Blogging

For a few months, over 90% of my visitors requested Bear Grylls : Worst Case Scenario is Coming Soon. I had no idea that the Worst Case Scenario television show would be so popular!

My article is ranked ninth on a Google search for “Bear Grylls” “Worst Case Scenario”

For over a year, the favorite had been Where Does Bear Grylls Live? If you search for “Where Does Bear Grylls Live” on Google, my article has been on top for 20 months!

Remembering Dead People

Writing relieved my sadness after my 48-year-old friend, David Nolan died. David thought he was going to pickup his daughter from school, until he had a fatal heart attack on the Subway.

I also wrote something not-very-cheery, about my dear departed friend Ellen, but I over-edited it.

So I started reading books about writing.

Writing More and Enjoying It More

I met Stefan Andersson at Writing Practice. He was visiting Lexington from Sweden, and writing about Bertrand Russell. Stefan writes very well, in English, his second language. He must be unbelievable in Swedish!

We became friends while I made his homepage, and enjoyed many hours together, solving English crossword puzzles. Sometimes we watched television, on one of the three channels that his ancient window antenna received. Stefan especially liked the hockey games during the Winter Olympics.

Our afternoons do not seem exciting, but in between these events, Stefan encouraged me to write. I heard “You have a great voice” many times. After many attempts, I have finally finished one story that I think is good enough to sell. Stay tuned.

Why Is This A Year?

I have only written an “end of the year” article once: Five Wishes for 2008. Three wishes came true when New York Giants miraculously won the last three games of their stupendous season. But right now, I just hope Giants do better than last year.

So no more wishes, and certainly no predictions for our illogical world.

It is a year, because yesterday was my birthday. I refuse to disclose my age because I do not want to see it. I wanted to write about making it through it another year, and I hope I can do this next year too!

I started with novels and selected five authors:

I have included Amazon links to paperback editions of these novels. Purchasing a book from this page helps support Where Did My Brain Go? — Thanks!

Check out Reading: Novels for my favorite novels and novelists, and let me know if you enjoy my selections.

I plan to add other sections, including non-fiction and computer books.

I selected Drupal, for its brilliant design and extensive documentation. I was particularly intrigued by the Drupal Book module, described as “structured document publishing.”

I began recording progress on Twitter with Learning Drupal, March 21, 2009.

First Drupal Site

I followed advice on drupal.org, and it was easy to subclass Zen theme to design new site. It was also easy to create menus, blog, forum, as well as a book.

I also studied Pro Drupal Development to understand how it all worked.

Everything improved eight days later:

starting 16 part Drupal/Eclipse tutorial

Because tutorial introduced me to Eclipse PDT, a wonderful integrated development environment for PHP programming language.

Problem Installing Eclipse

After a few crashes, I got Eclipse to work, by installing latest version of Java runtime. I did not want to replace my current version, but it was simple to point Eclipse to new version, starting it:

Eclipse has never crashed with newer Java.

Problem Installing Drupal Test Site

Before adding content, I wanted to be sure that my test site would not appear on search engines. Unfortunately, I could not find “privacy” among the dozens of Drupal administrative settings, or in “Database Table Reference” of Pro Drupal Development.

NOTE: Follow instructions on Disable RSS Feed? before adding content to a Drupal test site.

After 16 Days of Drupal

On April 5, 2009, I Tweeted:

My first Drupal site is up: http://mitchelldmiller.com/web/
Unfortunately, my Tweet from the site did not work

I fixed the Tweet problem, by writing my own program to read and display my last Tweet, and added it to my Drupal and WordPress blogs.

My next Tweet was melancholy:

Trashed my Drupal database and test site is gone!

No, I have no idea what I did, but I knew I needed to learn more PHP. On April 10:

any suggestions for PHP book with function ref to replace php.net?

A response by @ucffool led me to PHP Reference by Mario Lurgi, which has been very helpful.

Nevertheless, I still liked Drupal, so I added “Convert blog to Drupal” to my lengthy “To Do” list.

Month of WordPress Updates

On July 13, I Tweeted:

only took 5 minutes to upgrade WordPress, but I am sick of it. Time to finish my Drupal book, and try something new

I have no idea how I did this, because it was never that fast again!

I recorded additional WordPress updates on July28, August 11, August 15.

I am delighted to report that since Tweeting:

@wordpress please consider validating future releases with Eclipse so they load without errors http://tr.im/uOC5

Future releases have loaded without errors!

Unfortunately, updates introduced very annoying problem! “Screen options” on Administrative pages, stopped working. Tried Linux versions of Firefox 2 and 3, Opera 9 and 10.

I wish WordPress would offer an option for a simpler Administrative theme, where all options are visible. Has anybody besides the developers, ever used the Drag & Drop feature?

Anyway, these experiences induced me to tackle blog conversion.

My Last 29 Hours of Drupal

Notes and comments from my experience converting Where Did My Brain Go? from WordPress to Drupal:

1. optimized WordPress database with disable revisions plugin before export
2. installed Drupal, and followed instructions on Disable RSS Feed?
3. selected WP2Drupal module to convert database to Drupal
4. edited WP2Drupal to: connect nodes with taxonomy terms fails due to lack of $node->vid
5. WP2Drupal ignored WordPress slugs, and created links from titles — most links worked
6. Needed to:
   • review 300 links to correct changes
   • Learn how to filter content types, to maintain current structure
7. Tried Blueprint CSS Framework, used by Blueprint Drupal Module. Even includes validator! But was hesitant about having to learn Ruby Programming Language to understand how it worked. Finally came to senses after reading “Help me!” messages in Blueprint CSS : Google Groups. I would not benefit enough from replacing:
   • one stylesheet with complicated Ruby system
   • really wanted to use Drupal Book module, but did not want to expend many hours converting blog

How To Try WP2Drupal Now

I installed these Drupal modules before converting database:

• Advanced Help
• Content Management Filter
• Devel
• Global Redirect
• Path Redirect
• Pathauto
• Root Candy (great Administrative theme)
• Taxonomy Redirect
• Token
• Views
• WP2Drupal
• Zen

Drupal Suggestions

I recommend Drupal to anyone who wants to start a new blog, knows PHP programming language, and is willing to read Pro Drupal Development to understand how Drupal works, and to learn how to write Drupal modules.

Drupal should assign volunteer to update WP2Drupal module so it creates uses existing links in WordPress slugs, instead of creating new ones from titles. Drupal should make it easy to convert WordPress blog to Drupal, if it wants to become more popular.

Monthly Index contains all posts, by month, and subject. For example, select February 2008 to read about New York Giants winning Super Bowl XLII.

Site Map displays all posts, sorted by category and name. There are over 100 posts now, which are displayed in pages of 50. I did not include “Pages” like the puzzle, because they are linked to each document.

I created the Site Map using Sitemap Generator Plugin for WordPress by Dagon Design, and I was every impressed! Check it out if you have a WordPress blog.

Where Has My Blog Been?

My traumatic brain injury (TBI) has affected me in many ways, but the top two areas are:

1. Short–term memory
2. Impulse control

Computers solve the first problem, because once you type something. you don’t have to remember it anymore.

Impulse control is different. You have no idea, how many times I have pressed “Send” when I should have pressed “Cancel.“

What Did You Do Now?

Although I am over 50 years old, I still get excited like a little boy. That is fine, when I am writing about New York Giants, or Bear Grylls, but problematic, when something annoys me – like budget cuts for Defense and Veterans Brain Injury Center while America spends $4,658,686,000 for the Iraq Freedom Fund.

It gets worse when I write late at night, when I should be sleeping.

My friends are used to this, and I have heard, “What did you do now?” more times than I care to (or can) remember.

I used to drink when I got annoyed, and make things much worse, but as you can see from the photo, I am on the wagon now.

Get to the point!

I was tired, angry, and writing about politics, when I accidentally confused an urban legend with a fact.

I apologized to a representative of the individual involved, and removed my blog a few minutes later, and waited for the idiotic post to go away.

How Big Is Google’s Cache?

The post is gone, and I missed blogging, so I have returned. I will avoid writing about politics in the future, except for legislation related to traumatic brain injuries, or if Michael Strahan runs for President.

Michael Strahan for President

Why Strahan? He is a proven leader, will probably retire, and he knows as much about defense as anybody.

Trackbacks are used by bloggers to inform each other, when they link to each others blogs. If I link to a post on someones blog, I send her a trackback, so she knows who links to her work.

I keep track of everyone who comes to Where Did My Brain Go? but I just look at totals of visitors, not at individual entries. Totals rise when I write about Bear Grylls and Osi Umenyiora. Totals drop, precipitously, when I don’t write anything at all.

Two days ago, after not writing anything on Where Did My Brain Go? for almost for a month, my visitor totals dropped so much, that I decided to look at individual entries. Among these log entries, I found about a dozen requests, which ended in “/trackback/” — but I did not have a single trackback!

I clicked on one entry, for example: http://wheredidmybraingo.com/2007/05/15/welcome/trackback/ and got a “File Not Found” error. (removed invalid link 06-17-09)

I tried changing some settings, but nothing worked. I headed over to WordPress support, and posted this clueless message in the How-to and troubleshooting forum:

My server log contains many requests which end in “trackback” but these do not show up on my posts as comments, as I have seen in other WP blogs.

I tried enabling / disabling my “Feedburner Feedsmith” plugin — but no change.

What do I have to do to make this feature work?

Unfortunately, my clueless message was too clueless for the gurus, but I got some unexpected help which explained how to fix the problem, with three lines of code.

WordPress Dashboard

Occasionally, a graphical interface is helpful, and one of those helpful GUIs, is the well-designed WordPress “Dashboard” shown above.

The Dashboard is a collection of WordPress news, instructions, tutorials. When you login to WordPress, without specifying an address, you are greeted with the Dashboard.

When I logged in yesterday, for the first time in awhile, I was determined to fix trackback, but I was still completely clueless. However, I perked up as soon as the dashboard was displayed, when I saw the word “trackback” among the titles, in Other WordPress News.

All in the Theme

Dashboard directed me to Tip #9: Use trackback auto-discovery, written by Leonid Mamchenkov. Leonid’s tip explained the important part in one sentence:

Gladly, there is a Codex page that covers trackback_rdf() function.

I learned that I did not have trackbacks, because I never added them to my theme.

How To Add Trackbacks to Your WordPress Blog

You must edit one file in your WordPress theme to enable trackbacks. Relax, it’s easy.

From the Dashboard menu, select Presentation followed by Theme Editor — select Main Index Template to edit.

Find a line that begins with: <p class="postmetadata" — around line 24

Insert the following three lines, immediately after that line:

<!– (ends with two hyphens)
< php trackback_rdf(); >
–> (starts with two hyphens)

That’s it! Save your file, reload your blog, and select a post. Depending on your theme, you should see “leave a response or trackback from your site“ after the post. You should be able to see it on this post to see it now.

I hope to see some trackbacks at Where Did My Brain Go? soon!