I finally decided I wanted to set up an OpenID ID attached to the URL of my personal website, apocryph.org. I just set up an account on MyOpenID, installed the Drupal OpenID URL module, and configured it to point to my MyOpenID URL.

I set OpenID Server to ‘http://www.myopenid.com/server’, OpenID Delegate to ‘http://codebloc.myopenid.com/’, and OpenID XRDS Location to ‘http://codebloc.myopenid.com/xrds’. And that was it. Now http://apocryph.org is a valid OpenID. Too easy.

After my flash of insight I’ve decided to build a tool to help me migrate apocryph.org away from drupal.

Requirements are:

• Work with my Drupal configuration
• Not so tightly coupled to my Drupal configuration that no one else can use it
• Output posts in a neutral format that users can post-process and import into other tools
• Preserve all the important elements of each post, including:
  • Formatting. Most posts are in Markdown, and a few are in SmartyPants. Those must be converted to XHTML using the same rules which generate the markup in Drupal
  • Files. A few of my posts have files attached, usually images but sometimes other stuff. Those files must be preserved themselves, and any references to the files from within a post (like IMG or A elements) must be preserved as well
  • Metadata. The tags, author, timestamp, published/unpublished flags must be preserved
  • Links.

After outsourcing comment processing to Disqus due to the lack of the Akismet module, fighting a buggy alpha version of the Views module for Drupal 6.0 to implement a front page that doesn’t use those damn teasers, and installing yet another security update using an update process that can best be described as a pain in the ass, I’ve finally asked myself why I use Drupal for what is basically textbook blogging.

The answer? Well, once upon a time, back in 2005, I had an HTML site that I’d painstakingly built, and I shopped around content management systems trying to find one flexible enough to let me reconstruct that look and feel in a theme. I looked far and wide, at WordPress, DotNetNuke, PHPNuke, MovableType, and just about every other CMS and blogging platform one can imagine. The only one with the flexibility I thought I needed was Drupal.

The current situation with comments on apocryph.org is untenable.

Today I took the plunge and upgraded apocryph.org to the latest version of the Drupal content management system. Drupal 6 has been in the works for what seems an eternity, and has a number of big improvements which made it hard to resist. Unfortunately, I now somewhat regret the decision, as there were considerable gotchas to cope with.

Of course, I started out with a complete backup of my Drupal 5.x site and database, just in case.

I just upgraded apocryph.org to Drupal 6, and it’s not going so well. This is a test post; I’ll post a detailed AAR later.

I’ve made some minor adjustments to the apocryph.org Drupal theme. The original apocryph theme was based on a ripoff of the built-in Drupal 4.x theme, and was showing its age. It wasn’t compatible with some nice Drupal 5.x features like autocompleting tag names, and auto-collapsing form field groups. Mostly the enhancements are to the posting side of things and thus benefit me exclusively, but while I had the hood up I tweaked a few colors to make the site look a bit less like a Spartan military barracks.

Lately I’ve been getting a torrent of comment spam on apocryph.org. No one else sees it because I’ve enabled comment moderation, but it’s a chore for me to purge all the spam posts all the time. I had installed Drupal’s CAPCHA module, but it provides only a lame arithmetic challenge, which apparently the spam-bots can defeat.

There seems to be something screwed up w/ Drupal atm. Only my last blog post shows up on the front page or when listing my blog posts, but all the others are still on the site, and reachable by their respective URLs. I’m investigating now; nothing’s changed, that I know of.

UPDATE: I’m an idiot. My mall ninja post was being chopped off at an unfortunate spot to form the teaser, and the resulting markup had all subsequent article links rendering improperly (that is to say, not at all!).

I upgraded the site to Drupal 5.0, from 4.7. Apart from having to tweak the apocryph theme a bit to reflect the new theming system, the upgrade went without a hitch.