Doing it All Wrong

With everything going along smoothly this week I knew something was bound to happen to mess things up. It happened on Friday, usually a slow day at work and a time for me to relax and pretty much do what I like. I spent a good chunk of the day helping set up for a video shoot, which our esteemed Special Events Producer decided to waste the whole day doing. This was a simple project for a client who wants this pro-Bono, a five minute video about a safety accident, which took ALL day to shoot. So to get away from the rampant idiocy of a director making up shots on the spot, instead of sticking to his own storyboards, I headed back to my office. This would prove to be fortuitous as I would soon learn that everything I had been doing to get this site up and running with comments was exactly the wrong and hard way to get things done.

Many of my long time readers will know that I have had the goal of setting up commenting and forum postings on this site for a long time now. I was in the midst of learning PHP code language to accomplish this. The result? Hours of frustration as I tried to bash my brain into learning the language. Needless to say up until this point the project was getting nowhere, yes these are PHP pages but most of what you see here is static HTML. I was spending to much time trying to figure out what I was doing wrong and not spending enough time devoted to my other projects. For a time things were bleak, I even thought of dismantling this site and putting it out on Wordpress or Blogger just so commenting could be handled by their built in systems. However I have always wanted this page to be more than a collecting of blogs, I wanted my own personal space for creative expression, something not easily achieved by prebuilt specific sites like Wordpress and Blogger.

So there I was at my desk, passing the time by going to Ars Technica, a tech site I frequent regularly. I stumbled upon an article detailing some of the recent changes Ars had made to its own forums and commenting systems. It was an interesting read and it lead me down my fateful rabbit trail. Apparently there are lots of open source forum packages freely available that you can download and set up on your own server. The one Ars switched to was called phpBB (php Bulletin Board). This would have been prebuilt and just patched into the current pages via code and apparently pretty easy in comparison to what I had been trying to accomplish. There was one big problem though, I don't own my servers. I rent my page space from Bluehost.com so I needed to research to see if Bluehost supported phpBB (they do, for those interested). While I rummaged around phpBB's own support forums I came across an interesting debate about which CMS was better and why phpBB sucked (it was the topic, I think that phpBB is a great program). CMS is short for Content Management System and it was exactly what I was trying to build from scratch on my own site! I had heard of some of these systems before but had thought that services like Joomla and a few others dealt mostly in site design, which is what I bought Dreamweaver for. It was then that I stumbled upon Drupal and when I learned that I was bashing my skull inside out for no reason. Drupal appears to be both flexible and powerful enough to fit my needs. Sites you are familiar with like the Onion.com, Whitehouse.gov, Economist.com and Ubuntu.com are all run off Drupal so my little site should be no problem. It looks like it is almost fully customizable with no preset layout and it nativly supports commenting and forums with just a few button presses. I was ecstatic!

That was a long and rather rambling story the thing you, my wonderful and dear readers, need to know is that over the next few months I will be testing out Drupal to see if I can get it to work with my ideas. Some people might be dismayed by learning that all their effort and work for the past eight or so months was misguided but I am just relieved that you guys will soon be able to comment and am super super excited. The good news is that if it all works out well we should have commenting up on all posts by mid year! For now though I need to get back to my other writing projects that are fast approaching. Drupal testing will begin April 1st but it will not effect this site at all, so you can still come and enjoy my blatherings. Until Next week my friends, sayonara!