At the current time, I've been a member of the Drupal.org website for 4 weeks shy of 3 years. I mention this because I had an awkward moment on the Drupal forum when an (obviously long-term) Drupaller showed his disdain for me for not contributing in all the time I'd been using Drupal.

I installed a dual-boot configuration during a system rebuild recently and stuck the latest and greatest version of Ubuntu 8.10 on a sizeable partition. If you've been reading this blog for a while, you'll know that I'm constantly questioning whether Ubuntu Linux is a viable Windows replacement.

One of the key things for me in making a transition of this magnitude is finding a desktop blogging client compatible with Linux and it also being as fully featured as Windows Live Writer - my blogging client of choice and perhaps the leading blog client software. The thing is, the latest version of Live Writer Beta has some pretty hot features, including a link gloassary which allows you to autolink to a page previously linked to: you enter the last anchor text as previously and it automatically creates the link for you.

There isn't a single other blog editor that I know of that can replicate that functionality.

If you've ever installed the TinyMCE module for Drupal (or indeed the WYSIWYG module which seems to be the preferred way forward), you'll have noticed that the default font size is miniscule. My first concern as a web designer is usability. How hard is it to read and edit?

About two years ago, I decided that I wasn't going to SEO this site. Admittedly, I've deviated from this strategy subtly in the intervening time.

For a start, I ditched the Garland theme in preference of my own design, which uses XHTML, is easily crawlable and very semantically correct. I noticed the other day that somewhere along the line, I installed the nodewords module for Drupal - possibly in testing for another site - but I'm not complaining about the individualised meta tags it creates.

I've been weighing up two blogging/CMS platforms recently with a view to launching a new community site. Those platforms are Drupal and WordPress MU.

Drupal is a leading open source content management system. With the aid of some nifty add-on modules, Drupal is capable of becoming just about anything your imagination wants. Blogs, wikis, forums, event calendars and much more.

I know it's been a while since I posted on here. I've been slowly updating the photo gallery, but rarely finding the time to cobble a few words together. Hell, I've been to Italy for a fortnight, started working on a Windows Vista course and am undergoing an intensive but interesting audit at work.

When I started working with Drupal, I used to gravitate toward TinyMCE as an editor. I think it was because I was used to it from WordPress. However, TinyMCE seems like a bit of overkill when you're dealing with user-generated content (although it does have integration with the img_assist module).

After a seriously long wait, Drupal 6 has been released to the web. By coincidence, I checked for it yesterday, as I've been watching the Drupal site for a while. I've done a quick upgrade (made a major screw-up along the way), and upgraded some modules.

All in all, this site isn't too heavy on contributed modules. I don't even use pathauto here, so upgrading was relatively straightforward.

Wow. Drupal 5. Launched today, installed this evening. I've got to say, this platform raises the bar for me. Drupal always seemed to go to great lengths to be user unfriendly. However, with this release, they've tidied up the back end, explaining what most of the functions are, which is brilliant. They've also got a darned sexy new theme which you can colour customise with a neat little colour picker and which then regenerates the CSS and graphics files on the fly.