Blog Marco

ARRRRGGGHHHH!!! I hate moving to new hosts. Something always goes wrong. Maybe it's me. So here's a venting blog entry about my recent ordeal with a Drupal Installation on HostGator which I just solved a few minutes ago. Call it a debrief on my experience and see what lessons I can learn from my mistakes. There isn't anything wrong with HostGator. I realise now what I was doing wrong.

I always go about Drupal installations systematically. Actually I wasn't leaving my long time hosting service (MediaTemple). I just wanted another host and wanted to try out another service (and also to use them as a backup, in case anything happens).

So I sign up to HostGator (which was painless except for the hip pocket - although their hosting prices are competitive). I bought a new domain name from GoDaddy and another from a company called IntaServe which offer registrations for *.com.au's. I've had experience with GoDaddy before - so that went smoothly - although for the uninitiated - you'll probably get lost in the jungle of promotions that they have. I'm slightly annoyed with Intaserve. I guess that's where my attitude started down a downward spiral. I came into the new project all optimistic and now this Australian registrar is screwing my workflow. Why? Because their business systems are screwed. I think they need to have a look at their registration systems: just a few tweaks with their wording in their emails and automated systems and they would be really good. But no, it took me a while, emails to Intaserve took a while to get answered. I was emailing HostGator at 11pm on a Sunday night in Australia and I was getting a response from them. So I had to give Intaserve a call to fix things. In five minutes the pain was all over. Thank God I don't have to deal with Intaserve again until the next time I need to renew my domain.

I've setup a new website for my photography business which sports my name: MarcoPalmero.com. It took half a day to setup, including setting up the servers, typing up the website html and css using notepad and the graphics. It took an extra hour to copy the existing portfolio from the original Photos2View website and to find a few new photos to add to the page.

I have also setup another blog - aptly named Sydney Photographer Blog - which will only have topics regarding photography (unlike this current blog which tends to be very random about topics). I've posted up photos I took from last Saturday from Eric and Prescilla's Wedding.

I went along the Drupal showcase for some inspiration. There are so many crappy - un-modified designs out there... But there are a few occasional great websites. I came across two in my visit today. One was exemplary, the other so-so but worth the mention.

Your MTB (MTB is short for Mountain Bike) is a community website for MTB enthusiasts. Its great! Smooth design, great functionality. Definitely a place to be inspired for my next Drupal designed website. There's a discussion thread here all about it.

Ruby Baboon is like digg.com with a twist. Not exactly original, but I like how they used a combination of modules to work together as well as some customisation of the theme.

Thanks to the tagadelic module and this php snippet I can do this:

Interesting Quotations Motivational Quotes Ashley Judd Asia Beijing Business Celebrities China CSS programming CSS programming Drupal Drupal Websites Electrical Engineering Filipino Food Gadgets General Computing Health Interesting Quotations Life. Manila Marco Money Motivational Quotes Music (and other Lyrical Media) People Philippines Photography Photos Programming on the Internet Random Stuff Shanghai Signals and Systems Sydney Sydney Cuisine Sydney Events Technique Technology + Gadgets The Internet Travel Travel tips TV. + Movies. (and any other moving picture media) University. Webmaster information Websites of Interest

I don't particularly like the design of my blog, or any of my websites for that matter. It isn't my specialty. Anyway, Just browsing throught he Drupal showcase and here are three interesting drupal website designs:

Bootstrap: A lot of white space and attactive

Jia Style: Lots of colour but I like the column layout

Altiris Juice: I like the subtle lime colours as well as the well set out page - a lot of white space!

There comes a time in a webmaster's life when they lose the passion they once had in building, designing, promoting and maintaining a website. And that time came for BetterWeddingIdeas.com. One of my first websites other than this blog of mine. That passion was lost, I stopped updating the site and my baby started losing visitors. I didn't want that to happen so I sold it off on a webmasters forum. I set the auction going but it eventually sold just a few hours at BIN (Buy It Now) price. some may say I could have received a higher price for that website but I'm happy because the site is going to a trustworthy person who already owns a wedding website. The true purpose of the sale is to see my baby grow more, and with me it had no potential to do so, and now it has the chance to become a successful website. right now I'm in the process of finalising the transaction and transferring the domain name and the servers.

I found an interesting php snippet to use in my website which enables a search function to look for related articles to the current page you are reading and listing them. Thanks to http://www.gerd-riesselmann.net


title);
$searchArgs = "";
foreach($words as $word) {
if (strlen($word) > variable_get('remove_short', 3)) {
$searchArgs .= $word . " ";
}
}
if (count($searchArgs) > 0) {
$results = node_search("search", $searchArgs);
if (is_array($results) && count($results) > 0) {
print '';
print '