Drupal

Work's been busy so I haven't posted much. I have 20 half written posts in my queue to finish... maybe some writing on the plane to Austin later in the week, when I visit Dell.

As I get a lot of traffic for integrating Disqus and Drupal I wanted to help publicize Rob Loach's Disqus Module. It looks like it's for Drupal 6 only right now, so you'll still need my hacky howto if you're planning on using Drupal 5, but if you're using Drupal 6, Rob's module is the way to go!

Thanks Rob!

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

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 stared making these inside "inside baseball" kind of posts more for myself  then for anyone else.  As some people find these posts interesting I'll keep posting them.  They do seem rather meta to me but the feedback is good as I plan on making this code available when all is said and done.  if you don't find this all interesting but are an LJ user please read the last paragraph of this post.  There is a question I'd love to hear your opinion on.

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);
}

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.

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.

First off, I'd like to make things perfectly clear, I use both my blog and twitter as a place to test technologies. There's always a possibility that something I do will cause a minor explosion. It happens rarely, but every now and then it's going to and I apologize in advance for this. This is a bit of a playground for me.

As is painfully obvious to my twitter-peeps last night there was a bit of a mishap involving twitter and my blog. In a period of a minute I basically retweeted my last hundred tweets or so. I'm posting what happened here so folks having similar issues can see what went on and how I'm handing it in the future and possibly some changes I'm making to the drupal modules in question.

So... on to my story. A few days ago I posted an entry about making my blog the center of my web presence basically adding friendfeed style features into my blog and using seanreiser.com as hub to access my online content.. While doing some research I found a drupal module named activity stream which grabs content from a number of services, creates drupal nodes for them and creates a stream for your site. It also accepts RSS and has a plugin system that allows you to create interfaces for services that it currently doesn't support. So, last night, being the curious person I am, I decide to install the module on seanreiser.com's drupal install and check it out.