sysmango.com

I'm having a strange problem where some of the blog posts are showing up in the views that run the front page, but the content is available. Not really sure what is going on, but it's rather weird that I can see everything, except when I'm in the views. Hopefully I can fix it quickly. In fact, this post is part of a test to see if it's affecting all new content. Drupal 6 using Views.

Update: I've fallen back to not using views and panel for the front page, but the problem isn't views or panels, it's the node listing for Anonymous users. Still trying to work through it. Enjoy the mess in the meantime.

Updated 2: It took almost 10 days but I believe the problems are fixed. There still may be some broken functionality, but at least the content is back. Looks like it may be a problem with one of the Drupal modules.

Yesterday I noticed a problem while upgrading some of the modules that run the site. It should have been an easy issue. The version numbers for one or two of the modules did not reflect the versions that had been installed, and this was making another module complain, because at least one of the versions not being reported had a security problem.
I did some poking around and realized that I must have put an earlier version of at least one module in the wrong place, and the system was still seeing the old version in the wrong place, not the new version I just tried to install.
So, I went about and fixed this. I deleted what I thought were the wrong versions and made sure the new versions were where they should have been.
And that's when I made my mistake. I worked without a backup.
Some of the modules I use rely on other modules. The layout of some of the pages, including, it seems, the admin pages that only I see, fall into this category. And all of the relationships between modules, and where files are stored and how things go together are all stored in the database.

Hopefully this is the last post on the way that the website now looks. But this is not really about the redesign of the website than it is about how I tried to do the redesign. I tried to run the redesign using Google Wave.

If you don't know what Wave is, I don't think that you are really missing anything. Wave is a "preview" at a much earlier stage than Gmail was when it was first released (in preview/beta/whatever). With Gmail, everyone already knew what e-mail was. While some of us think we know what Wave is, I don't know that anyone actually realizes everything that Wave is eventually going to be when it grows up (if ever). [I spoke about my initial feelings on Google wave in an earlier post.]

The redesign started as some notes scrawled in a notebook, including some pretty poorly done drawings.

Before

From SysMango.com

After

From SysMango.com

I'm racing to get this in before I have to start working for the day. Today I released an updated theme for SysMango.com. Looking at the theme, I can say that it's not done, not 100% done. It is good enough to put it up and see how it deals with the real version of this website. If anyone has any comments or suggestions, please feel free to leave a comment on this post. I know there are probably issues that I haven't seen yet, because I'm using Firefox and Google Chrome. I'm fairly certain that Internet Explorer will look awful. Sorry about that. Can't really make myself care about browsers that seem to refuse to follow standards. There are still changes to come, but this was the big change.

OR How I discovered how incredibly uninteresting I really am.

When I first started with Twitter and Facebook and MySpace, I really didn't expect anythign meaningful to come of it. I could see the possibilities that hte technologies presented, but I could also see the issues that bubbled beneath the surface.

My experimentation with MySpace didn't last all that long. In the time since I abbandonded the MySpace account (Sept 2007) to now, my attention has been paid to other services. Almost the same day, I created a Twitter account. About a month later I created an account on Facebook, about the day Facebook opened up the service to anyone and everyone.

Three years seems like a really long time to be using these services. And at times, each and every one of them loses whatever appeal they may have had.