One of the hazards of making registration easy is that you get spammers as well as the people you really want to connect to. Once moderation is set up, your site is a "honey pot". Sooner or later someone will post something objectionable.

Ot the thousands of available contributed modules, there are a few every site should have. One of these is "pathauto" which depends on "token"and "cleanurls".

As the user which owns the site:

drush dl token
drush enable token
drush dl pathauto
drush enable pathauto

The defaults are fine except "admin/build/path/pathauto". In the section URL aliases, check the box "Bulk Generate".

Of course, you need "drush" but that is another story.
 

The release of 6.15 and 5.21 prompted a review of local Drupal sites. We have a collection of 44, many experimental, some customer evaluations and a few "productive" sites. Fortunately, all our sites have a similar file structure and we can obtain a status report of all Drupal code with a few lines of code.

I was induced to rethink web hosting while chasing Aegir - a  hosting management system for the Content Management System (CMS) Drupal. While you may crack open a book on the basis of its cover, It is the first few seconds of the reading experience that hook you into reading more. If that first few seconds is a repeat of the last experience, you may be inclined to say "I've read that book before" and put it away.

Note: the gremlins came back today. The sessions table had mushroomed in size. I had to repair it before I could empty it but life seems better now.

I found one of the web servers unresponsive on Wednesday morning. Worse, the router between my workstation and the web server was gasping. In a rash attempt to improve life on the router, I thoroughly trashed it. But that is another story.

Updates are not so bad.

I downloaded 5.19 and 6.13 from drupal.org to /root.

Then I extracted both files creating the directories /root/drupal-5.19 and /root/drupal-6.13

Immediately I renamed /root/drupal-5.19/sites/default/settings.php to settings.php.org. If you forget this step you will wish you had a backup of settings.php.

Then I "su" to the appropriate user; cd to public_html/domain_name and

cp -a /root/drupal-x.yy/* .

People who want a well-reasoned blog should write their own or look elsewhere. Sometimes I stumble across a process or practice that seems to work fairly well yet might not be obvious to the average reader. One such process is producing a book.

We all know CSS is a pit. Things which soar in one browser, crash in another. There is a reason for that.

http://www.webdevout.net/browser-support-css provides a neat list of things you probably don't know about CSS and browser developers don't either. I've been in pursuit of a CSS mechanism for printing and one of the things you would want for that purpose is @page. For some reason, "The size of a page box cannot be specified in CSS 2.1.". If anybody discovers the wisdom behind that, please clue me in.

A useful Firefox extension for exploring code generated by a CMS (Content Management System).

Web Developer can be downloaded from http://chrispederick.com/work/web-developer/ and installed by dragging the "xpi" file onto a Firefox window. Once installed, extensions must be enabled, sometimes configured and finally invoked with a restart or two in between. Web Developer is accessed through a Tool bar between the Bookmarks tool bar and "tabs" and the Menu item "Tools".

Clean URLs are almost taken for granted. Drupal 6 enables them automatically if certain requirements are met. "Dirty URLs" contain a "?" and used to prevent some "spiders" from "crawling" your site effectively.