I.D.E.A.

I just started using the Things app on the iPhone. It supports GTD concepts. Let’s see how long I can keep this up. It seems like I’m more productive already. I’ve been adding items to Things as they come up, and I’ve been checking things off. I think it will take time to adjust to this way of doing things. I’m use to keeping things in my head, but now I will need to trust that I have this system to help me so I can use the extra brain bandwidth on other things.

I was just digging around my theme editor trying to insert a piece of HTML from my hosting service that says that my site is Green, because the hosting service Carbon Neutral. I decided to add the HTML to the footer of my theme. When I looked at the file there were tons of links embedded in a div that had a style of ‘display:none’ !!! I looked at the header and same thing, there were tons of hidden links. I of course deleted the divs from each file and all is well now.

It turns out that people’s WordPress themes are getting hacked for some reason. Here’s an article about it.

Drupal has a multisite feature that allows you to run multiple sites under the same code base.  I found a great tutorial here which uses CVS to install Drupal.  The advantage of using CVS is that if you want to update/upgrade your Drupal install, it’s as easy as issuing a single command in your shell.

First I setup my Dreamhost UNIX directory structure by following this wiki entry.   The wiki entry goes into a lot more detail but the important part is to keep your directory structure clean and put all of your websites under ~/www.

Then I followed the instructions from the above mentioned tutorial.

Here are some highlights…

Checkout Drupal verision 6.10 from the CVS repository, by using the tag DRUPAL-6-10, to your directory…here it’s ~/www (here is a list of valid tags):

$ cd ~/www
$ sudo cvs -d:pserver:anonymous:anonymous@cvs.drupal.org:/cvs/drupal checkout -r DRUPAL-6-10 -d drupal drupal


This will create a directory called ‘drupal’ and place all the checked out files in that directory.  Create all the other directories following the tutorial..including one for each domain you want to host.

Since, I don’t have access to my web server’s configuration files, I used Dreamhost’s control panel to point the two domains to the drupal install directory (if you’re on Dreamhost, you can find it under Manage Domains…click on the Edit button under Web Hosting for the domains you want to run on Drupal).

You can also checkout contrib modules using CVS. Here’s an example of how to grab the admin_menu module. To find the tag to use for the version(-r) parameter, here it’s DRUPAL-6--1-3, click on the Release Notes link that accompanies each release. At the top of the page you should see the tag in all caps.


$ cd ~/www/drupal/sites/all/modules/drupal-contrib
$ cvs -z6 -d:pserver:anonymous:anonymous@cvs.drupal.org:/cvs/drupal-contrib checkout -r DRUPAL-6--1-3 -d admin_menu contributions/modules/admin_menu


Later, to update your core and contrib modules, you just have to run this (of course, make sure you backup stuff, turn off modules, etc. before updating. Basically follow appropriate upgrade instructions):
$ cvs -nq update -dP

I just recently discovered I manually installed this blog a long time ago, instead of using my hosting service’s “one click install” feature to install Wordpress.  They also make it really easy to upgrade.  But I also found out that at some point I had converted my install to use SVN instead.  So, now all I have to do to upgrade my Wordpress software is to:

1. Go into the root directory of your blog
2. type ‘svn sw http://svn.automattic.com/wordpress/tags/2.7 .‘  (make sure you refer to one of the right version tags here)
3. Go to your browser and run http://yourblog.com/wp-admin/upgrade.php

That’s it!  Really simple right?!

Read this to find out more information about SVN and Wordpress.