blogging

Time to upgrade Drupal again. Yesterday version 7.12 was released and this blog is currently running a very outdated (and probably insecure) 7.4. Although Drupal 7 included automatic update for modules and themes, updating the core Drupal software still needs manual intervention and takes time.

Over the years, the main self-hosted blog platforms I have used are:

Must. Blog. More.

Seasoned bloggers knows people are rarely moved to comment on a blog post. Especially, one hit wonders sent from Google, who were simply looking for 'Train times between Clapham and Norbiton' and instead see some commuter rant aimed at South West Trains.

However, microblogging has taught us that people are slightly more likely to grudgingly acknowledge an amusing one-liner with a 'Like' or a 'Fave'. Clicking a button is quick and easy - even for lazy people.

For many years, I have flitted between a plethora of different blogging platforms mainly out of curiosity, boredom, frustration or occasionally sheer bloody mindedness.

I have lost draft posts in WordPress, Tumblr, Posterous and Habari due to network glitches, browser crashes, my own stupidity and a broken AutoSave plugin.

One night in a lonely hotel room, the realisation suddenly dawned on me that my frustration with all of these blogging platforms was that I spent a lot of time in the post editor and none of the post editors did what I wanted.

This blog and the handful of modules I use has been upgraded to the final version of Drupal 7.0 which was released today.

Steve Rubel sings the praises of Markdown and good old fashioned text editors.

There's a common saying in Customer Relationship Management (CRM) circles along the lines of:

It takes 10,000 times more time/money/effort to acquire a new customer than it takes to retain an existing customer.

Evidence of this is commonplace; introductory offers, improved interest rates, free Parker pen and pencil gift set and enticements for new customers for which existing customers are ineligible.

This blog is now running on Drupal 7 (beta 3).

Currently Disqus comments are absent but I am hoping the Global Redirect module and the Disqus crawler will remedy this given time.

Most of the modules I require are available for Drupal 7 apart from FeedBurner so I have just re-pointed the feed for now.

Let's see if this appears on the other side.

I will probably convert to using MarkDown markup in due course too.

Main reason for ditching Habari was the lack of user forums.

Apart from a short-lived crisis of confidence - after losing a Draft post, I spontaneously migrated this blog to Wordpress as an interim hop before completing 99% of a full blown migration to Django-Mingus which I then immediately discarded - I have used Habari as my preferred blogging platform for two and a half years.