Deviant Solutions

Francis and I decided to get this webspace so we would have a place to work with rails and PHP. Also because Dreamhost is awesome we have two subversions running on it and 3 Drupal installations. I am happy about these because I am a Google Summer of Code participant working for Drupal writing a BitTorrent tracker module. It is interesting that it has taken four months to finally setup the root of our webspace, but Francis and I have been so busy and we pretty much just kept to our individual sub-domains.

Some may notice that my blog entries are a couple of years old, I have transferred all of my blog entries from my schools blogging server and I have brought them over here with the import typepad module. My school has a blogging system for faculty, staff, and students which runs on Moveable Type. At first I used the instructions to use a custom Moveable Type template that saves my entries in a xml format so that a page here could import my old posts. This worked up until the actual reading of the file. I was not aware that in the domain settings for this server I was using PHP4 instead of 5. When I tried to run the import script PHP was displaying errors that it could not find the simplexml_load_file() function. So I kept reading the page and eventually gave up on that approach, I looked a little further down and someone wrote a perl script that would me the entries over, but I decided not to use that one because it seemed as the I would need ssh privileges on my school's server. Finally I woke up and actually read the top of the page which linked to a module that reads typepads export format into drupal. So I download the module and tried to install it. I extracted it to sites/all/modules, I had never done this before, but I was fairly confident since I have been reading my new Drupal book. To my surprise the module did not appear in Administer - Site Building - Modules, I noticed when I extracted the module there was no .info file with the archive. In the book for every module created there is an accompanying .info file describing the module in the administer interface. After asking my SoC mentor (I should have gone to the Drupal support channel, rather then going straight to him, but I didn't think of that) I was directed to a page discussing its compatibility with Drupal 5. After downloading the patch and .info file I patched the module and it worked. The module was now displaying in the Administer interface. This was a nice exercise considering i had never installed a module before and it was giving me issues. The module did exactly like it was supposed to and it import all of my blog posts without issues. I hope to begin work on a couple of modules to get practice working within the Drupal environment, this software is very flexible and its framework is intuitive.