This and that and the other
Apr. 1st, 2012 06:49 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
hrjSaturday ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
scotica began leading me through the adventures of converting my web site to Drupal. The theory is that it will greatly improve the organization and usability of the site. At the least it may kick-start me back into putting new content up on it. So, of course, I started out by trying something tricky and complicated with the format of my great-great-grandfather's civil war diary. None of this will be visible for a while -- I'm building the new site on my laptop at the moment. The front-end changeover should be nearly invisible but there will undoubtedly be a great fracturing of links to specific internal pages.
Today, on the next best thing to a whim, I dropped in on FogCon at the Walnut Creek Marriott. It looks like a lovely small lit-con and I hope it keeps going. I've been looking to get back into con going, having largely going on hiatus during grad school. I've gone to a couple of Bay Cons since then (and may go again this year) but they didn't really click for me. (And of course there's Darkovercon, but that's a different matter entirely -- more in the line of a family reunion.) It's going to be a bit hard to get back in the swing, I think. I spent a bit of time hanging out withklwilliams and desperance and stopped to say hi to a few people I've known from the Before Times, but to a certain extent I feel like I'm breaking into an entirely new social scene from scratch ... and you know how well that works for me. When the programming was finished I thought about hanging out for a while more, but the con had condensed into small tight clusters and I could feel myself tipping over into death-spiral mode. It's funny how sometimes I feel like I've made such progress and other times I fill like I've made none at all. (At least now I recognize when I hit death-spiral mode.)
Well, I have three major things on my free-time to-do list and I should get at least one of them done.
scotica began leading me through the adventures of converting my web site to Drupal. The theory is that it will greatly improve the organization and usability of the site. At the least it may kick-start me back into putting new content up on it. So, of course, I started out by trying something tricky and complicated with the format of my great-great-grandfather's civil war diary. None of this will be visible for a while -- I'm building the new site on my laptop at the moment. The front-end changeover should be nearly invisible but there will undoubtedly be a great fracturing of links to specific internal pages.Today, on the next best thing to a whim, I dropped in on FogCon at the Walnut Creek Marriott. It looks like a lovely small lit-con and I hope it keeps going. I've been looking to get back into con going, having largely going on hiatus during grad school. I've gone to a couple of Bay Cons since then (and may go again this year) but they didn't really click for me. (And of course there's Darkovercon, but that's a different matter entirely -- more in the line of a family reunion.) It's going to be a bit hard to get back in the swing, I think. I spent a bit of time hanging out with
klwilliams and desperance and stopped to say hi to a few people I've known from the Before Times, but to a certain extent I feel like I'm breaking into an entirely new social scene from scratch ... and you know how well that works for me. When the programming was finished I thought about hanging out for a while more, but the con had condensed into small tight clusters and I could feel myself tipping over into death-spiral mode. It's funny how sometimes I feel like I've made such progress and other times I fill like I've made none at all. (At least now I recognize when I hit death-spiral mode.)Well, I have three major things on my free-time to-do list and I should get at least one of them done.
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no subject
Date: 2012-04-02 03:52 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-04-02 04:08 am (UTC)My impression is that if someone sets up the basic site for you (and it's well set-up) then relatively little knowledge and training is needed to be able to add and edit content. If you're designing a site from scratch and you're doing the types of things with it that Drupal seems to assume people want to do with it, then it's relatively straightforward. But there's definitely a bit of a learning curve. On the other hand, I suspect your average local SCA website's needs will fit well with what Drupal's assumptions about what people want to do. (E.g., blog-style news-feeds, managed forums.)
I'm not really "teaching myself" --
no subject
Date: 2012-04-02 02:44 pm (UTC)There will, in fact, NOT be massive link breakage on your site if you set things up correctly. There's a Drupal module (or combination of small modules) that will invisibly redirect everyone who goes to the "wrong" address to the new, RIGHT address.
If you need any help down the road with how the site LOOKS, i.e. site design and CSS, I'd be happy to walk you through some of that as well.
You're doing far better on your first few lessons than I did on mine. ;)
no subject
Date: 2012-04-02 02:49 pm (UTC)Setting up a new site from scratch is the only really tricky part -- once that's done, anyone who knows how to use a word processor or fill out forms online will have no trouble maintaining the content after about an hour's worth of training.
So if you can find someone to do the setup, you won't have to really "learn" Drupal unless you want to be able to add more features to the basic site, do your own software updates et cetera.