chacadwa.com

There are a lot of other backup scripts for Drupal on the web, but I promised somebody I'd post mine in response to this week's episode of the Geeks and God podcast. There are variations based on how the different servers are set up, but here's a basic summary of how I do it.

I wrote this email today intending to resend it again and again as new friends started joining Twitter, primarily from Facebook, but have quickly realized how cumbersome that might become, so instead I'm adding it here as a blog post for all to enjoy.

I've noticed a couple of my friends have signed up for Twitter but are not using it. Most of you have added the Twitter Facebook app, and are wondering "ok, so now what?" As a diligent and responsible Twitter addict, I've decided to sit down and write you a nice email to help you get started.

Matt Farina recently posted a question on FriendFeed about increasing adoption of Drupal among churches.

I'm wondering how we can make Drupal easier for churches to adopt. Drupal for Churches distribution? Documentation targeted at churches? Thoughts?

I think four factors are that churches are asking the wrong questions, we're providing wrong answers, the Drupal web site probably doesn't target non-geeks, and the word about Drupal isn't getting to the right places.

Lifestream aggregation is an issue I've been pondering for quite a while now. I have multiple blogs and web 2.0 services. Twitter, Tumblr, Flickr, Facebook, FriendFeed, YouTube and the list goes on. I've been seeking an effective way to combine all of this crud into a single RSS feed so I can share all of it in one place.

And so I've tried a couple of methods. I made some Yahoo! Pipes. I tried rolling everything through my Tumblog. I tried the feed aggregator in Drupal core. And I mostly settled on FriendFeed, especially since Rob Loach wrote a sweet FriendFeed Module for Drupal.

There's a lot of talk about version numbers and the web these days. It seems that people are getting tired of talking about Web 2.0, and want to move on to new versions. I've started wondering if the whole bit about numbering web versions is keeping us from seeing how short-sighted our vision actually is.

I just posted a video over on the HFCC Help Desk Web Site that describes the Drupal-powered web site that we use to manage the college's Student and Financial Management System, lovingly dubbed "HANK" or HFCC's Automated Network of Knowledge. (Yeah, it's weak. Somebody actually suggested an acrostic for EDSEL. My own suggestion of SCMODS never stood a chance...)

The HANK Admin web site is an internal web site centered around Drupal's Project and Project Issue Tracking modules. It also features LDAP Integration for authentication, Forums and navigable Book Pages for user documentation.

View the video: https://dvc.hfcc.net/about/hank-admin.htm

I suppose most readers think that I've abandoned not only this series, but this entire blog. Fear not. The fact is that I've been pondering this last topic for quite some time, and still don't have a really good answer for how to create a front page on a Drupal site.

And maybe that's okay for this series. When I started writing this series, my goal was to help someone go from a blank hard drive to an operating system and web site that they could play with. The goal was never to get anything all the way to production on the first go around.

As we start talking about theming sites, I have to say that I haven't been a terribly big fan of the default Garland theme. Part of this may be the simple fact that using the default theme for any system puts the user at risk of building a site that looks like everyone else's site. In the last couple of days, my thoughts are starting to change on this, as I've found a couple of sites that are based on this theme that, with some tweaking to the header and the colors, actually look pretty good.