Change has Come!

Well it has been a long time coming but finally after more than a year of waiting commenting has once again returned to the blogs! It has been quite a feat to get this place up and running over the past week. To be honest by Wednesday the site was still mostly broken but with hard work and a bit a research I was able to find replacements for that parts I wanted to use. This site is now one of a growing number of Drupal run sites, it's a great CMS supported by a large community which means that there are about a dozen different ways to do things within its framework. It is both Drupal's curse and its blessing. Well here it is, I hope you like what I've done with the place. welcome to the Dream Anvil! Here is a quick status update for you, currently I have transferred over only the most recent blog postings and will keep updating the back catalog behind the scenes. The media galleries are all accounted for but are currently unsorted and do not have category tags on them, though they are in their respective galleries. The travel section is not up yet but should make its return shortly. The Forge is up and working, though there are no posts there yet and that about wraps things up.

The Dream Anvil will be the new home for my own content but thanks to Drupal (the system powering it all) it can eventually do much, much more. Right now you may have noticed a user log in. While you do not need an account to leave comments you will need one to participate in the Forge (the forums) signing in will also net you the ability to track your comments and participate in polls and other site related details. Eventually, if it's wanted by the community, I can include the ability for users to create profiles, write their own blog posts or post their own photos. Interested? Leave a comment below and sign up!

This past week was spent on getting the site ready and since it was flirting with disaster for most of that week I have spent a LOT of time on it. Every single free moment has been spent mucking around with its systems, getting it working right. For the most part that task is done, there are still issues with the input system though and I am working on ways to make sure that private areas of the site are not indexed by Google, Bing and Yahoo though it would appear that right now they are being skipped over. Unfortunately much of that time getting the site running was supposed to be spent on its design, what you see now (the “magical pen”) was an idea I had for the Special Topics page, eventually I will have a picture of an anvil somewhere around here. What you see right now is not the final look but it is fairly close, because of that it will probably remain the way it is for the time being. I need to get outside and talk to other people again, enjoy the sun light or play some games. In other words, I am dead tired and in need of change from working on this thing.

Many of you may be wondering just why it is I have made all of these changes. Yes commenting is great but it was not required for the site to operate and everything was running fin before right? Yes, everything was running fine before, but only at the expense of a good deal of my time. Writing one of my posts takes roughly an hour, depending on the topic, length and level of distraction that time can decrease by a little, or increase by a lot. Then to post the topic and have it show up on the home page and blog central page I had to rewrite whole sections of the website. That process took another forty minutes to an hour on top of writing. Add to the fact that to even make a post I had to have both my laptop with Dreamweaver and an internet connection at hand. Drupal has wiped that whole process out. Once I write something it's as simple as copy and paste and since it is all controlled directly through the web site I can post from anywhere and on anything that has a connection to the internet. This will allow me to focus on what is important, writing. You see building a site like this requires skills and patience, I have spent the past month buried in Drupal training, the month before that I was blasting through Illustrator and Photoshop training. All of it invaluable, all of it taking away from the time I have to write and not just my blog posts and reviews but from writing my stories and books too. Now I can look back on what I have accomplished and while I am proud of what I have done, I am eager to return to my beloved stories and write again.

For those of you wondering what else was going on this week, I did have my interview and it went very well. I should have spoken up a bit about my willingness to travel to particular Asian countries, especially ones that start with the letter J, but I thought that things went well. I should finally be able to close this tumultuous chapter of my life within the next two weeks or so. Look for news right here and while you're at go ahead and leave me a comment! Sayonara.