Greetings,

Last Thursday I had arthroscopic knee surgery. I tore the meniscus in my left knee almost two years ago. I wish I would say I was doing something exciting. The truth is I was helping some friends move. I never felt it tear, but it's given me trouble ever since. The surgery went fine. The doctor found some other cartilage issue and drilled a couple of holes in my femur. I'm not sure why he did that, but I was coming out of the anesthesia and don't remember much. I'll find out details at my follow-up visit.

Today was my first day walking. The three holes they punched in my knee for the surgery hurt worse than the knee itself. Looks like I'll be fine.

I spent all day working on this blog, which frustrated me. I'm itching to write. But the move over to a new server with new software has been harder than I thought. And I haven't even done most of the work. I'm serious when I tell you that I don't know what I would have done if I hadn't met Tim Miller at Jethro.

Most of the cool things about the new Drupal site are behind the scenes. Things that make it easier for me. I worked over the menus on the left. I got my Foy Davis and RLPDV and archive links the way I like them. Some of the stuff links to the archives. I doubt I'll ever get around to importing all that stuff.

One new thing about this blog is the way I'll handle subscriptions. The details are in a new page I created. On the old site I maintained a page for subscribers. Well, if you use the word "maintained" loosely. One problem was I had to basically lay out the html every time I wanted to update it. With the new site, it will be much easier for me to maintain some secondary content as a way of thanking the folks who subscribe.

Tomorrow I have some stuff to do in the morning. I hope to get some time to write later during the day.

rlp

Real Live Preacher has a new website and the RSS feed has changed.
Please subscribe to http://www.reallivepreacher.com/rss.xml if you want to continue reading Real Live Preacher by RSS feed.
Thanks
Site Admin

Tim from Jethro here.

There have been numerous comments with questions about the new site and whats happening. Please keep them coming - especially if you notice broken things.

However to avoid wasting your time and duplication here is a list of the things we know about and are fixing - some from the comments!

RSS Feeds
RSS feeds are working on this site - but they are different from before. We suggest you change your subscription to the main feed. It is better then the rlp blog feed though you can choose that if you want. Gordon is mostly going to write under his rlp user name. However some content may be posted, e.g., images, audio, video etc., that is not a blog entry and will not be included in the blog feed. For a full list of feeds and to learn how to use them check out the sitemap. For those users who in the past were subscribed to the blog3 feed as mentioned in comments, we will look at the solution of mapping the feed over. However we would prefer they switched to the new feed. Unfortunately some of this can't be avoided. The feeds structure was different in the old version of Drupal. We think it is better now but of course change can be hard.

Subscribers blogs and subscriber content
Gordon and I are discussing just how and what to set up for subscribers. As he mentioned we want to offer subscribers additional content etc. We are just working out the best way of doing this. Feel free to comment with suggestions, ideas.

Audio Posts
We have added the ability to attach audio to a blog post so Gordon can add these into his writing. They will still exist as a separate entry and there is a feed for podcasts that can be subscribed to. This works in iTunes or any other Feed reader that you use for podcasts.

RLP Archives
We have only just got these working - took some time with DNS changes, importing the old database and setting it up to work in a sub folder. However there is a lot of stuff that is not linked up right yet. We will need to manually edit a bunch of links so that they point at the right place. Please be patient as we do this. We would love for you to point out to us broken links as you find them.

RLP Search
At the moment search is operational in both the current site, though there's not much to search on yet, and the archive site. however one search will not find content in the other etc. We are looking into this one.

This is the third incarnation of Real Live Preacher. I began as a Salon blog at http://blogs.salon.com/0001772. Later I moved to my own domain using Drupal. That's when the chatroom and the threaded comments began. I guess that was RLP 2.0

Well, here we are with what I hope will be the final version. Now that Jethro is in charge of the nuts and bolts, I'm guessing they will update Drupal for me so that I don't get behind again.

So okay, so the new site is up and running. There are a number of issues I want to tell you about.

1. We lost all of our user accounts. There was no way to help that, unfortunately. However, there is good news. On the old site, having a rlp user account meant that your name appeared on comments, and you could visit the chat room. Well, there is no chat room. Anymore. It fell out of use. I could always bring one back if people wanted it, but for now there isn't one. AND, you can leave your name when you leave your comment, if you like.

2. You can still sign up for a user account if you want. If you are signed in, You won't have to do the captcha thing. And, in the future, I'll have some features reserved for registered users only. For example, users might be able to launch a discussion forum if a particular essay brings a lot of discussion. I'm not sure if we'll have that, but there are a lot of things Drupal can do. We could add a number of things.

3. Subscribers (Those who support the site financially) Your blogs will be listed here, just as they were before. We're going to recreate your user account for you, so don't worry about that. And as before, there will be an area of the site for you only. I can't promise this, but I've asked Jethro to find a way to feature your sites in a rotating basis as well. So every day there would be a featured site or two from the subscriber sites. Be patient; we're doing a lot.

4. I have a lot of clean-up work to do. All of the old stuff is here: http://reallivepreacher.com/rlparchive. But it won't be linked by subject. I'm actually considering republishing all of the old essays in the new system so that they can be tagged for easier retrieval. I don't even know how to get started with that. I've written so many essays since 2002. Even if I only do the serious stuff, it's a daunting task. I'm still thinking about that.

So why the change?

First, I had no spam protection in the old Drupal site. Second, there are a lot of things behind the scenes with the newly upgraded Drupal software that will ultimately make my life a lot easier. Images will automatically thumbnail for me and are easier to upload. My audio files will have an RSS feed, making them a podcast if I want. And I really enjoy doing short videos. Tim Miller tells me they have a solution for making that easier to do as well.

Finally, I'm working toward only dealing with my word processor and Drupal. Previously I wrote things, then put them in FrontPage, then finally into Drupal as an html file. I have some editing options here that are helpful to me.

So I'm glad for the upgrade, even if it means things are a little out of order for a time.

Tomorrow: The first essay on the new site. Some thoughts about war, the Mars rovers, and an impossible dream.

rlp

Welcome to the new real live preacher site. I'm on a new server, and the dns will still be propagating for the next day or so. I'm so appreciative of the folks at www.JethroConsultants.com for helping with this migration. The old site was falling apart and beginning to break every few days.

A lot of things at the new site won't be working yet. I don't think the dns has changed in Australia, so the guys at Jethro can't make a lot of the final changes. The entire old site will be archived intact. That's going to mess up any links out there to specific essays, but there's no way to avoid that. And some of the links inside the archive may be broken. But you will definitely be able to get to all of my old writing there.

So for the next week or so, things will be coming online. Thanks for your patience!All of my subscriber's blogs will be listed here somehow, so watch for that.

We lost our user accounts, but I don't know if there is any reason to have them now. All they really allowed you to do was have your name on your comments. Well, you can do that now without registering. I'm checking with Jethro on that question.

I want to thank Tim Miller and the people at Jethro for their fantastic work. These guys have been great to work with. I'll write more about that later!