The Lab

Several folks have been asking me as of late why I manage http://seanreiser.com in Drupal and not Wordpress or another blogging platform. And instead of re-answering the same questions I decided it was time for another "inside baseball" post. This is not a feature for feature Drupal vs. Wordpress post. Nor does it consider wordpress 2.5 since I have never really evaluated it.

As regular readers of my blog know I'm using Drupal's ActivityStream module to power the Life Stream page on my site.  I've wanted to add an activity stream block and remove the twitter / lastfm blocks for a while now, but haven't gotten around to it until tonight.  It's a short function but I figure I'll post it in case someone else is looking for it.

Just add the following function to activitystream.module

There are currently 3 feeds that I'm building and hosting here that I'm moving over to feedburner (mostly to preserve bandwidth).  I'll be setting up redirects but for now they are just being replicated.  The new links are as follows (I've updated the original posts as well):

So in the last few weeks I've taken on a few projects involving comments on seanreiser.com and it seems that they are conflicting with each other, and I've come to the decision that where I like disqus, I have to go back to the default Drupal comment module.

When I added disqus to seanreiser.com I thought it was simple, but one of my tweeps asked for a howto so maybe it wasn't . Also I seem to have had a few hits on from google searching on "disqus drupal". So for the curious here's are the steps I followed.

I noticed that items from my activity stream were popping up in the last viewed (and potentially most popular content).  As I'd rather not show these items I've changed statistics_title_list in drupal's statistics.module as follows:

function statistics_title_list($dbfield, $dbrows) {
return db_query_range(db_rewrite_sql("SELECT n.nid, n.title, u.uid, u.name FROM {node} n INNER JOIN {node_counter} s ON n.nid = s.nid INNER JOIN {users} u ON n.uid = u.uid WHERE %s <> '0' AND n.status = 1 and (n.type = 'story' OR n.type = 'page') ORDER BY %s DESC"), 's.'. $dbfield, 's.'. $dbfield, 0, $dbrows);
}

A couple of folks have asked why I am basically reinventing friendfeed and presenting my lifestream  on seanreiser.com.

As has been documented, I have been playing around with putting a presence aggregator on this site.  I've hacked around with the drupal activitystream module and came up with this.  It's still very alpha, and subject to change but as time goes by.  For example, I'm pretty sure I'm removing the list controls to get rid of the useless bullets (the icons are much better then the bullets in this case).  When I have all my changes in place I'll post the code.

Since the beginning of the year I've written 3 small scripts that create RSS feeds w/ media enclosures out of sources without such feeds.  In some cases the scripts are a little wanky because they rely on screen scraping to get the job done.  I hadn't released the code since I always planned on doing more with it.  As I haven't gotten around to it, I suspect I never will.  As the scripts are working I might as well release them to the world at large.  This is not the best code I've written, it just gets the job done.

The Story so far
By extreme stupidity I managed to flood twitter using drupal's twitter module installed on http://seanreiser.com My problem was that the twitter module tweets every new node, not ever new front page story as I thought.