drupal

This seems like the summer of endlessly extended projects. It's already July and I am still finishing work on books that I thought would be done last semester. But with a larger staff at the Netlab and with those projects wrapping up, this should be a good summer for new work and, I hope, for the blog.

Over the weekend, I've been bumping up both this site and the Netlab site. With Drupal as the underlying content management system, it's pretty trivial to change the look of the site, so I brought varnelis.net in line with the underlying theme at AUDC. It probably looks a tiny bit less polished right now, but it has more potential for growth in the long run. At the Netlab, I set up a photoblog, which seemed long overdue given the number of photographers around.

When I resurrected this blog in May of 2005, I turned to Drupal because I wanted to have a content management system that could handle more than just blogging. Even if the learning curve was steep initially, Drupal has proven to be the correct choice. I built sites for Networked Publics, the Los Angeles Forum for Architecture and Urban Design, DOCOMOMO-US, AUDC, the Netlab, and even for my espresso maker on Drupal installs. As the CMS has evolved, it's become possible to handle custom databases and to produce all manner of content that is different from your usual blog. 

Today I'm introducing a new page that simply keeps track of the most popular content on the site. See it here. Not a bad place to start if you're new to varnelis.net. 

I've made some behind-the-scenes changes today that I hope will make varnelis.net load faster and tweaked the css a little bit. If you encounter trouble as a result, please let me know!

With the New Year on us, it'll be time for some pretty major changes to the site. We'll see what you think, but I am happy with the way they look.

A brief note before heading off to teach Network City.

First, even though I haven't written much on any site in the last
few days, I've been busy working on migrating my own sites to a new server and on getting the networked publics site updated to drupal 4.7.4 so that it can host our upcoming book. A lot broke in these transitions, from trouble with user privileges (ill-thought out on the part of my host) to "collation issues" (this time the trouble is with Drupal). You may notice some stray strange characters throughout this site as a result, but I'm cleaning those up little by little. My hope is that now that I've dealt with it this kind of thing won't be a problem in the future. But it reminds me how fragile Drupal is as a content management system and how, more than a decade after the web first entered my life, how far away we are from an inexpensive (or free!) application that can just manage content efficiently and effortlessly. While I can configure the site and leave it to someone, when that site requires upgrades or if it ever has to migrate servers I have to get back in the picture or the client has to find someone willing to take on the project.

Second, in an unrelated note, worldmapper is a great site, containing hundreds of projections of the world such as this one:

which shows "the earnings of the richest tenth of the population living there, as a proportion of the earnings of the richest tenth living in all territories"

vs this one:

which shows "the proportion of all kilometres flown around the world by aircraft that were registered there."