for the other Drupal themes I would like to create.

I've added a "recent comments" sidebar block to the front page so I (and visitors) can keep track of comments people have made. I appreciate the comments--it makes as if people actually read this site!

If you're not a registered user (it's easy to become one!) your comments will have to be moderated (by me) before they show up on the page.

I wrote my bookmark system a few years ago because I had no good way for sharing bookmarks online, or amoung web browsers on different machines on different platforms. I've not ported it from the old site to this new one, and I'm not sure I care... While my bookmark system did what I wanted it to do, it was not flexible. I look at the PHP code I wrote and remark: I hate this.

So, I now use del.icio.us. Am I now a Web 2.0 (I hate that term) loser now?

I have bought my 16th domain name today, randomized.info, for a project that I am going to do some day soon.

The way I see it, domain names are like Internet real estate. And indeed, some people market them like this (though I wouldn't). The domain name system and the top-level domains everyone knows and loves (.com, etc) are not going away anytime soon, nor is there any kind of suitable replacement to solve its inherent problems.

Just when you thought I had settled on a domain name, I decide not to! Hah!

I'm going to be moving this site from tamasrepus.rhombic.net to samat.org. Some reasons why:

1. It's actually available
2. It's short
3. It's more me and is more personal (Samat IS my name)
4. Less connection with my company, Rhombic Networks

Some negatives:

1. This is the... 4th or 5th time I've changed domains? I'm going to write up a history page one day...
2. It's eerily similar to my friend Sudarshan's domain.

While I am going to keep the same Drupal setup, expect some stuff to break. URLs hopefully will remain the same (as they have with tamasrepus.rhombic.net and tamasrepus.hotnudiegirls.com). I think I am going to try to figure out something fancy, such as a script that will issue HTTP status 301 (permanent redirect), which Google respects, so the old URLs don't stay in search engines forever.