Hal MacLean

So now having installed Wordpress, it turns out that it is infinitely customisable! Oh joy… more to learn about!

The task was to be able to build a single category RSS feed that people can subscribe to if they so chose, rather than have to subscribe to all categories, or all comments. In the theme I am using the sidebar holds the category list and it was here that the code had to go.

The issue was to find the category ID and the category name and only show the link to the RSS *if* the user had opted to view all posts in a single category.

It turns out that Wordpress has done most of the hard work for us, in that the functions to get the ID and name are already created. All that had to happen was to find those arguments, wrap them in an ‘If’ tag and post them to the sidebar. Once again, some gentle reading of the Woprdpress documentation got me half way there and able to manually write the code for each category… but it needed automating. And once more, Alex Blanc stepped up to the plate…

To cut a very long story short, here’s the code, entered as a list item in the sidebar.php file for the theme:

<?php if (get_query_var('cat')) { ?>
<li>
<a xhref="/wp-rss2.php?cat=<?php echo get_query_var('cat'); ?>"><?php echo single_cat_title(); ?> (RSS)</a>
</li>
<?php } ?>

This then writes the title of the category in the sidebar as an RSS link, and ensures that only that category’s posts are included in that particular feed. You can see from the code that the link is using RSS2, so you can probably amend this to be any other flavour of feed that you wish.

After struggling for quite a while to get Drupal upgraded to a later version I simply gave up. Sad really, as I quite liked using Drupal.

However, with some help from Alex Blanc who found the necessary scripts, I migrated from Drupal to Wordpress. It wasn’t pain free, but it was straightforward enough, thank goodness.

Now, as soon as I can get all of the user details into the Wordpress database then all of you who had signed up to my Drupal site should also find yourselves signed up here. What I now need to do is move the files over that I was referencing, build a couple of pages to allow them to be downloaded and finally bring in the missing images…

Hopefully it will be done before Christmas 06!

OK - a sad day. I had well over 70 spam comments put on the blog in the last 24 hours. This is probably linked to the fact that the server was hacked recently by some muppet trying to offer ringtones for download. What I am getting is an immense amount of ring tone based comments.

Every day I pretty much go into the Drupal database and delete the spam comments, but today was a hefty job to do.

Sadly then, in order to post comments, I think you’ll have to register an account. I didn’t want to do this, but I really can’t see a way around it at the moment. perhaps when the blog gets moved to a new server I can implement a better way, but moving a blog is no simple matter… for a start there is the whole issue of ‘googlejuice’ to consider. Many of my pages are linked by the server address and not the framed web URL address… which means that if I move, links that others have bookmarked will not work, Google will have to re-trawl the site and instead of appearing in the top ten for searches I’ll probably be back right at the bottom. Sigh.

If you are a spammer, or have ever been one, then congratulations. You bottom dwelling pond scum are wrecking the internet for the rest of us.

OK - this blog runs in Drupal. It’s a reasonably old version of Drupal, and needs upgrading to allow spam filters and other features to be added in.

However, the recent server down time has thrown up a new question… should it stay in Drupal?

What alternatives are there and how easy is it to move from Drupal to a different blog software?

I’ll be looking at alternatives over the next month or so, but any suggestions or comments to get me heading along the right track are warmly welcomed. I’ll start off by looking at Wordpress… anyone seen any Drupal to Wordpress conversions?

Aaagh!

It is like living on a knife edge when you have your blog on a server that is getting so many hits!

One of the Ultralab servers was hacked last week, and whilst not a great deal of damage was done, it did take it off line for a number of days. The worst part of this was the timing - just before a bank holiday weekend when no-one would be around to fix the problems.

SO it was that this blog was off line for five days. Sorry to all of you who tried and failed to get in whilst looking for Dension files, Limara info, stuff about cameras, the Highways Agency or DVD authoring in general. It really couldn’t have come at a worse time!

We are back up and running (as you can see) but it emphasises the point that this blog needs to move homes. Doing so will undoubtedly cause issues, not least we will lose google juice and people who have linked to these pages will lose the links. Hopefully we’ll be able to take enough time before moving to allow proper redirection and google bots enough time to re-link the pages.