timmillwood's blog

Since my last post about Blog to it, 1 week and 20 hours ago, I have been working solidly on the idea. So far the development site features the creation of your own blog using wmostrey's DrupalMU install profile, Twitter integration using walkah's Twitter module and rating of blog posts using Eaton's Fivestar module.

I have been maintaining this blog since March and been using the Drupal content management system to run it. A Skribit question asked was "Why do you use Drupal?", well the reason is, when I started my current job at International Baccalaureate I was required to help with the development of their Community Theme web site, which was Drupal based.

This sparked my interest in Drupal and showed me just how powerful it was. I had not heard of Drupal until I applied for this job and the only content management system I had used before was PHP-Nuke.

After finishing the Community Theme website I built this site and carried on developing using Drupal at home and in work.

Last week I came up with what I think is a great idea, I have Twittered a little bit about it and this has started questions on Skribit about what "Blog to it" is?

Well, Blog to it will merge many Web 2.0 ideas and technologies together into a site where you can find new blogs, promote your blog and even start blogging. The idea is, when a user registers for Blog to it they will be able to add blog RSS feed URLs to the site. These blog posts will then be imported into Blog to it where users can read and rate the blogs and their posts. When adding the feed the user would of selected a category where the blog and all it's posts will be stored making interesting blogs and posts easy to find.

Wordpress first appeared in 2003 as a single user blogging system, there is now both a hosted version and a downloadable open source version. Some time after the first release of Wordpress, Wordpress MU (or Multi-user) was released. This enables the creation of multiple Wordpress blogs from one Wordpress MU install.

When I got my iPhone about 9 months the one app I wished for was a terminal. I wanted somthing to enable me to quickly login to my servers and fix problems when in work and stuck behind a proxy or when away from the desk.

There was first a web app which turned out to be a joke, luckily I had that thought and tried it with bogus details. Then there was a homebrew app, but I failed at jailbreaking my iPhone. Then there was another web app, but this time hosted on your own server. This took a little bit of fiddling and messing about to get setup, and was a little clunky, but did do the job.

This week I decided that now ImageField was available for Drupal 6 I would move from Image Attach to ImageField. This all went fine and works well, but ImageCache does not work very well with Lighttpd web server.

ImageCache is module that crops and resizes ImageField images, these are then saved within in the files directory. The module makes use of Drupal's CleanURLs system and Apache's Mod_rewrite function. Apache is a widely used web server but because of my lack of RAM I have chosen to use Lighttpd. Lighttpd doesn't work in the same way as Apache so ImageCache ends up getting confused.

The other problem I am having is when an image file is uploaded via ImageField the permissions are not set high enough to allow it to be displayed.

As you may or may not of noticed there is a new block on the right asking "What should I write about?". This is Skribit, Skribit is an idea by Paul Stamatiou, a blogger who I have been following for a while because of his great reviews and how to articles. In his blog he explains how he came up with the idea and what skribit is so I won't bother re-explaining it all.

I am now married and been on my honeymoon, so it's now time to get back to normal. In just 12 hours time I will be on my way to work for the first time in two weeks.

In exactly 24 hours time I will be stood in St. Michaels Church, Llanvihangel Crucorney, Abergavenny, taking my wedding vows. I have been with Kelly for over 8 years and have been planning the wedding for ages.

The reception will then be at The Celtic Manor Resort in Newport.

I am really excited and nervous. The biggest problem is the weather, it won't stop raining, I am just preying it clears for tomorrow.

Last night I noticed an interesting article on The Next Web about Google launching their own web browser "Chrome". This morning I opened up Google Reader to find a wide array of posts on the same subject. It all started with Blogoscoped who posted an article about a Google comic book they were sent about Chrome.