On Sunday, on impulse, I thought I’d test myself and see how quickly I could do it. I imagined finding a free template,  installing Drupal, copying the content, doing the redirects, and being finished within a few hours.

It never works like that.

The free template search led me to the Genesis templates, which are actually just a structured basis for template design. So I ended up spending an hour mocking up a layout, then another hour or so  doing the CSS styling.

I had to download fresh versions of the Drupal core, and the ten modules that I like to use.

Then installed them all, which was the quick part, and updated the nameservers, as  I was moving host.

Normally Godaddy does the dns delegation really quickly, but even though I checked the Godaddy settings (yes, they’d accepted my DNS), nothing happened for around 4 hours, until I re-entered the same details. This time it worked. (And to think I was blaming IINET under my breath. Shock horror.).

So it wasn’t until Monday night after work, that the DNS was finally updated, and I could run the install.

Spent most of Monday night (after dinner) starting to copy pages across.

Rather than waste traffic, I was planning to redirect the old page URLs to the new addresses, with 301 redirects. But the standard htaccess redirect commands didn’t work.

Courtesy of Google, I found a suggestion to use rewriterule  instead of redirect (http://www.bestjudo.com/blog/26337/khadaji/moving-website-drupal-301-redirects-and-404-pages), but that didn’t work for me.

So I ended up using another module for Drupal, http://drupal.org/project/path_redirect, to manually redirect each old page to the new one. I could have setup a rule to match old and new names, but I wanted some variations in my page titles, and there weren’t really a lot of pages.  An excellent post by Dave Herron addresses the rewrite rule with Drupal: http://davidherron.com/content/cure-fail-when-using-redirectmatch-clean-urls-drupal

So tonight I finished copying all the page content across.

Finished the redirects.

Finished the meta data.

Added Google Analytics to this site (for the first time), and it’s recording data, so the redirects are working well. According to AWSTATS on my old host I used to get around 40-50 visitors per day – not too bad for a 4yo site I hadn’t touched for a couple of years.

And I’ve added forums, polls and my own blog,  as another way of sharing any health and fitness findings I bump into.

Sunday through Tuesday night, after hours, after dinner.

And I still managed to swim 500m today – without the spa!

twas january 1st
and all through the house
not a creature was stirring
not even a mouse

the kids were still snuggled
asleep in their beds
late nights and much walking
had addled their heads

we olds were enjoying
a morning of peace
the dogs werent yet barking
no-one on the streets

we pondered again
how our plans went awry
for a hot spicy midnight
under fireworked sky

the odds had seemed good
that the kids would be dozy
near midnight, allowing us
time to get cosy

but alas, they’re now teens
with parties to go to
one under the bridge
another the zoo

we couldnt enjoy
the bottle of moet
we had to stay sober
til all were home safely

one came home quickly
1 am’s not too bad
but as expected a call came
could we get a lift home dad?

and they were all starving
mcdonalds was full
new years resolution broken
to eat healthy food

we tucked in to hotdogs
as 2am beckoned
not quite what the plan was
their dad and i reckoned

but january 1
has a night of its own
we claimed it as our night
and partied at home.

He likes to make things (especially if it doesn’t cost anything). And also leaves things to the last minute. So on Christmas Eve afternoon he was running around, trying to find a blank CD at home. He didn’t say what for. I didn’t suspect anything.

I couldn’t find one, so he disappeared back into his room, and played with his laptop a bit more. Stayed up late.

On Christmas Day (after finally getting out of bed at 09:30!)  he showed me what he’d made.

A powerpoint presentation set to music, of lots of loving, kissing pictures. Mostly free pictures with watermarks that he’d downloaded from Google, they were soppy pictures like Minnie and Mickey mouse kissing.

At one point the music got out of sync, so he improvised on the spot, republished it without sound, and played the music direct from his iTunes account. Very resourceful.

But I couldn’t get over the fact that he had done for fun, what they had been paying me to do at work last week, synchronising sound (and voiceovers) to powerpoint presentations.

(Yes, his copy is legal. I bought him the student version of Office for his Mac, as thats what they use at school).

We should subcontract to him – its much better than waiting for the local papershop to give him the paper-run, after 2 years of  being on the waiting list and then seeing them advertise the next street  (Cumberland  Newspapers – you are sooo disorganised!).

I went into his room yesterday (you have to be brave), and he was there on his laptop, with two other laptops next to him. “I fix things”  he said. Although the fan problems on the Lenovo were beyond him, and the battery problems on the Thinkpad. But he happily wiped them, to use them as backups.

Scott, you’ve got a great future ahead of you in IT.

This only took a few minutes to find and install. Getting the images the same size, formatted nicely, might take a little longer, but it’s all that most people would need.

These pictures of Spike are about 2-3 years apart.

Interesting though – a few minutes after installing and using the plugin, it self-deactivated.  The slideshow.php file was suddenly empty. Even after having seen it work once. Reuploaded it, upgraded WordPress, and all seems fine, but….  see how it looks tomorrow.