Budts.be: version 3 is here

Today I'm happy to launch the new version of my weblog. (Oh and also the rest of the website, although some content still needs to be updated.) This is version 3 of the weblog, not counting my very first weblog at blogger.com. Although it's only been 1.5 year since I switched from Nucleus CMS to Wordpress, I once again switched over to another CMS: Drupal. Not because I was unhappy with Wordpress (it's a really nice system), but Drupal gives me a lot more flexibility. Flexibility which I needed to implement some new ideas I had for this version of the weblog and my website in general.

I have always maintained a few different sites, running on a plethora of applications. I had my photo website (fotos.budts.be), which ran on ZenPhoto; I had lightyear.be with the activity stream, running on Gregarius with some self-hacked ruby code to write the final stream; Then I had my cv-site (budts.be/jeroen), which was mainly just static html with some PHP-hackery; Joining the club was also gluefish.net, which was built with some other static html and PHP-code; and finally I had this weblog on Wordpress. Clearly a mess :)

So now all these sites are integrated in one Drupal site. The cool thing about this is that all my content is now available on the website as real content, or 'nodes' to use the correct Drupal-speak. That's right, blogposts are nodes, normal pages are nodes, photos are nodes, tweets are nodes, delicious-bookmarks are nodes*, project pages are nodes, (allmost) everything is a node. This has the advantage that I can tag nearly everything on the website with the same set of tags so you and I can easily read all of the content about something. And it also allows easy searching.

I have been happy for a very (very!) long time with the look of my weblog. But finally repainting the walls was a welcome change. In fact, I only got inspired to create a new look for the website when I discovered and started using the magnificent Molokai theme for Vim. I really like the dark background and all the vibrant colors on top of it.

Some technical background

For those interested, here is some info on the Drupal modules I used etc. The theme is based on the Tao theme, and uses the Skidoo Redux css layout. The following contributed modules are used: Custom Breadcrumbs, Feeds, GeSHi Filter, Image, Custom Pagers, Global Redirect, Gravatar Integration, Menu Block, Pathauto, Search 404, Project & Project issue tracking, Tagadelic, Views

To import my activity stream, currently from Twitter and Delicious, I use the Feeds module. However to be able to store the hashtags from my tweets as taxonomy terms I wrote a small plugin for the Feeds module. I will make this code available after adding a few more features.

* All my delicious tweets are imported as nodes as well, so I'll be prepared when Yahoo pulls the plug on delicious. Although I'd prefer them not to, obviously.