The Good Life... a weblog about life, technology, and the Opera web browser

As part of my site relaunch, I did some major behind the scenes work on the software used to run this site. I had been using Drupal 4.6, which was released in April 2005. Since then, Drupal has had three major releases, the most recent in February. In addition to using the core Drupal software, I use several third-party add-ons (called modules). Since modules usually take some time to be compatible with new core releases, I decided to base my site on Drupal 5, which works with a large number of modules.

When I first launched my site using Drupal, I used the core blog module, since I figured it made sense to blog using blog module (a fair conclusion). However, since I was the only user blogging, I found the extra bits of UI added by the blog module got in the way rather than helped. As part of the upgrade and based on the Dag Wieërs' advice, I decided to ditch the blog module and use the generic story module. It's been a seamless transition so far.

I enjoy the dialogue that sometimes occurs in post comments, so I wanted to see if upgrading could improve the usability of comments. Previously, I allowed site visitors to register at the site, which gave them a couple additional benefits, such as e-mail notification of new comments and posts. Unfortunately, the vast majority of these registrations were used to post spam and very few registered users actually used the e-mail notification, so I decided to disallow new registrations and delete all old registrations. The site now automatically remembers commenter information and I added the ability for users to receive e-mail notification of new comments to a specific post if they've commented on it. Additionally, I added several new RSS feeds: all comments, comments to specific categories, and comments to specific posts.

As if that weren't enough, I also changed the way comment subjects work. By default, Drupal will take a chunk of the comment body and use it as the comment subject if a commenter doesn't fill in a subject. In practice, this leads to a bunch of duplicate text between the comment subjects and bodies. Instead, my site will use the post title as the default comment subject. The alternative was disabling comment subjects, but some of the other functionality I added requires comment subjects, so this ended up being a good compromise.

Spam is one of the big concerns for anyone allowing comments to their site. There's a great third-party spam module for Drupal that I used on my old site. That caught a large amount of spam, but I'd like to prevent spam from being posted in the first place. So, in addition to the spam module, I decided to require commenters to enter a CAPTCHA. Instead of using the CAPTCHA module's default arithmetic CAPTCHA, I decided to use the reCAPTCHA service. reCAPTCHA, a project of Carnegie Mellon University, uses words that couldn't be understood by OCR software when books were scanned. So, the CAPTCHAs that are solved on my site are helping to archive books digitally. It's a really neat idea and I'm glad I can be a part of the project. As an additional measure, I'm using the commentcloser module to stop comments on all posts a set amount of time from their publication.

I decided the relaunch was a good time to give posts more recognizable URLs, rather than just using "/node/1234". I wanted the URLs to be as meaningful as possible, so using the pathauto module, they are now title- and date-based, i.e. "archive/2008/03/02/title". Many sites that use this format don't have true path hierarchies for the URL, meaning that visiting "archive/2008/03/02/" would return a "Page Not Found" error. I'm a big fan of path hierarchies, so I decided to use the archive module to help out. By default, the archive module uses the "all" keyword in the URL to determine which types of content to display. Since I only have one type of content I want displayed in the archives, I hacked the archive module to remove the keyword handling, so it automatically handles the path hierarchies for me. Now post URLs are meaningful and allow easy access to archives.

Of course, I would be committing the cardinal sin of web sites if I changed all my URLs without also making them accessible from the old URL. Drupal has built-in functionality for this using path aliases. If I used this functionality, my content would available both at the old and the new. Unfortunately, Google dislikes such duplicate content. Global redirect to the rescue! This module uses redirects to forward the reader to the new URL rather than allowing content to be accessible at both URLs.

Another new addition to the site is a copyright. Previously, my site didn't indicate how the content was copyrighted. Though, I never saw evidence of misuse, I figured I would rather be safe than sorry.

Here's a list of the modules I found essential for this site; these modules should be seriously considered for any Drupal-based blog:

• archive: date-based post archives
• captcha: anti-spam measure: require users to enter a captcha to post a comment
• comment_info: remember anonymous commenter information
• comment_notify: e-mail notification of new comments to previous commenters
• comment_subject: default comment subjects based on node title
• commentcloser: anti-spam measure: close comments after a set period of time
• commentmail: e-mail notification about new comments for site administrators
• commentrss: provide various RSS feeds for comments
• copyright: add copyright notices
• elf: add an image indicating off-site links in posts
• globalredirect: uses 301 redirects to stop duplicate content from arising when path module is enabled
• pathauto: creates memorable URLs
• pathfilter: filter for referencing internal paths, e.g. previous posts
• quote: node and comment quoting functionality
• recaptcha: anti-spam measure: use the reCAPTCHA service for CAPTCHAs
• spam: anti-spam measure: apply Bayesian filtering to submitted comments
• xmlsitemap: provide a sitemap for search engine spiders to improve search engine ranking

I'd be happy to give additional information about my site setup as requested.