Drupal Needs a New Home 295
reardonsteel writes "All of the Drupal websites were offline for about two days because of a server meltdown at the organization's hosting provider. The main Drupal website is back up with a single temporary page and they've announced a fund-raising drive to raise US$3000 for a new server to be hosted at the Open Source Lab at Oregon State University's server farm. Drupal is the leading open-source (written in PHP) content management system and is used to power tens of thousands of websites, blogs, community sites, etc." At this point, all they need is an actual server, too: the OSL has agreed to provide rack space, bandwidth, power, backup facilities and support.
well, since i can't get to the link (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:well, since i can't get to the link (Score:1, Insightful)
What I love about the FOSS movement (Score:3, Insightful)
Renting a dedicated box? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:What was drupal? (Score:3, Insightful)
Parent? Meet Google [google.com]. I know it's hard to believe, but this is a site that catalogs the entire internet and allows you to search through them for the information you seek. For example, if you were to type "Drupal" in the text box and hit enter, the website would return thousands of pages that use that term, and would further enlighten you to
Or you could just use Wikipedia [wikipedia.org], which, of course, has a wonderful page [wikipedia.org] up about Drupal. Oh, but I forgot. You're too busy to do any of that. We should just explain everything to you. Who do you think you are, man? Seriously? Not a web developer, obviously.
A good candidate for P2P? (Score:3, Insightful)
Once they have a new box, why don't they distribute their software and docs up on P2P? surely that'll lighten the network load and cost them less.
All Together Now... (Score:3, Insightful)
Seriously, I have never heard of Drupal until I saw this article. It may be useful software, very useful, but who knows? FA like this should really start off like this:
Then maybe
Re:Homeless Business Partners (Score:3, Insightful)
BTW I find the lectures about what you think customers want somewhat annoying. Customers care about having their own systems up and running. While it might be a cause for concern, it's hardly world ending.
Re:Renting a dedicated box? (Score:4, Insightful)
* Renting higher-end servers gets awfully expensive
* Adding another hard drive might cost you something like $20/month forever -- if you plan on being around for a long time, it's actaully much cheaper to just buy
* I've read a few horror stories of people whose dedicated server providers (some at fairly reputable places) had their servers formatted by mistake. With a colocated server, you don't have to worry about a tech transposing a couple digits in your IP and formatting the wrong machine.
Maybe this could help -- and it's completely free (Score:1, Insightful)
yes well, where were you last month? (Score:2, Insightful)
It is better to OWN your core resources and leverage the other stuff that OSL is offering. They also provide mirroring, 24x7 admin staff familier with and specializing in open source software.
OSL does NOT REQUIRE an AD for this service. IT's just what they do. What happends when Drupal goes beyond 500GB/month? All this for the price of owning a server. I own my server and you seem to own yours.
For four years a very few people have born the expense of this while growing at a phenominal rate. While lots of happy users [and some that chose other products
Your post just seems a little
OT, but I can't help myself... (Score:2, Insightful)
You can meet many former 'homosexuals'; you will never meet a former 'African-American'."
Are they trying to say that I'll never meet Michael Jackson?
Burn, Karma, Burn...
Re:well, since i can't get to the link (Score:5, Insightful)
Newer stuff such as Drupal, Mambo (which I personally dislike), Textpattern, and other newer CMS systems have embraced emerging web technologies (Ajax, CSS) and are generally written with extremely clean code and have very simplistic ways of operating (mac-like if you would care to make the analogy)
Slash and nuke are dinosaurs. They may still work fine, but if you're going to make a new site, you'd do yourself a favor to research the newer options. Development on all of the 'old' CMSes has stalled, and little work is being done to improve them.
WTF? (Score:5, Insightful)
Or maybe there was some misunderstanding you could clear up?
Re:.....wtf (Score:5, Insightful)
Bull. I used to write all of the code for my own website. It probably took me about a week of full-time-equivalent work, and it worked OK, but that's still a far cry from half an hour. Don't give me any of that crap about it being because you're a better programmer, either. I work on kernels and distributed systems for a living, and have done for over a decade. Web programming is something I do as a break from real work because it's so easy by comparison. Nonetheless, all you can get in half an hour is something that sucks. If you want something that's modular and maintainable, that takes more time. If you want something that's database-efficient, that takes more time...and flat-file-based systems are even worse so don't go there. If you want something that's standards-compliant, that takes more time...and your main page generated 130 errors when I ran it through the W3C validator. If you want it not to look like crap (again unlike your site) that takes more time. If you want to have features like markup in comments and comment preview, decent archive management, categories, and search (again unlike...) that takes more time. If you want to do all of those things and have it be secure, that takes more time; not knowing how to implement features securely is a poor excuse for having a low-functionality site. Do all that in under the week it took me, and I'll be impressed. So far, not even close.
My guess, based on your comment, is that you're another victim of the rewrite bug that often afflicts junior programmers. Writing code is not necessarily more efficient than reading other people's, but it is generally more fun so kiddies always want to rewrite everything in sight. What they end up with isn't usually any better, though. Most code that's written as an excuse not to understand something that already existed sucks far worse than what it replaces. That's why most of the people who roll their own website never even have the balls to make the result available for others to see. They know that it's a lot easier to claim superiority than to prove it.
That's the most offensive thing about your post, and why I went out of my way to be offensive right back. Sure, maybe you and I can (with varying degrees of success) write code to do the things that a typical weblog does, but why should we be the only ones to have sites? Why shouldn't high-school students and grandmothers have them too? Sure, most of what they write is crap, but so is most of what geeks write (including here). What purpose is served by having someone who might be able to contribute code in some other domain that you know nothing about have to learn your most treasured skills as the price of entry to the world of website ownership? What if their contribution is something other than code - like scientific knowledge or political insight? Aren't those valuable too? Thinking that everyone should value what you value is beyond elitist, and contrary to the spirit of free enterprise. It's just a crutch for insecurity, not a valid or useful attitude. It's almost as pathetic as posting fake-IQ-test results to your blog.
Re:.....wtf (Score:4, Insightful)
Well, it turns out, you're right. I went to his site and thought, "hmm, a blog system with comments and trackbacks, maybe he does have a point if he built this whole thing in 30 minutes." But then I tried his system. Anyone can add comments -- comment spam could (and probably eventually will) overrun his system. In addition, I was able to easily drop JavaScript code into the comments and it was executed! Of course, I only dropped in a harmless JavaScript alert, as I don't want to get in trouble for "hacking" a neophyte's crappy blog system.
But in any case, to the grandparent post: my God, man, you cannot build such a shoddy, terrible system, and then tout the benefits of reinventing the wheel. Your wheel is awful, and better people before you have built wheels that put yours to shame. Yours is bad enough to actually be dangerous. It's a black-hat's wet dream. SQL injection, code insertion, you don't even launder your input! I fear for your site and the server that hosts it.
Re:well, since i can't get to the link (Score:1, Insightful)
Object orientated is the way to go.