This is the third incarnation of Real Live Preacher. I began as a Salon blog at http://blogs.salon.com/0001772 [1]. Later I moved to my own domain using Drupal. That's when the chatroom and the threaded comments began. I guess that was RLP 2.0

Well, here we are with what I hope will be the final version. Now that Jethro is in charge of the nuts and bolts, I'm guessing they will update Drupal for me so that I don't get behind again.

So okay, so the new site is up and running. There are a number of issues I want to tell you about.

1. We lost all of our user accounts. There was no way to help that, unfortunately. However, there is good news. On the old site, having a rlp user account meant that your name appeared on comments, and you could visit the chat room. Well, there is no chat room. Anymore. It fell out of use. I could always bring one back if people wanted it, but for now there isn't one. AND, you can leave your name when you leave your comment, if you like.

2. You can still sign up for a user account if you want. If you are signed in, You won't have to do the captcha thing. And, in the future, I'll have some features reserved for registered users only. For example, users might be able to launch a discussion forum if a particular essay brings a lot of discussion. I'm not sure if we'll have that, but there are a lot of things Drupal can do. We could add a number of things.

3. Subscribers (Those who support the site financially) Your blogs will be listed here, just as they were before. We're going to recreate your user account for you, so don't worry about that. And as before, there will be an area of the site for you only. I can't promise this, but I've asked Jethro to find a way to feature your sites in a rotating basis as well. So every day there would be a featured site or two from the subscriber sites. Be patient; we're doing a lot.

4. I have a lot of clean-up work to do. All of the old stuff is here: http://reallivepreacher.com/rlparchive [2]. But it won't be linked by subject. I'm actually considering republishing all of the old essays in the new system so that they can be tagged for easier retrieval. I don't even know how to get started with that. I've written so many essays since 2002. Even if I only do the serious stuff, it's a daunting task. I'm still thinking about that.

So why the change?

First, I had no spam protection in the old Drupal site. Second, there are a lot of things behind the scenes with the newly upgraded Drupal software that will ultimately make my life a lot easier. Images will automatically thumbnail for me and are easier to upload. My audio files will have an RSS feed, making them a podcast if I want. And I really enjoy doing short videos. Tim Miller tells me they have a solution for making that easier to do as well.

Finally, I'm working toward only dealing with my word processor and Drupal. Previously I wrote things, then put them in FrontPage, then finally into Drupal as an html file. I have some editing options here that are helpful to me.

So I'm glad for the upgrade, even if it means things are a little out of order for a time.

Tomorrow: The first essay on the new site. Some thoughts about war, the Mars rovers, and an impossible dream.

rlp