Move from Drupal to Blogger.com

I've been mulling over moving off of Drupal and onto a free hosted blogging platform.  I've been looking around for a while (and used livejournal for quite some time), and decided to go with blogspot/blogger.  It's part of the google platform, and I've just changed over the website (along with my 250 previous posts).

Facebook Connect login

Using the Drupal module FBconnect, you can now use facebook to log into the website to leave comments and other assorted mayhem.

hettinger.cc changes to hettinger.us

I've noticed that performance at Dreamhost fell off the charts lately, so I've been looking around for a decent VPS provider. Some of the better ones looked like Slicehost, and VPS village, and Rapidxen. I eventually ended up going with RapidXen. The uptime looks way better already. Dreamhost was giving me whole days of subversion like webpages that had nothing to do with my websites.
Along with the different web host, I am changing the domain for the website. The old domain name should forward to the new one for a while.

Super-Mega Photogallery revolution

I've upgraded the website with a mashup of PicasaWeb Albums and Lightbox. I'm thinking that these improvements make the photos portion of the website about 1,000 times more navigable. It was a result of the merging of this a javascript project to embed PicasaWeb Albums: JavaScript interface to PicasaWeb Albums. I took that script and modified it to work with Lightbox. With some customized mangling to mash them together, and some further tweaking of lightbox to user the arrow keys for navigation, I'm very happy with the result.

Drupal 6 upgrade

The website has recently been upgraded to Drupal 6. As well, I've switched from using gallery for my photos to using an embedded version of picasa web albums. there are still a few items to implement, such as web links, but over the upgrade went pretty well.

Ten Years of HTML Mangling

This year, 2008, marks ten years of my creating websites for groups and organizations. I've cobbled together a portfolio of some of the websites that I've worked on. The internet definitely looks alot better these days than it did ten years ago.

Hot Springs Section

I've added a new section of content to my website. It is entitled Hot Springs. It's pretty self explanatory, but I am finding it really fun and useful. I'm still working on it, but if you like hot springs, you'll want to check it out.

Dreamhost

My website hosting company accidentally overcharged its customers $2,100,000. That's an expensive mistake.

RSS Feed

I've setup an RSS feed for the Website. If you don't know what RSS is, it is an easy way to read lots of websites in one place (without having to visit all the websites). I recommend Google Reader.

Website Maintenance

This website was recently moved by my hosting company, Dreamhost, from one webserver to another. This, unfortunately, hosed my database driven (and fairly slow) image gallery. However, the images weren't lost, except for names and descriptions of the photos. So, it's back up and running, and has some special functionality implemented. As well, I was spurred to setup a few cron jobs to automate backing up website content, etc.

Drupal 5.1

Drupal 5 has arrived, and it has descended upon this website. All the neato enhancements of Drupaldom should now be making the website spectacular! I've also enhanced the photogallery navigation with custom mangling.

Website Construction

I recently upgraded the website with Drupal 4.7.3 and Gallery 2.1.2. This should make it a little faster and have new added functionality. There is now a download(s) section that attaches to stories for attached files and videos. In addition the web links section has been rearranged to provide further functionality.
Downloads fixed!
Weblinks fixed!

Website Flashed

Several years ago, I did some HTML construction work for a website called IdahoRec.com.  Wherein contributors would write up content about various recreational activities around the great state of Idaho and post them on the site.  They would also be required to purchase work related items like mountain bikes, hot springs guides, skis, snowboards, and huckleberry pails.  Of course, their business model was more of a tax writeoff, thus it never really got off the ground.  But in the meantime, I got some experience using macromedia flash.  I've enjoyed it ever since, and recently added a few pieces of flair to the website.

Construction

Ported the majority of my website, running on Postnuke over to Drupal. The website should run considerably faster now. And also upgraded to Gallery 2.0. Overall, I'm pretty impressed by the comparative size and layout of Drupal. I really like the mod_rewrite function integrated into Drupal and Gallery 2.0. These two programs seem to work really well with each other. There are a few things to tidy up, but it shouldn't take forever.

What the Hack?!

h4x0r3d!My website was hacked for about 2 hours today. I recently upgraded and left an important file with the wrong permissions. Anyways, that's mostly remedied. I find it extremely humorous that some dingdong somewhere thinks my chronicles of adventures are worth defacing. Thank you Captain Stupid, for making me feel important.

Postnuke Upgrade

A Gallery and Postnuke upgrade have made the website more flexible and user friendly. It should also be a bit faster. there has also been an advanced polls module added, with a few random polls.

Balm of Gilead (24-Apr-2002 - 24-Apr-2005)

As of 04-24-2005, the Balm of Gilead will cease operations under the address of balm-of-gilead.org. This website will continue at it's current address of hettinger.us. The reason for this is the three year run of that domain name will be at an end, and the board of directors have decided not to renew this address.

50,000 hits can't be Elvis fans

As of January 30th, 2005, the website has received 47675 hits since going postnuke. Thus, it's soon approaching its 50k page hit mark. Kindof exciting for having a website. It's funny to see that some of my mispellings in the website have brought some of that traffic, and also people using search engines for quotes I referenced have brought other traffic. I also have enjoyed using the postnuke PHP frontend and learning about MySQL. It's really a very powerful web hosting content management system.

Website Stats

The website has almost reached almot 40,000 page hits. I think that googlebot and some indexers helped a bit with that. Still, it is nice to see some decent traffic on one's website. It's been really nice to have a camera again, also.New additions of late include the "Mystery Photo" section on the left. There are also some improvements to the member interface, for those that have registered. The theme was revamped for the holidays! Hoping everyone has a Merry Christmas!

Latest Construction

     The website is about to experience its 20,000 hit. It's taken about a year (Oct 9th), so that makes about 55 hits per day (hpd). I redid the main theme. I will probably turn on the personal theme option in the user menus so that you can change it to something simpler and quicker loading if desired.     In other news, my dad is getting his arm operated on today. Yesterday and the day before I started up the '66 Ford. I am hoping to go out shooting sometime. I am also hoping to plan a campaign to conquer all of the hot springs.