www.lewiz.org

Oops! I screwed up the sauna entry—I’ve fixed it now so you can go back and read it. It should be fairly amusing. Right, I’ve got to go now. Tata!

Yes! I’ve gone all out to put together a set of decent kit for my holiday. Xiaoxiao and I took the train to Leeds yesterday where I bought a pair of Merrell Stormrider GTX with some new fangled version of Gore-Tex. I’ve never been a person for spending lots of money on branded clothing or shoes but I’m fairly impressed with these.

Granted, they’re not the best looking shoe in the world (although mine do look slightly better in a khaki/grey sort of colour). The “model down” looked pretty smart and the one below that was pretty much perfect. The problem with the cheapest was that it had no “waterproofing”/Gore-Tex, which meant my feet would probably sweat a lot and they might get a little wet in heavy rain. The other pair were great as they had Gore-Tex but they were uncomfy as hell. I spent ages deciding between the two until I finally decided to try the most expensive pair on—a great fit, comfy and with the Gore-Tex.

I’ve already got a great big (I mean really massive) rucksack sorted so I’m pretty much set. I’m still missing a few odd bits and pieces: I have no smaller rucksack to carry around but I’m going to borrow Xiaoxiao’s (with hindsight I should have bought one of those rucksacks that have a smaller rucksack that zips onto the back); still no camera, but I’ve now decided to buy this in person in Shanghai—with any luck I’ll have it all bought and sorted the day I arrive (since I arrive early on a Monday morning, Shanghai time); I still have a few bills left to pay and I need to extend my travel insurance (and maybe give the nurse a ring about my Malarone tablets for malaria). My passport (with visa) and flight itinerary are sat in a nice safe place (right by the front door so anybody can steal them) and somewhere I have a train ticket down to London for Saturday afternoon.

I’m staying over in London with a friend on Saturday night, which will give me plenty of time to get to the right terminal at Heathrow for my Virgin flight at around 3pm on Sunday.

Otherwise I’ve not been up to much. I’ve been sorting a PC and a laptop out for somebody, as well as shifting a few pantiles about next door. Tomorrow I think we’ll be doing a little more work next door—we have to finish off the floor I talked about previously.

Well, time to go find something else to fill my copious amounts of free time. I guess I could finish tidying up the mess I made when I dropped all of my bags in the front hall…

Update! I almost forgot to mention that I really have finally imported the galleries from China, as well as the Kyoto Temple galleries. “By my caculations”... that’s the last of them. About time too!

Well, I’ve almost finished combining Kubrick with KubrickFlexible for XOOPS. It seems to have come off quite well and while it doesn’t look as good as the fixed-width Kubrick or K2, it will hopefully do wonders for the resolution of images in my galleries.

I’ve got a couple more things I want to tweak and play around with but eventually I will submit this theme to the Drupal Theme Garden for other people to use.

I’ve just gone and modified the colours a little. I quite like the Kubrick bar as it is, the visited link is a reasonable colour but I think the regular URLs are a little too bright. Or maybe they’re just a little too… green? Any ideas what I should do with them?

Once again I’ve imported my image galleries. Where possible I’ve imported the original images so clicking the “view original” link will take you to a fairly hefty JPEG file.

Every gallery but the China, Hong Kong and Japan galleries have been done. Hopefully I’ll get those done after the graphics exam on Friday.

Enjoy!

All I can say is “oops!”

I managed to delete the last three or four days of content as well as all of the settings and such while working on getting image_import.module to work last night.

I’m not quite sure why image_import isn’t working but there is definitely something very odd going on somewhere. I’ve submitted a bug report so with any luck it will get addressed soon.

I’ve managed to recover the entries from a SQL backup from a few days ago and by browsing my website in offline mode (what a great feature after all!). As far as I can tell everything is back, except the image galleries, which I deleted on purpose.

Once image_import is working I will import all of the images from my old site.

I think a couple of people had noticed how the search wasn’t performing very well. I think this was due to the way I imported the entries from my old blog but I’ve followed the advice at drupal.org/node/21160 to force the search index to be rebuilt.

This is now complete and search now returns useful results. It doesn’t look as though comments are indexed though, which is a little disappointing. Maybe I will turn my attention to that a little later on :)

The wonder that is Drupal continues to amaze me! Not only is it stupidly powerful, it is also stupidly extensible and (with a few exceptions) very sane.

I am using an image module for my individual images and image galleries. Unfortunately it was missing a feature that allowed me to show previous/next links for easy gallery navigation. A little searching and I came across a half-baked patch to do this at drupal.org/node/19920.

I took this simple patch, cleaned it up and modified it further to provide image thumbnails along with the previous and next text links. You can check this feature out (please do!) by visiting my image gallery from the navigation bar at the top. Along the way I spoke to the developer and maintainer of the image module to find a way that both of us wanted this patch to function—hopefully this will be incorporated into the next release of the module so everybody can benefit.

Now this is only a simple patch but there are plenty of things that can be done to image.module to make it even more amazing. I’m really blown away by how useful it really is. For example: when I created my first few image galleries I mistakenly chose an image size slightly too wide for the site. I’ve since changed the setting but the image module crawled through all the images and automatically rescaled them to the new setting. No user intervention required.

If that isn’t great functionality… I don’t know what is!

I’ve applied a simple patch to the Drupal image module (that handles all images and image galleries). It adds the concept of next/previous when viewing a photo in the image gallery. It is very basic right now but with any luck intoll get around to tidying up the CSS a bit and maybe even including a thumbnail image.

Now I’m 90% done setting my new site up (I hope) I was unable to resist playing with some Drupal themes. I’ve always quite liked the default Wordpress theme and when I spotted a Drupal version I gave it a go.

Personally I think it looks great—definitely cleaner than the previous theme—although it is a little disappointing that it is an entirely fixed-width layout.

I’ll probably change my mind and try another theme in a few days time, if not before. In between then and now… enjoy the Kubrick!

I’m in the process of moving my website over from my own custom code (lewizsite2, it was inventively called) to Drupal.

Drupal is exactly what I was looking for—it supports multiple blogs, categories, provides image gallery support, Wiki-style page editing, etc. All of the new fangled trackbacks and blog APIs are supported too, which is another boost.

I’ve imported all of my old journal entries and the comments. Some of it has gone a little wrong—stuff like Japanese and Chinese characters, etc.—but on the whole it seems pretty good. I’m about to start importing all of my image galleries again and I have yet to insert a lot of images associated with entries on the old site.

Signing up is very easy now and it will allow you to subscribe to specific entries, sections or the whole site.