I Decided to take shadyvale.org from blue to green, being a lush valley and all that. The old logo didn't work, so I thought I would spend a little time and see if I could come up with something other than a plain text site name.

So I fired up the old inkscape, and played around a bit. I know so little about graphics or artistry, but was able to make use of the fine tool and took advantage of the Open Clip Art SVG Library.

I then set out to create a favicon (the little picture that appears in the address bar for those using cool browsers) which I have done previously in theGimp, and ran across a little web tool, FavIcon from Pics which did the trick. Just exported a png from inkscape and uploaded it to the site and was given a decent favicon.ico. It appears that the background is white instead of transparent, but good enough for now.

Note: IE 6 users, you will see an ugly site logo since PNG transparency was broken for years in Internet Explorer. Sorry, I am tired of providing work-arounds for the bug, I would highly suggest downloading a newer browser.

I have to say that the Drupal 5 rocks, the drupal core Garland Minnelli theme has met my needs, and with the included "color" module I was able to alter the colors of the theme without editing any css.

Anyway, let me know what you think.

Long overdue for some attention, I have updated shadyvale.org to Drupal 5.2. The upgrade from 4.7 was quite smooth, and everything should be about the same as it was. One exception is that I switched themes because the previous one wasn't updated for the new version of drupal. I was pretty much ready for a change anyway. The old logo didn't fit right for the new theme, so I held off.

I look forward to playing with some of the new modules available. I have a lot of catching up to do with the Drupal community which has really blossomed.

I have upgraded shadyvale.org to Drupal 4.7 , and with the help of a friend was able to move it to a new hosting service. You should notice a speed increase as well as some nice new features.

If you notice any problems please let me know.

Suppose this means I should post more

Well after upgrading my photo gallery software this evening, I decided to emerge the latest gallery-remote.  Its a java front end for sizing, cropping, captioning and uploading photos to gallery.

Well, the now famous samr7 recently developed a drupal module called image_pub which implements the gallery remote api.  This means that you can now use gallery remote to upload pictures to drupal.  Very slick.  It can also be used with digiKam and the Windows Web Publishing Wizard.  And there was much cheering in drupal land.

So, easy upload of mass pictures into drupal's standard image module and then you can easily peruse and use those images in your posts, with the image_assist module, and the TinyMCE rich-text editor.  Its getting too easy.

Will I completely abandon the gallery software.  We'll see.  I need to spend some more time with drupal 4.6.2 and install the node privacy by role module.  That way I can post pictures and specify whether they are public or not.

For now, enjoy some pictures from my recent camping trip to Yosemite last month. 

Happy Independence Day to all!

I successfully updated shadyvale.org from the ancient drupal 4.3.1 to 4.6.2.  It went quite smoothly, and I am now in the process of adding fun modules to extend features.  For instance, I have added a wysiwig (rich-text) html editor (TinyMCE) which I am using now for the first time.  No more html knowledge necessary to compose neat looking posts.  Easy adding of images to posts as well.

As usual, please let me about any problems, and what you think of the new theme/colors etc.  If you have problems with the new editor you can disable temporarily by clicking "disable rich-text" below the text entry window.  I think that it does have some problems with safari, but works well in firefox and ie.