David Herron .com

I've been hosting my Drupal sites on Dreamhost for quite awhile, but it's time to move on. They're a decent web hosting provider that offers a combination that suits me well, but if you peruse http://www.dreamhoststatus.com/ you see a lot of customers complaining bitterly about downtime and slow service. I'm one of those customers, but do not want to focus on this part of the story, and instead want to focus on seeking a proper useful home to house my websites.

This project just popped up on my radar - Canonical Entity Representation (see http://groups.drupal.org/node/197588 and http://groups.drupal.org/node/197583). The description of this sounds like it would resolve one of the key critiques I have against Drupal. Namely the lack of a import/export format that's part of Drupal Core. I'd like to call some attention to this and hopefully, as the two posts above suggests, this can be a standard part of Drupal starting with v8.

I remember attending a Drupal7 release party several months ago, 11 months ago actually. It was an exciting time, all this new stuff had gotten into core. I was hoping and looking forward to using the new functionality. But then I started evaluating the status of the contributed modules and realized it wasn't going to be possible. The main blocker at that time was that Views was in a massive rewrite mode leading to Views3, and that this was causing attendant delays in other modules who were depending on Views.

Over the course of time you might add nodes that you later delete, and end up with taxonomy terms that have no nodes. These empty terms add overhead to your site, and add empty taxonomy listing pages. It's best to remove the empty terms.

I said "Overhead".. I don't know all the instances but have seen a couple places where all terms are loaded into memory. If your vocabulary includes empty terms (no nodes for the term) each empty vocabulary term makes for a bigger array that is loaded into memory.

The following are for Drupal 6.. haven't looked at how to do this with Drupal 7.

The season 6 finale, the Wedding of River Song, was an amazing story but within five minutes of finishing the first watching I an anger over the episode erupted. I recorded some of that anger in audio feedback for The Doctor Who Podcast, hopefully they'll play it. Anyway... it was an excellent story with lots of depth, as we've come to expect from Stephen Moffatt, but there's a bit at the end that is just griping me out to no end.

The "Path Redirect" module for Drupal 6 (http://drupal.org/project/path_redirect) is an excellent way to set up redirects from one URL to another. This module can be used for any purpose where you want the HTTP request for URL's on a Drupal website to automatically redirect to another URL. For example :-

• you might want to have a nice URL to promote for some excellent product (example.com/excellent-camera) that lands on a merchant website while hiding the complexity of the merchant URL (making sure to include the affiliate link).

Hilarious retrospective of the entirety of Doctor Who from 1963 up until late 2011 Matt Smith.

The next season of Doctor Who is coming up - and the BBC has released this bit of a video to tease our appetite. The first half of season 6 left us with lots of questions.. like, why was that little girl regenerating? The trailers they released also leave lots of questions and tantalize with many new things. The entrance into Hitler's office is - well - fitting. It's clear the arc here is about The Doctor actually dying, or not. And clearly we're gonna see more of Eye Patch Lady, and somehow River Song has an Eye Patch at some time? Why would that be.

Ben Buckman asked a question that struck deep into a dissatisfaction that's been growing in me about Drupal. He spoke it from the perspective of someone who's spending a lot of time inside the code, but I have a different perspective and take on it because I prefer to stay at the admin screens. He talked about the API complexity, stuff that isn't working that used to work, modules not conforming to long-standing practices, modules not using core Drupal features when arguably they should, and so forth.

What happens when Doctor Who meets a twisted version of Frankenstein? What we get (this time) is Rebel Flesh, that is Flesh that goes on a rebellion. What happens when the creations of our technology take on a life of its own, starts running around making its own decisions, having its own offspring, and engaging in rebellion or perhaps what they might think of as a war of liberation? That's what we have in this story, a technology which can program "Flesh" to be "anything" hence create life, and what happens when it takes on a life of its own?