Full-time teaching in the fall means precious little breathing room to get life in order, so although I intended to post some new work this week, it turned out that I wound up involved in workspace upgrades, the first being my home office, where I put up new bookshelves, the second being my main Web sites.
The former left my physical space a shambles, the latter was little better as far as the Web is concerned. Version 6 of the software that I use to run my sites, Drupal, was released almost a year ago and its finally time to upgrade. The upgrade process illustrates the perils of Open Source development, as the community learned the hard way. Drupal matured a great deal in version 5 and many larger sites began using it. Unfortunately virtually none of these were ready to go when the upgrade to the software was released a year ago and Drupal has an unusual philosophy of breaking existing extensions each time an upgrade is made. Many of the authors thought that a major upgrade was the time to rethink the basic framework of their extensions and so huge delays took place. Even now, Networked Publics is missing its embedded videos and Docomomo-us.org couldn’t be upgraded yet because of e-commerce is not yet ready for prime-time.
For now, all of my sites are likely to experience a little roughness around the edges, but I think I have everything stabilized.
I’ve been a bit frustrated by the lack of comments (thank you to those regulars who do comment all the time!) compared to other blogs, so I’ve taken the opportunity to install new anti-spam software. It should only show you a captcha image challenge if it thinks you are spam, thus making commenting easier.
From my perspective, the interface is much more elegant and should allow me to extend what I do with all my sites significantly. Given that Drupal 7 is almost a year away and, judging from my Drupal 6 experience, the extensions that I need to make it work probably won’t be ready for another year after that. Two years until my next site upgrade is fine by me.
In the meantime, it’s back to producing content.
Don’t forget A Few Zines tonight at Studio-X. I’ll be posting back here soon.
Full-time teaching in the fall means precious little breathing room to get life in order, so although I intended to post some new work this week, it turned out that I wound up involved in workspace upgrades, the first being my home office, where I put up new bookshelves, the second being my main Web sites.
The former left my physical space a shambles, the latter was little better as far as the Web is concerned. Version 6 of the software that I use to run my sites, Drupal, was released almost a year ago and its finally time to upgrade. The upgrade process illustrates the perils of Open Source development, as the community learned the hard way. Drupal matured a great deal in version 5 and many larger sites began using it. Unfortunately virtually none of these were ready to go when the upgrade to the software was released a year ago and Drupal has an unusual philosophy of breaking existing extensions each time an upgrade is made. Many of the authors thought that a major upgrade was the time to rethink the basic framework of their extensions and so huge delays took place. Even now, Networked Publics is missing its embedded videos and Docomomo-us.org couldn’t be upgraded yet because of e-commerce is not yet ready for prime-time.
For now, all of my sites are likely to experience a little roughness around the edges, but I think I have everything stabilized.
I’ve been a bit frustrated by the lack of comments (thank you to those regulars who do comment all the time!) compared to other blogs, so I’ve taken the opportunity to install new anti-spam software. It should only show you a captcha image challenge if it thinks you are spam, thus making commenting easier.
From my perspective, the interface is much more elegant and should allow me to extend what I do with all my sites significantly. Given that Drupal 7 is almost a year away and, judging from my Drupal 6 experience, the extensions that I need to make it work probably won’t be ready for another year after that. Two years until my next site upgrade is fine by me.
In the meantime, it’s back to producing content.
Don’t forget A Few Zines tonight at Studio-X. I’ll be posting back here soon.
on comments
Hi Kazys,
I’ve been following your blog for some time now and it’s been great! I confess to be one of those who read and never post comments, I’ll try to catch up this year.
In fact, I just referenced one of your posts in a proposal I just submitted to a Spanish Foundation for the possible elaboration of a book. If you’d like to, I’d love for you to take a look at it, though it’s still in Spanish. I will try have it in English by the end of next week.
The zines event sounds great! -Will pass by.
Hope all’s well.
JME
Thanks for the kind
Thanks for the kind words!
And would love to see the proposal. I really wish I had studied Spanish in high school. Would have made much more sense. I don’t think anyone in France has ever shown any interest in my work. Spain is quite the contrary!
I feel like i was called out.
I feel like i was called out. Not personally but as belonging to a group.
I do enjoy reading your blog. However, i also generally find that your posts elicit a feeling of well said. I either have to disagree or agree with a post (and feel i have something to add to it) in order to post. And generally your posts leave me with neither feeling.
Which i think has more to say about myself perhaps than you or your blogging “abilities”.
Cheers
on blogging
I, on the contrary, don’t think it’s about agreeing or disagreeing (and in your case adding), but on maintaining a very much needed opinion/research-based architectural discourse; which is what this blog offers.
As for french, you can say it’s ‘romantic’. I’ll let you know when the proposal is ready in English. Thanks!
Au revoir.