m. c. de marco

The site was down for about 20 minutes for a Drupal upgrade. The management apologizes for any inconvenience.

I became a de facto member of the 1654 Society a while back when it merged with another group to which I apparently belonged. (I don’t quite recall the details now.) As a consequence, I got a complimentary copy of Conversations in the mail this week, with a link to the IJII’s website. I had the feeling when I first looked at it that it was a fellow drupal site, but I wasn’t certain until I signed up and saw the telltale tabs on the registration page.

National Novel Writing Month is imminent, so I logged into my nanowrimo account today. I found the login screen suspiciously familiar; the small print admits that the site is based on drupal. Unfortunately it doesn’t seem much faster this year than in previous years, and the forums don’t appear to be searchable. All the more time to write…

Service may be interrupted today as I attempt to upgrade the site software.

Beyond the obvious new theme, all formerly broken stuff should now be working, including search, login, and new user registration.

I’ve upgraded the blog/home page to Drupal 4.7.x and a speedier server, but I didn’t upgrade my old home-cooked Drupal template. For the moment I’m using MetaTheme by Ken Collins instead. Play with the buttons at the top of the page to see what makes it meta.

Some other features of the site may be down for maintenance for a while longer, especially the news aggregator. The management apologizes etc., etc.

I finally got around to putting the Amazon link to Strange New Worlds 8 in the left-hand column, just in time for the July release date.

I added a new Drupal block and stuck in the iframe code from Amazon, wrapped in a centered div. I was pleased to see that Amazon has more formatting options for associate links than the last time I looked, so I was able to take off the black border and the price ($10.17, if you’re dying to know—-$14.95 retail). I also added the name of my story.

If you want to see a legible version the cover, there’s a huge one (2MB) up at SimonSays.com.

Drupal, the CMS that runs this site, has been upgraded to 4.6.0—-now with PHP5 support. (I’m still on 4.5.0.) They also have a nice new theme garden at drupal.org.