Yes, it’s a brand new RGR for a brand new… something.
I’m not sure if I still have any regular readers who haven’t given up on me. If you are one, I apologize for the lack of posts. But I just kind of ran out of things to write about, or got lazy, or a little of both. Take your pick.
But I woke up today and decided today was going to be the day that I finally relaunch RGR. I’ve started to at least twice before in the last six months or so, but never finished; I think part of the reason was that I figured I would have to import at least some of my favorite content from the older blog, or at least set up some sort of redirection to it so that clickthroughs from search engines and such would still work… but that was just too much work to do for free, I guess. I decided that the way I would do this this time is to just ignore the old content. It’s still up in its own little segregated directory, but I’m not going to copy over any of my favorite posts (though I have fixed links and images on some of them; they broke when the directory of the blog changed); I’ll just let the search engines re-index them at their new homes and not worry about the problems that will cause. (I have set the new 404 page to invite people to search for articles in the old archive, though.)
The old blog was powered by the Serendipity Weblog System. I still think that’s a decent blogging system - definitely better than the massively-overrated WordPress. However, through work, I have fallen head-over-heels in love with the Drupal content management system, and knew a rebirth of RGR could be powered by nothing else. Drupal is a joy to program for; so amazingly thought-out. It’s not really easy to use, partly because it can do so much; when I train clients in it at work, I generally just teach them just the stuff they need to know and tell them to please ignore everything else. It’s also not the easiest to jump in and program for, partly because the API is so massive and there’s a lot of basics you have to know just to get started (the Pro Drupal Development book was immensely helpful for me; hopefully, the new version covering the latest major release of Drupal, Drupal 6, will ship soon). But once you start to get your head wrapped around things, it’s just amazing the quickness and flexibility Drupal gives you.
I code in Drupal pretty much every day at work now; we almost always have at least one site we’re working on for which Drupal fits the bill. But you know, it’s funny; I code in Drupal a lot, but I don’t really use it much. I think that’s another reason why this blog had to be powered by Drupal; as I’ve been working today setting this up, being on the user end of things instead of the coder end has been enlightening. I also want to eventually set up pages showing off some of my Drupal projects outside of my page on Drupal.org. I soon hope to make a post (or possibly a static page which will be occasionally updated) showing off some of the modules I’ve used to build this site; both my own and others. (The chunk of code that’s powering that “Interesting links” section there on the right is especially crafty, in my personal opinion, but it’s still a ways away from being ready for release.)
I also intend to broaden the scope of this blog. The old one was ostensibly tech-related, and there’s going to be a lot of such nerdery on this blog too. But I think if I can occasionally blather on about personal stuff as well - something I was hesitant to do on the old blog - I’ll have more to write about, and have more fun writing it as well. I have a rather cool “in-real-life” personal project that I’m going to try to accomplish in the next twelve months or so, and I’d like to use this blog to track the progress of that… I’m not quite ready to tell the world about it, but if I can pull it off, it just might change my life. And now’s the time to that sort of thing, I think - I’m not getting any younger.
Anyway, thanks for stopping by. Please subscribe to the feed and/or come back again soon.
