Award Sounds

We've still got issues with the RSS feed from this site since the upgrade to Drupal 6.

The first article shows correctly in the feed and then becomes repeated, often replacing the 2nd, 3rd and 4th articles and so on.

Since the Feedburner feeds are due to be moved across to Google Feeds anyway, I'm going to disable the Feedburner module for the time being and revert back to Drupal's built-in RSS feeds.

To continue following, please subscribe to http://www.awardsounds.co.uk/rss.xml

Following the upgrade to Drupal 6, I noticed an awkward error when publishing content from my desktop editor (Ecto 3). From what I've read, it will affect any editor that uploads content via the blog api integrated in Drupal 6.

How to resolve:

It looks like it's down to the version of libxml2 and php involved. You can either:

1. Upgrade php & libxml2 if you have access to the server or
2. Patch the xmlrpc.inc file in the includes folder of your Drupal 6 installation.

I went with option 2 and it's not as scary as it sounds.

This is the log of issues resulting from the recent upgrade from Drupal 5.x to Drupal 6.x. The issues are relatively minor and so the site is still live and mostly working.

It's been a while coming. I was waiting for some modules to become available before this site was upgraded.

I've been excited by what I've seen in Drupal 6 for some time now, especially having triggers built into the core system. That could be very useful.

Most of the site works now, there are a couple of issues that would have needed to have been fixed for other reasons anyway (e.. RSS subscriptions via Feedburner since it's moving to Google Feeds).

I'll be updating the underlying content management system of this website in the next week or so. I'll be moving it to Drupal 6.1. I know there will be a few features missing such as Similar Entries.

You'll also come back to a new look - ok, I'm cheating there, I'll be using on of the default themes while I'm waiting for contributed themes to catch up. That suits me, I wanted to change from this theme since it was looking a bit too busy.

I'll leave a maintenance message up, hopefully for only an hour or so.

I've had to look at a few options for improving performance on this site. I noticed that the introduction of the Feedburner module and moving the RSS feeds across to Feedburner had caused some performance issues.

I'm in the process of swapping this site's RSS feeds over to Feedburner. It allows me to manage the feeds better and understand what readers use the feeds for. For a start, I had no idea how many of you subscribe to this site or which parts of it.

Leaving comments may be a little awkward for a while. I've had TinyMCE on since I started this site, but as a writer I've stopped using it. I can imagine it being awkward for users who aren't used to it and a lot of the features never seemed to work. It was never number one on my priority since readers can always leave basic messages - just don't try to do anything complicated.....yet.

Easy-to-use

I value easy-to-use above lots of functionality in this case. So I'm on the search for something better. I'll post back when I've installed something.

Rather than just having a test site on a home server, I've been playing with different Drupal features over at this site's sister site at www.alancward.co.uk. I'm also using that site to host less professional articles than at this site. There may be some overlap as I put articles that may be of interest at both sites, but by and large I'll keep the articles and the sites separate with the odd article present on both sites.

After adding the HTML Corrector, I noticed that Blogrush (and not that site widget alone, some of the image adverts as well) were not displaying anymore.

The way around it is to create another input format that has free html input without the HTML corrector. It's also probably best to under the use of only the Administrator and not for general release for other user profiles.

Then apply the new input format to the blocks that weren't working properly with the HTML Corrector.