Web Development

I have been playing with Django lately. I came accross it as I was investigating and doing some development for the "Cloud" using GoogleApps.

This site was developed using Drupal and that was a reasonable choice in terms of speed of web site development and setup, at that time.

There is no doubt that we have a potential breakthrough in use of the Internet with Google Wave.

Having used the Wave for a few weeks, I am impressed. But my enthusiastic reception is tempered by the fact that things may not pan out the way I expect.

The wave is a more efficient combo of twitter, email and collaboration tool, of that there is no doubt and has been mentioned ad nausea on many reviews of Google Wave. It simply need to achieve critical mass to succeed.

I have noticed a lot of comments on the burden of upgrading Drupal versions, recently due to Drupal 6.10, just made available. A lot of those comments on the time it takes and the down time conversely experienced by the visitors to the site.

I am using an series of upgrade steps that minimise the down, or 'in maintenance' time' for the user. Here they are. Please use at own risk and benefits. :)

Today I added an Image rotator to the left sidebar block of this site. I wanted to test how easy it was to do with Drupal as the underlying CMS, or framework, used by this site.

Guess what! It was very easy indeed. It took me less than five minutes to get it operational on the live/production site, this one, itself. Doing it on the live production site rather than on a development shows how confident I was. Granted I had the required modules (Gallery and Views) installed and the needed content (the images) uploaded already. Still, not bad for ease of development!

Successful upgrade to Acquia drupal 6.9 completed with this site unavailable (off-line) for less than 30 minutes.

No problems encountered. All seemingly working well.

Thank you, all visitors and members, for your patience during the down time.