We went dark there for a while

Somewhere between altering a PHP script I found to migrate Drupal content to Blogger and writing my own Python script to do the same I lost focus on the site and plecebo.org was down for several days.

Apologies to anyone who was inconvenienced, but I feel pretty good that I'm how I want to be over at Blogger.

I ended up using conversion of this script: https://github.com/nschloe/drupal2blogger over to Python and SQLAlchemy. It worked fairly well, but I was never able to get comments to work for me at all, so I'll be migrating those by hand. Lucky for me the Plecebo.org site never had many comments and I think I'm looking at migrating less then 10 comments. :) Very doable.

I'll try to clean this up a bit and make it available via a github repo in the near future.

What Web 2.0 Is?

Ok, I know I am late to the game on this one, and this question "What is Web 2.0" has been covered amply, but this explanation really struck a chord with me. Besides it is very Web 2.0 that I feel compelled to share my own experiences with this, no matter how late to the game I am.

I ran across this great article on Slashdot today that in general covers the changes that have been going on with the web for quite some time in the context of the downfall of Dreamweaver. As the article points out, it is not about bashing a product because it doesn't do its job well, quite on the contrary I'd say that Dreamweaver is one of the exceptional products that came out of the Macromedia company (which was bought by Adobe) and though I have long given up the use of Dreamweaver in favor of a plain text editor I do remember how wonderfully easy it made the transition from Infant Webmaster into Toddler Webmaster.

No, the problem is really that Dreamweaver is out moded. It is no longer a significantly relevant way to create content for the web. I can think of NO sittuations in which I was wanting to create a useful site where I reached for Dreamweaver instead of a tool that integrates the content creation experince into the application BEFORE I even get started. Because, and here is where the title comes in, the web is becoming a place where content is created by the content creator. In the words of the articles Author, Tom Arah:

The bottom line is that the old model of the central webmaster hand-spinning every page of every website and, worse, manually adding the navigation necessary to help users find it, just isn’t scalable or viable. The only feasible course for the future is for content to be posted by the content contributor, whether that’s the site owner or site visitors, and for the best possible navigation to be constructed around that content on the fly.

That's it... Web 2.0 marks the transition from Webmaster created sites, into user created sites. The webmaster (or the whole design team rather) is there to make it possible for content creators to do just that.

So simple, and profound.

Long live Drupal indeed!

Drupal Skillz!