For the past couple of weeks my blogging energy has been low. I’ve been migrating all of the sites I maintain to a new hosting provider, and it’s been frought with the usual snafus. The new host – Site5 – is great. It just takes time to move a dozen domains with various combinations of CMSs, blogs, fora, and so forth.
Now that I’ve got that out of the way, I have a bit more leeway to play with nifty drupal tools on this site. Among other things, I’m migrating my collection of ephemera bookmarks to a new section of this site. It’s an easy way for me to keep them accessible when I want to dig up posters from 1800s theater productions, or photoshop a 1980s computer ad.
Drupal offers a lot of flexibility over the ‘build static pages, use directories to organize, and spend your life updating’ approach I used when building a few of my first web pages back in the day. It creates a soup of ‘content nodes’ that are organized with flat and hierarchial tags. You build classification taxonomies around the content’s properties, and sidestep inflexible storage schemes. The only hitch is that all this flexibility makes simple organization structures a bit daunting to set up. I’ve installed the path_auto module, and it’s dynamically building the ‘directory structure’ of this site from the taxonomy terms. Next step? Creating a clean interface to RSS feeds at every level of the structure…