www.itowler.com - Ian's Home on the web

About 2 posts ago, I mentioned that I would be working on getting the Blog Archive back to the way it was before I did the Drupal 7 upgrade.  Before the upgrade I had the Archive setup so that you could go to www.itowler.com/Archive and you would see a listing of Years that have blog postings.  The display is looks similar to this: 2011(16), indicating that that there are 16 posts in 2011.  By clicking on the year, it brings you to the a Listing of the blog postings by month, and looked similar to this: June (4) etc.

One of the reasons I keep Itowler.com is so that I can play / work with / Experiment with the web technologies.  By maintaining the website, it gives me the chance to learn.  In the process of learning it is inevitable that you will fail, and hence the title of this blog post, If It isn't broken, you are not trying hard enough!

Over the last month or so I have been working on the itowler.com site, and in the process I have broken a few things.  These include:

• The Main Menu at the top of the screen
• The Blog post Archive (which used to be able to be access by year/month/etc...)
• I also seem to have random errors showing up every now and then
• I have even had the site not work at all for about 2 hours....

All of these things are happening as I am trying to learn more about drupal, make small changes to the theme (think look and feel of the site) and improve the site.  It seems that some of these issues were a result of the upgrade of Itowler.com from Drupal 6 to Drupal 7 at an early stage of Drupal 7 (as opposed to waiting until it was a bit more "mature").  

I have been doing genealogy for around 6 years now, and one of the most important tools in my research has been the internet.  One important aspect of the internet is the ability to get to sites like ancestry.com or Footnote.com at any time of the day, as long as I have an internet connection.  Another aspect of the internet as a tool for genealogy is the ability to share and get the word out.

Well,

Post number 2 for the year, and as you can see, things are on a roll as far as updating the site.  Itowler.com has undergone a few changes, most of which are not minor.  The first major change is the fact that I have moved to a new host.  Right off the bat I noticed that there was an increase in speed.  The new host allows me much more control and so far I am liking it.  It has forced me to learn even more about server administration, but that is a good thing.

So in an effort to make the site my user interactive, I have enabled the comments option for my blog posts.  This means that you will be able to comment on a post, instead of using the sitewide comment option.  This should make it easier to get in touch with me about a specific topic.

In the past I have not had this option enabled for security reasons.  Between security and spam concerns, I had chosen not to enable the commenting.  I no longer have as big of a concern about that.  Drupal is really solid, and I have also installed a pretty strong anti-spam system, so here we go.

Its near the end of June now and I figured that I would check in on my 2009 Goals and see how things are going so far. 

• Lose weight

This is a carry-over from last year.  I need to get down to 165-170.  I should get there, but again...who knows.  This one is starting to get important though, the longer I keep the weight on, the harder it is going to be to get rid of it.

Part of the great part about the internet is the ability to share information.  This is really helpful for genealogy.  Being able to share info and ideas about your ancestry is great, and the internet makes it even easier.  But in order to share people need to be able to find you.  Finding itowler.com just got a little eaiser.  itowler.com is now listed in the Genealogy Blog Finder. 

Itowler.com has been active now for about 4 years, and I have been posting about genealogy for about a year now.  Blogging about my genealogy has been helpful in a number of ways, not the least of which is the ability to connect with other people working on the same familes.   In order to make connecting with other people more effective, I use a number of tools, including SEO (Search Engine Optimization), and make sure that I submit my site to multiple search engines.  You can not find new people to connect with if they can not find you. 

One of the great things about using a CMS like Drupal is that you can add new "features" to a site by installing a module.  I was (and still am) using the Tagadelic module, which creates a list of the blog topics that I have.  The terms in the list are then scaled in size based on the number of blog posts that have been flagged with that term.  If you look to your right, You can see that the term "Genealogy" is big, and the term "pi Day" is not.  I obviously write much more about genealogy than I do Pi day.

The latest module that I installed is called Cumulus.  It expands on the Tagadelic idea, and makes the list more 'interactive".  With cumulus, instead of the list just being listed, it is in a cloud format, that rotates and moves based on what you mouse is doing.  If you hold your mouse near the top of the cloud all the terms will scoll "up", if you have you  mouse to the left side of the cloud the entire cloud will scroll left.  You get the idea.  To slow the list down or stop it from moving, just hold your mouse close to the center of the cloud.  Lastly, to select a term, and see all the blogs tagged with that term, just click on a term and away you go!

In Tagadelic, the font size increased the more the term was used.  In Cumulus, the font size increases, but also gets darker in color.

I plan to keep both the Tagadelic block and the new Cumulus block active for a while, and maybe down the road I will disable the Tagadelic block.  I am not sure about this yet, it might be nice to have both there....Cumulus for looks and fun, and Tagadelic for a straight forward use.

My only gripe about tagadelic is that the install could be a little tricky for someone that is new to drupal.  The module functions as a "Block" in drupal, so you have to go t the Block admin page, and enable the module, then edit its settings.  This is not that hard to figure out, but if you are new to drupal, it might take you a bit to figure it out.  An update to the readme file that is included would help, in my opinion.  Other than that this a fun little module that works great!

Wow, 2008 flew by.  The year has passed, and I did not even notice.  Lots going on this year, but its time to take a look at the goals I set for 2008 and see how well I did.  Without really looking very hard, I can already tell you that I did not do that great of a job on my goals list, so many of them will be carried over to 2009.  I will list the 2008 goals in blue below, and then a description of what I accomplished below that.

Well, I think that I have everything pieced back together again.  itowler.com has been put back together and seems to be working as intended.  I have been able to move the old site over to Drupal, and still keep everything that I wanted.  The "new" Drupal version has the following features: