Like the new coat of paint? Yep, the new server is up and running and I thought I would commemorate with a new theme for the site. As a matter of fact, the site received a fair bit of long needed attention.
First was a manual migration of EVERY blog posting I've made since the start of Grover Ponders. I could have saved a lot of time and effort if I just copied the site over as is, but this was a perfect opportunity to take care of a few things that have been nagging at me.
If you got back to the first post and start reading through each of the subsequent posts, you'll see that Grover Ponders has been running for 3 or 4 years now. A lot of the decisions form the early days of the site were still in place - specifically in the organization of the files. The site is based on the Drupal Content Management System and originally made use of version 4.3 of Drupal. Since then things have changed quite a bit as technology got better, bugs were fixed, new needs were addressed, etc. Drupal 6.14 (current stable version) layous out the directories differently than 4.3. Most of this is behind the scenes and the end users will never know the difference. But to me, it had made for a messy directory structure as I had uploaded files over the years to share or support the postings. So I cleaned this up and did it the way Drupal 6.14 expects (in the /file directory under sites/default). I also cleaned up a bunch of "crap" that was placed on the server for a one-off type of connection. But this needed me to go through ALL the postings and look for references to the old location and change em to the new location. I think I got them all, but let me know if you find a link that doesn't work. Some links are just dead though - any reference to "fifo.linuxworldnet.com" for instance.
The next nagging concern I wanted to fix was how my code snippets were displayed. Over the years I had developed a few ways to deal with posting code. Usually this was a simple area with a different background color and a border. But as the theme changed over time, some of the older postings just didn't look right. ALL code snippets are now cleaned up and make use of Syntax Highlighter. Take a look at my LDAP posting to see what I mean. This is consistent across all pages now and applied to JavaScript, PHP, BASH, SQL, HTML, XML, and Rails postings. And even to some plain text sections where it makes sense.
Overall, the site is MUCH cleaner.
I took a "scorched earth" approach to the new server - I only migrated what I KNEW needed to be moved. Anything else can wait until someone tells me it was needed. The jQuery How-To's will not be resurrected though - the site was rather out dated and the official documentation has progressed to the point where the How-To's aren't really needed anymore.
Still, I know that I will be "fixing" things for the next week or so. But the end result is a much better environment that isn't going to be as much of a pain to maintain. Hope you like the new digs.