Blog

While I don't get a lot of visitors to this blog, I recognize that the people who do read it are unlikely to be interested in all the things I am. That's why I decided a few months ago to split this blog off into a few topic-specific sites, and after a couple of false starts, I sorted out all the issues and got two of the sites launched this weekend

Drupal Dork will be about web development, specifically with the Drupal CMS. I've been developing with Drupal for nearly a year now and have written about it several times here. Those posts have been mirrored on the new site. One of the upcoming posts will be about the different strategies I tried to get all three of these sites running from a single Drupal install, and why I eventually gave up on it. (Intriguing, right?)

Godless In DC is a joint blog with my wife, Erin. We are both atheists with strong opinions on religion, and this site is born out conversations we were having together. I expect this site to be less about specific news items (like events or legislation) and more about our opinions on bigger-picture topics of religion, but we'll see how it plays out.

I also expect to spin off a biking blog soon. As I've gotten more into biking, I inevitably have found myself with more to say; half of the posts on my front page right now are about it.

This blog will be the catch-all for anything that doesn't fit into those categories, and will probably only be interesting to people who actually know me - if even them. But hey, thanks for visiting! I take requests!

Again, here are the links and RSS feeds. I hope you'll subscribe to one or all of them, because I like you THIS much.

Personal blog (this one): http://feeds.feedburner.com/brockboland

Drupal Dork: http://feeds.feedburner.com/DrupalDork

Godless In DC: http://feeds.feedburner.com/GodlessInDc

Have spammers started employing people to actually read and comment on blogs? I just got a comment on a two year-old post about Devner:

I do agree that Denver is weird, though other parts of Colorado are perfectly beautiful. Also, it is a pity that you didn't go out of your hotel/conference venue for your entire trip to Vegas, there is so much to see and to do! Maybe next time, in fact, no maybe about it - you simply MUST. Trust me man. Tim from leather armchair

Somebody actually took the time to read the post, comment on it with some context, and sign off with a link. I'm a little bit impressed - but not impressed enough to leave the comment there.

For the moment, yes: Garland.

I finally made some time to migrate my blog from WordPress to Drupal. The content is all moved over and the old paths are still intact, and one of these days I'll find or build a new theme. But for now, yes, I'm using the default Drupal theme, which is the web developer equivalent of wearing a fanny pack to the opening night of a cool new bar.

Furthermore, some other changes are on the way. I don't know why it took me so long to realize this, but friends coming here to see what I've been up to don't want to hear about web development stuff, and people coming to read about web development don't want to see the atheist stuff. All religion-related content will soon be moved off into a new site that my lovely wife Erin and I are launching in a few weeks, and I may splinter other topics off into their own sites. The reader base here is and always has been pretty small (hi, guys!), so I've never felt too bad about tossing everything in together because I never had much of an audience. Still, I would like to separate things out for myself a bit, and at least put some separation to my professional life (the web development stuff) and my personal life (the atheism/biking/DC stuff).

I'll announce the new site here when it launches - stay tuned.

Friends on LiveJournal --

I'm canning the brock_blog syndicated feed.  My biggest issue with using LJ this way has always been the comments left on posts there.  I had an import script that would copy over comments, but not very well, and I got tired of maintaining it.

I am now using the LiveJournal Crossposter WordPress plugin to crosspost my blog entries into my long-dormant LiveJournal account, brocklisoup.  Comments will be disabled there, but the posts will all include a link to leave a comment on my blog.

So, if you're reading this post in the brock_blog account and want to keep getting my updates, add brocklisoup to your friends list.  This is the last item that will appear in brock_blog.

Lesson learned: WordPress re-writes part of your .htacess file every now and again, namely, the part between the "BEGIN WordPress" and "END WordPress" comments. So, you know, you shouldn't put your own rewrite rules in between them, or you'll wonder why they keep going missing.