I have successfully gotten Drupal up an running on HostGator.com. I was very skeptical going into this but it is looking good so far. I have been most pleased with the response from tech support. Here are some of the issues I encountered:

* smtp not working - update DNS MX settings to route to my MX host. HostGator expects that you are using them for email.

* clean urls not working - I added an .htaccess file and it fixed the problem

I'm working with client who has their site on a hosting company's servers. They do not want to change that for some reason. I am attempting to migrate them to Drupal. When I first tried to install Drupal, I found that MySQL LOCK TABLE command was not allowed. A quick Google search revealed that this company would allow LOCK TABLE if you asked nicely. I spent 4 hours on the phone and then waited a couple of days but managed to get LOCK TABLE access. I was able to install Drupal and start setting up a basic site.

The new system update for the iPhone is now out. One of the new features is you can add bookmarks to the front screen, a.k.a the springboard. The graphics that appear on the home screen are 57x57 pixel PNG files. You put the png file somewhere on your your server. Then you edit your template.php to activate it. Add the drupal_set_html_head() function call with the html code for the png.


drupal_set_html_head('<link rel="apple-touch-icon" href="/folder-path/apple-touch-icon.png"/>');


Two Drupal updates in as many days. I have not updated just yet. It takes me a few hours to do an upgrade as I need to do a full backup and then run through a test plan.

If you want complete control over RSS feeds, I have used MagPieRSS to fetch RSS feeds and store them in my local database. It has a notion of stale content to optimize your page presentation. I am no longer using it in favor of the Drupal Aggregator but I wanted to pass on the link since I mentioned it at the November Jedi Council meeting.

Google has announced OpenSocial API, an open standard for creating social sites. GoogleSocial will be Google's implementation of the OpenSocial standard. There is already a Drupal OpenSocial API Module started to give Drupal developers easy access to the API. Like OpenID, all web site developers need to be familiar with this standard.

I have updated this site to Drupal 5.3 including all the module updates. The site was running Drupal 5.1. I have moved all the contrib modules from the root to the sites/default/modules folder to make it easier to do upgrades. I have added a few new CCK modules to play around with.

This is a rough attempt at at Drupal Jedi Logo. Please comment on it.