Developer Notes

These notes may be of interest to developers or may merely serve as a reminder to myself of a best practice or technique that I have discovered.

Steps to Set Up an Aliased Local Server on Ubuntu

Note: This assumes that apache has been installed.
For more details see HTTPD - Apache2 Web Server

Edit hosts file

sudo gedit /etc/hosts

Add an entry for the new website. For example:

127.0.0.1 cooltestsite.local

How to Integrate Windows Live Writer with a Drupal Blog

I’ve just set up Windows Live Writer to edit my blog posts. Despite what I have read in various postings this desktop blog editing software integrated seamlessly with my Drupal blog (including photo uploads). This worked with both Windows 7 Starter on my Acer AspireOne netbook and in Windows XP Pro on my Dell 390 workstation.

Taxonomy is an Easy and Flexible Way to Organize Content in Drupal

This seems obvious now, but as I first began using Drupal I was incredibly confused by the taxonomy system. I guess it is because the word "taxonomy" brings to mind a labyrinthine system of classification as used in biology or an intricate nomenclature like that of organic chemistry. But it is really simple.

Setting Up The New Site

When I brought the site over to Drupal I initially concentrated on duplicating the look and feel of my original site. In order to accomplish this I ended up creating a new Drupal theme from scratch based on the original XHTML and CSS code. I then went and added content, duplicating the original structure of the site. I made heavy use of the Path module and enabled URL re-writing in order to keep the page addresses consistent with their static versions. This is important for search engine visibility.

About the New Version of This Site

This site is built on the Drupal open source platform. This platform allows us to easily and quickly create secure, powerful, low cost, dynamic web sites and communities.