It was a lot of work to get this right technologically *and* come up with a presentation that I could live with. So many issues: length, mic, formats, new programs ... In the end, I am pretty happy with it and am really looking forward to making this format my own.

Future plans include experimenting with more eye candy, background music, better microphone work, experiments with screen size ...

Versions in Italian and German included after the jump!

Separating your files from Drupal's, and simplifying upgrades

Drupal's developers are constantly fixing bugs and striving to make our Drupal installations as safe as possible - there have been 6 security updates of the 5.x and 6.x branches so far in 2008. If you have several sites, the maintenance work can really cut into your time.

I'd like to share with you a little trick I use in my server setup to streamline the upgrade process when a new core release is available. It not only makes core updates quicker and safer to implement, it also leaves the previous version ready to use on my server in case there are problems with the new Drupal core version.

My setup involves keeping the sites directory outside of the main Drupal installation and using symlinks to tell Drupal where it is. This saves me the step of copying the directory from one Drupal installation to the next when upgrading, which can be time consuming and a potential source of problems on a content-rich site.

Well, happy holidays people!

Edit: Note the quality difference between the first and the second image. Although I uploaded both of them from the same large source jpg file using IMCE, the Image Toolkit settings are different. It turns out that Drupal's out of the box, standard compression quality setting (using php's GD2 image toolkit) is 75%.

The first one was scaled using the 75% setting and it gave me a bunch of ugly jpeg artifacts (especially in the red area), yuck!