drupal

Yeah, I'm nearly there.

At this point, the BLOG looks good. I've removed the "other writings" and "about me" links. I'll have to improve that. There's one link to my old blog. I have recent posts. I think the next steps will be to turn on the performance caching, modify the banner image (rick05.jpg), and then unpublish the drivel that I see now, and start posting "for real." And the first posts will be about me.

I'm getting there. I'm going to be working the user profile after lunch, if I'm able to. And after that I'm going to try to figure out the cron and the performance aspects (what kind of MySQL, caching, some basic "ab" testing).

Drupal and Disqus don't play super nicely together, so I have to disable Disqus for now. I'm going to use the old school Drupal comment form, which obliges me to enable user login stuff. I'll have to test this workflow. I'm almost done since I have the style sheet nearly finished. I'm going with a bare-bones CSS, by the looks of it.

The theme for today (ha!) is to think about the theming stuff. Either I keep going with rickzen (and why not?). Or I try one of the myriad of themes "out there." If I choose the former, I'm going to be knee and waist deep in CSS (selectors, properties, etc.). If I choose the latter, I'm going to be knee deep in installation and configuration madness. Sigh. Maybe I'll just noodle with more functionality, like pictures.

I'm on a roll now. I've got plenty of work done on the site, and it's starting to shape up a little more nicely. I'm also slowly (slowly!) learning about CSS, and how to tweak it.

For example, below each story is a little footer. It was originally offset from the left edge of the story. I hunted around for the edge, and found that if I could somehow disable the padding for only that first item element, I'd be all set. And guess what? I could!

ul.links li.first
{
padding: 0 0;
}


I got a lot of things done with the new blog.

It's not yet ready for prime time, but it's close. I'm still debating with myself as to whether I'll "throw this all away", so I can start from scratch. I've installed a whole bunch of modules, with a few more to go, and I've done a good bit of customization. Still, it may really be the best way to go. Maybe a few more days with the messing around and configurations.

This is the second post. The environment is somewhat shaping up. I mean, c'mon! I just installed and configured Drupal and am nearly close to finishing this work.