Patrick Teglia

If that title doesn't get your attention, you aren't a geek, srsly.

After hearing a little interest from some people around irc-land, and from one person who I am considering starting a G1-fund for, I decided that I should try to get Drupal 7 working on my T-Mobile G1 phone. After all, it's an Open phone, right? I might have even uttered those words my wife and I always regret; "How hard can it be?"

Actually, it wasn't that hard :)

A tiny bit of history...

Four years ago, a very cool musician/web guy asked me to help him do some CSS work for another musician's site he was developing, on a platform called Drupal. I didn't know Drupal very well, but I had played with it, and knew CSS, so I said Sure! The site was cool, and I recall that I was editing all kinds of CSS files in all these different places (where I shouldn't have). It all seemed very complicated with these modules having their own style sheets. I was intrigued! But I was also confused by the taxonomy, and felt it was too complicated for the little sites I was doing at the time. After that project, I returned to doing things the way I had been doing them.

It is really too bad I didn't see the real beauty of Drupal at that time, that I didn't understand it's power, flexibility, and community. They were all there four years ago, but I didn't see them. If I had, who knows what I would be doing now? I might have been smitten by the drop, like that cool musician, Robert Douglass. That was his first Drupal site as well.

I don't think much of Mollom on my Drupal site. It's not that I don't like it, actaully I freakin' LOVE it! It is just that I never, ever, have to think about it.

So this week I had to get search_files module for Drupal 6 running on a shared host, Bluehost, for one of my customers. I had promised that we would be able to search his PDF files, but I didn't realize that search_files, as well as search_attachments modules require a Linux command line utility named pdftotext to be installed.

I did request that Bluehost install it on my box and was told that anything requiring root access wasn't going to happen.

Fine, maybe I can run it myself, after all, I did get SVN running on Bluehost, how hard could it be?

This morning, before our morning walk, and other family affairs, I poked around making Drupal my personal wiki. Why, that's probably what your asking? Drupal is a CMS, or CMS framework, and there are alternatives to Drupal for sure when it comes to wikis. PHPWiki, DokuWiki, MediaWiki, even the hosted PBWiki all come to mind.