A Fresh Start

Up until about a week ago I've jumped from one free host to another with mixed results. After prolonged periods of downtime I decided to jump once and for all to a paid host. Free hosting is perfectly workable if you know the limits and are prepared to juggle different accounts for different things. My new host is not only capable of having the site accessible 24 / 7 but gives me much more freedom to really start to work.

I've also had a few real life things to think about, one of which is the desire to get into learning PHP with the aim of working with Drupal on a much more intricate level than I have been. I played with the idea of switching themes, functions etc but have decided to just keep the site as it was before for the most part, and gradually introduce new parts when they are ready to be unveiled. For the time being it's not much more than a blog, that will change.

The theme is a pretty much unmodified Zen Classic. I do have a sandbox for learning Drupal, and one install specifically for learning and creating themes. When it's ready I'll bring that theme in to replace this one.

As I switched from WordPress to Drupal, the content formatting got messy, as did the RSS feed URLs etc. I did alias them before as a workaround but I have several plans for this site that go beyond just a blog, so I'd rather start fresh and keep it clean. So the blog RSS feed is now:

http://thistleweb.co.uk/blog/feed

During this week I discovered the Pathauto module and learned how to get it to generate my URL paths to include the date and post title automatically. The rules it uses means that some URLs will have changed, as it strips off some words like "the" and "and". Again I could change this, but I do occasionally write posts with long titles so it's a good idea to keep the defaults. My apologies if you bookmarked a link which has changed, I assure you the posts are still there.

For now, I'll keep this post short, the point of which is to say that I'm finally on the right path, and that there should (fingers crossed) be almost zero downtime in future.