Blogging

the joy of Markdown

For many years, I have flitted between a plethora of different blogging platforms mainly out of curiosity, boredom, frustration or occasionally sheer bloody mindedness.

I have lost draft posts in WordPress, Tumblr, Posterous and Habari due to network glitches, browser crashes, my own stupidity and a broken AutoSave plugin.

One night in a lonely hotel room, the realisation suddenly dawned on me that my frustration with all of these blogging platforms was that I spent a lot of time in the post editor and none of the post editors did what I wanted.

Drupal 7 released

This blog and the handful of modules I use has been upgraded to the final version of Drupal 7.0 which was released today.

I was quite pleased that I used Drupal 7 from the early beta versions and then tracked the D7 release candidates as this gave me valuable experience in upgrading Drupal 7 relatively quickly while preserving my additional modules without losing all my data which always helps. It’s worth noting that although I barely scratch the surface of Drupal 7’s wide range of functionality, the quality, reliability and performance of Drupal 7 was perfectly fine for this blog.

to markdown or not to markdown

Steve Rubel sings the praises of Markdown and good old fashioned text editors.

I agree and for a long time have dithered over whether to write all of my blog posts in Markdown. This makes sense as it simplifies the syntax and theoretically should make writing content easier and quicker. I was particularly struck by Caius Durling’s use of Markdown on his Habari blog and the use of the plaintext plugin to reveal the raw Markdown.

essential modules for your new Drupal 7 site

People never ask me ‘Hey Norman - what modules have you installed thus far on this wonderful Drupal 7 powered blog ?’

• Archive - monthly archives.

• Disqus - although I had some problems with this module so I am currently using a simple Disqus block.

• Global Redirect - ensures that ’node/1234’ is redirected to ‘2010/21/22/blog-post’.

• Google Analytics - mandatory to torment myself over visitors statistics using GA.

• Markdown Filter - although I haven’t fully embraced this yet. Old (raw HTML) habits die hard.

  Read more

marketing plan for Drupal 7 launch

The date for the long awaited Drupal 7 release has been announced as 5 January 2011.

Dries should just play this video. Then he should simply read the following and leave the stage.

CRM for bloggers

There’s a common saying in Customer Relationship Management (CRM) circles along the lines of:

It takes 10,000 times more time/money/effort to acquire a new customer than it takes to retain an existing customer.

Evidence of this is commonplace; introductory offers, improved interest rates, free Parker pen and pencil gift set and enticements for new customers for which existing customers are ineligible.

Now I occasionally claim that I am writing this blog purely for me, myself and I. What I mean by that is that I tend to write what I want when I want and don’t feel pressured to produce content on a regular ongoing basis. However, that’s not entirely true; if it was I could equally well write this stream of consciousness into a A5 notebook locked in my top drawer where no-one would ever see it.

all change please

This blog is now running on Drupal 7 (beta 3).

Currently Disqus comments are absent but I am hoping the Global Redirect module and the Disqus crawler will remedy this given time.

Most of the modules I require are available for Drupal 7 apart from FeedBurner so I have just re-pointed the feed for now.

Let’s see if this appears on the other side.

I will probably convert to using MarkDown markup in due course too.

starting from zero

One of my favourite and regular UK bloggers, Jonathan Beckett had gone rather quiet recently so I assumed he must have moved blogging platform the the Nth time, gone on holiday or possibly his feed was screwed without his knowledge so I sent him a polite email asking ‘Dead or just resting ?’ and he informed me he’d intentionally changed blog address without telling anyone.

I think this sudden, unannounced, abrupt loss of service is an excellent idea for all bloggers - it’s a bit like writing ‘I love small, fresh, juicy satsumas’ buried deep in the middle of a technical report to be delivered to a client or pausing for 5 minutes, with your face in your hands, during a presentation at Oracle Open World. It helps to focus the mind and check whether anyone is actually reading or listening.

Habari development roadmap

StatusNet names all releases after R.E.M. songs so here’s my idea for future Habari release codenames. It’s a well kept secret that all Habari developers and users adore that popular beat combo - The National.

The Habari development roadmap in full

• 0.7 - October 2010 -Developer Release 1 (‘10/10/10')
• 0.8 - January 2011 (‘Pay For Me')
• 0.8.1 - February 2011 (‘Murder me Rachel')
• 0.9 - June 2011 (‘Lit Up')
• 0.9.1 - August 2015 (‘Slipping Husband’ aka ‘Slipping Release')
• 0.9.2 - November 2015 (‘Mr. November')
• 0.9.3 - January 2016 (‘The Geese of Beverley Road')
• 0.9.3.1 - January 2016 (‘Mistaken for Joomla')
• 0.9.3.2.1.3(Alpha 3, RC1) - January 2016 (‘Start a War')
• 0.9.4 - March 2017 (‘Afraid of Everyone')
• 0.9.5 April 2017 (‘Your Patches Were a Kindness')
• 0.9.9 - June 2017 (‘Conversation 1,000,016’ aka ‘Taxonomy revisited')
• 1.0 (Final) - Thursday December 25 2019 (‘Bloodbuzz Ohio')

Habari 0.7 developer release

Apart from a short-lived crisis of confidence - after losing a Draft post, I spontaneously migrated this blog to Wordpress as an interim hop before completing 99% of a full blown migration to Django-Mingus which I then immediately discarded - I have used Habari as my preferred blogging platform for two and a half years.

It’s been a while since the last major Habari release (0.6) but, because I run the latest 0.7 development code (using SubVersion), the lengthy gap and absence of a formal 0.7 release didn’t particularly bother me.