Geekworld reborn

After many designs, decisions, redesigns, restarts and late nights, my work here is done.

Geekworld is reborn.

From a technical perspective, this was a difficult build. There were a few tough decisions that I had to make. My old site was still running on Drupal 5. If I wanted to migrate all my data over to Drupal 7, there were some major technical hoops that I had to jump through. Table structures were quite different and I ran through quite a few attempts at migrating that data. It was a giant undertaking and I got most of the data over, most of the time. But then my hyperlinks broke. Most of my image links broke. My old site also never used WYSIWYG editors or image management tools, so all the formats that were previously handled by Drupal 5 with regards to line breaks and paragraphs were broken when imported into Drupal 7.

So I had to make a choice. Spend hours and hours trying to fix all the images, hyperlinks and line breaks of more than 200 blog posts... or start over.

I started over.

Geekworld in it's old form is still fully available in an archived format that you can access here. At the archived site, you cannot add any more comments or posts and you cannot register any more users. The archived site has been locked down. You can view anything you want, but you can't change it.

So, out with the old and in with the new!

Let me quickly go over a list of features and decisions that have affected the design of the new site:

• Full Anonymous commenting has been enabled
• Comment spam will be handled by the excellent Mollom module
• Full WYSIWIG editing using the TinyMCE editor
• Image management is implemented with the IMCE module and integrated into TinyMCE with the IMCE Wysiwyg bridge module
• Two content types, the normal blog entry (like this one) and something I call Quickies, where I quickly share a source link with some of my own thoughts

There are still more things I need implement on the site:

• Google Adsense integration
• Youtube video integration
• QR Codes for each blog post so that you can share a post with friends using a cell phone
• Archives sorted by year and month
• Lots of other things that I will eventually think of

I'm very excited to start blogging again and I hope everyone is just as excited to read the interesting (and mundane) things I will once again have to say.