Wow, yesterday was a lot of fun. I felt like I was having an open house for my new home. And like a new home, you have the same furniture, but everything else is strange and new. Here are all my precious little essays, which are like children to me, but they're all in a new place. So far, about 200 people have signed up for user accounts. In a day or two, you won't be able to chat without a user account. When we launch forums, users will be able to create their own discussion forum on whatever they are interested in. That's going to be cool.
I just noticed this morning that if you hover your mouse over a user name, down at the bottom of the browser you can see their user number. I'm number 3. My brother Hugh is number 5. He got to preview the demo site and signed up then.
I wish you could see things from my point of view. With Drupal I feel like I'm flying a space ship with a lot of weird buttons and controls. Everything in Drupal is on the website, not on my computer. That means I can now "drive" rlp from anywhere. Man, you can do a lot with Drupal. We're just using a small part of its potential.
Matt Sturges could explain this better, but as I understand it, Drupal is to blog software as Adobe Photoshop is to the little picture editing program that came with your digital camera. Another way to say it is that Drupal is content management software and blog software is a specialized and limited kind of content management program.
Because it is open source software, lots of people have created and are creating various add-ons and modules. Because it is PHP based, a brilliant php programmer like Matt can pretty much do whatever he wants with it.
One thing you can count on, over the next few months all sorts of fun things will happen here. Some will work and others not so much. By the end of the year, I think we'll have a rather iteresting little blog going.
I was pleased with how the chatroom worked yesterday. I dropped in three or four times and got to chat with people. The chat room worked just as I imagined it. There was usually just a handful of people in there, chatting away like this was a coffee shop or something. If you're interested, you can click here and see the log of the entire day.
So I'm settling into the new digs just fine. Today I'm turning my attention back to writing. I'm working on several things all at once:
"Martin Luther, Diet Coke, and Canned Soup"
"The Aging of Love"
and
"Reading Carl Sagan With Lillian"
So let me get busy. I'd like very much to post my first essay here at my new home tomorrow.
See ya!
rlp
