MJHutchinson.com Michael Hutchinson's Home on the Web

My site is live at the new domain, and my old page is now redirecting here. The theme still needs a lot of work, but I have other priorities right now.

Most of the work in setting up the new site has been in migrating from PostgreSQL to MySQL. It wasn't a personal choice, just what happened to be on the servers. I took the chance to do a complete Drupal reinstall, and have a few new features planned for the coming months.

The site's only been up for five days and I'm already getting referrer spam. No comment spam yet, but I'll probably disable comments and trackbacks until I have some interesting stuff up, and sort it out then.

Thanks to some helpful advice on Caveat Lector I used a bunch of Apache .htaccess rules to filter out domains containing spam-like words. It's likely that there will be some false positives but until I find another way, it'll have to do.

In other news, Drupal's project module is giving me trouble; it refuses to track my projects' releases.

I wasn't quite as far as I thought I was.

There were still a few PostgreSQL bugs in Drupal that I had to fix before getting on with theming the site. This turned out to be too big a task for an evening so I modified the Drupal port of Michael Heilemann's Kubrick theme, changing the title picture (anyone recogise the mountain?) and the footer, hacking the template so that the sidebar vanishes if it has no content, and making a few other tweaks. Personally I still have my reservations about a fixed-width layout like this - even though it's very pretty - so when I have time I'll fix it up to use relative units.

I've been wondering for literally months how to set up this site. I almost went with a custom coded solution but Drupal's logging and modular 'plug-in features' were ultimately too alluring. The critical question, as always - what would be the best layout? Which modules to use to categorise and display my projects? How do I make all these features work together?

I finally got around to setting up the site properly. My year-old half-baked installation of Drupal should now be fixed (I've reinstalled it several times playing with various configurations) and set up to do everything I want it to. I had to use a few modules, several of which had to be ported to PostgreSQL, but overall the installation process was quite easy. The categories, blocks and links are all set up and all that remains is to create a theme. Then the content can be rolled in...