Klaas Bals' Blog

I'm waiting to upgrade to Drupal 6 until all of the modules I use are available.

Here is the list of Drupal modules I currently use, with their status:

Backup

Not yet available. It doesn't look like it's still very active, I may need to find another solution (like switching to Backup and Migrate or something else). This is not of vital importance, I can organize my backup in another way.

Comment RSS

Available since 2008-04-29!

Global Redirect

In development

Google Analytics

Available since 2008-02-15!

Mollom

Available since 2008-05-01!

Pathauto

Available since 2008-04-30!

Technorati

Not yet available.

Token

Available since 2008-02-23

Update status

This is now a part of Drupal core, so no module needed anymore.

An then I would like to use:

OpenID URL

Available since 2009-03-09

Drupal Administration Menu

In development.

In general, this looks very good, and I guess, I can start trying to migrate. I'm a bit worried by the Global Redirect Module as I really like that one. I may want to look at the reliability of the current development version, or search for alternatives as, with Drupal Modules, I never know whether I'm using the good one or if alternatives are available.

Who knows, if I manage to find me some free time, I can try to update some modules myself.

As I explained before, I am now using OpenID Delegation. Thinking about it, as a result of me doing the Delegation, I'm making my website a single point of failure. Not only for reliability (when my website goes down, I won't be able to login with my OpenID on any site anymore), but also for security. If someone can hack my website, he can modify the OpenID delegation so that it points to his OpenID and so he can login using my account that does delegation to his account with his password.

So hacking into a website of someone using OpenID Delegation can all of a sudden be a lot more interesting. I should really keep my Drupal version up to date...

Side-project thought: It may be interesting to have a service that regularly checks my website to see if it still points to the OpenID provider I've configured, and not to someone else's. It could notified me whenever my site's been hacked. Maybe doing this for people running a Drupal site is part of a service Acquia can add to their list?

Edit: Apparently a missing quote made half of the original post invisible to most users, making the post missing what I indended it to be. So I'm pinging this post again...

Many websites start to accept OpenID account, so it really starts making sence to create yourself an OpenID account, for example at myopenid.com. I did, so I now have http://kbals.myopenid.com as my OpenID account. However, when you do that, and start logging in everywhere with that specific account, you start to get dependent on myopenid.com. Very similar to using hotmail.com or gmail.com as your sole email address making you dependent on a specific provider, and you don't want that!

For an email address you can set up forwarding, for example in my case, all mail you send to klaas at bals dot be will be forwarded to my gmail account. For OpenID, this type of fowarding is calle OpenID Delegation. Make sure that before you start using OpenID, you set up OpenID delegation.

Actually this is very easy to do (if you already have a website or a blog) as explained in this post. For those of you that I have already converted to using drupal for your website, I'll even explain how to do that in drupal (informed by this explanation):

Create a block with input format 'php', place it somewhere in a region (like the header) and paste in the following content (of course adapted to your own openid account at myopenid.com that you created beforehand)

<?php
drupal_set_html_head('<link rel="openid.server" href="http://www.myopenid.com/server" />');
drupal_set_html_head('<link rel="openid.delegate" href="http://yourname.myopenid.com/" />');

// add the next two lines if your OpenID Provider supports OpenID 2.0
drupal_set_html_head('<link rel="openid2.provider" href="http://www.myopenid.com/server" />');
drupal_set_html_head('<link rel="openid2.local_id" href="http://yourname.myopenid.com/" />');
?>


From then on, you can login any site accepting openid accounts by filling in the name of you blog, http://bals.be in my case.

Oh yeah, once all of the Drupal modules I use are available in Drupal 6, I'll upgrade, and you'll be able to use your OpenID account on this site as well. (If you care. ;-)

A while ago I turned on comment moderation, as the spam module I am using (Mollom), had a couple of problems at the time. This way way back, before mollom was actually released, so I was one of the first users.

Now, Mollom is officailly available, and the quality of the filtering is very good, so I'll turn off moderation again. (Thanks Litrik for prodding me to do this.)

This does mean I need to check the comments on my site regularly for quality. I may want to allow other people I know to flag messages as spam, if it turns out I monitor my site less frequently than the people reading my site. Let's wait and see...

I'm sorry folks, but as I'm having far too many spam comments the last couple of weeks, I have turned on comment moderation. I did have a anti-spam system, but for some reason it doesn't seem to catch enough, or perhaps I demand too much from such as system... (it does capture about 150 spam comments a day, but on average 1 a day was passed through). I'll see what I can do when I'll have more time.

I have been listening to last.fm for a while, but only recently created an account (because a colleague of mine did). The subscription form was perfect!

• You can check within the form whether a username is already in use.
• The form checks all items without you need to submit the form.
• By default, the newsletter subscription is off.
• No need to fill in your real name, date of birth etc.

I've successfully created a public Amazon EC2 AMI, that allows you to start a Fedora Linux system with Drupal 5.1. When the image is started, you can simply connect to the assigned public DNS Name, and you can configure and play with Drupal. Actually, creating this image wasn't that hard, but I figured some people would want to play with Drupal on EC2, so I decided to make this AMI public.

I haven't solved any of the problems with persistence, meaning that this AMI is only usable for playing around with Drupal, as none of the changes you make or content you add will survive a restart of the virtual machine instance. But you can use this AMI to take a look at the Drupal installation procedure, or get a quick tour of a scratch Drupal installation without needing to install all the prerequisites and configure the database.

How to get started?

To be able to start your own instance of this AMI, perform the following steps:

• Subscribe for the Amazon Web Services. More specifically, subscribe to Amazon S3 and Amazon EC2.
• Install the Firefox Extension for Amazon EC2, launch it, and fill in your account details you received when creating your account.
• Find the AMI with the AMI ID or manifest shown on the AMI's info page, and create a new instance.
• Wait a minute or to, click the 'Your instances -> Refresh' button, and copy the public DNS Name.
• Paste the name in your favorite browser, and you will see the Drupal installation screen.

For a more in depth guide on how to start with Amazon EC2, check out the Getting Started Guide.

Apparently, the Drupal Group in Vancouver has had a session on Amazon Web Services. It was given by a guy named Alex and his slides contain a nice overview of the Amazon Web Services (but doesn't give details about Drupal on AWS).

No real solution for the persistent storage problem though, although he has a nice name for this problem. He call this the "Ephemeral Nature of EC2".

As Litrik had some problems, that apparently have been solved already I did some searches there...

Apparently when you search for discovery3, the four videos that are shown in the "featured" tab are all created by me. But to find a blog post from me in the "posts" tab, entries from me are only shown on page 3.

Whatever...

Update: I installed the Drupal Technorati module, so maybe that will help me get higher in the "posts" tab?

Update 2: Ok, the list of posts is just sorted by date. The other posts before me are more recent. Duh...

Dries gave me some Drupal code to show the topics/tags that I write about and that are used on my website. This will help me keeping my tags clean (or make them cleaner ;-).