Have you ever had the need to produce a web site that needed dynamic CMS features and capabilities but felt that using one of the usual suspects (Drupal, Joomla!, Wordpress, etc.) was the equivalent of using a sledgehammer to kill a fly?

That's certainly the feeling I had when finally getting around to refactoring a small site of mine that has been on the Internet since 1997.  There had been numerous updates and tweaks made to the site over the years, but it was still based on static html pages and a bunch of customized (and poorly organized) javascripts.  Adding or modifying content was a manual process.

I had almost talked myself into using Wordpress, as all I really needed was the framework and the equivalent of the Wordpress Page content type.  But, at the last moment, I stumbled upon a lightweight CMS called GetSimple.  It is advertised as "The Simplest Content Management System Ever" and appeared to have the basic features and capabilities I was looking for.  I downloaded a copy and installed it in a subdirectory off of my web server's root.

Happy birthday to Owen!

View our February 2010 Pictures of the Month

View more February 2010 pictures at Snapfish.

The big event this month is Owen’s Birthday.  He will be 10 years old.

No early Spring this year…Phil saw his shadow.

We had two back-to-back snowstorms this month.  This first one left about 30 inches on the ground; the second one added another 10 – 12 inches. 

We’ve missed over a week of school due to the snow.  Good news is that we have had plenty fun in the snow; bad news is that we will lose some of our summer break to make up for the lost snow days. 

P.S. Pop-Pop made a new web site this month called HR’s Big Box.  Take a look and see if you can open the Big Box and see what’s in it!

Ross & Owen

Happy birthday to Granny and Uncle Bud...and to you too Elvis, wherever you are!

View our January 2010 Pictures of the Month

View more January 2010 pictures at SnapFish

This month marks the beginning of the 12th year for Ross and Owen's Pictures of the Month.  We wish all a happy and prosperous 2010 and are looking forward to another year of sharing our monthly news and pictures with you.

Pop-Pop doesn’t have any new pictures of us to show you this month.  So he has gathered up some of our pictures taken over the past 12 years for this month’s album.

Enjoy this walk down memory lane.  We hope that there’s still a few moments of our 15 minutes of fame left and that next month’s edition will contain a bunch of new pictures. 

Ross & Owen

On 15 January 2010, I installed the Drupal 7.0 Alpha 1 release on a Linux server used for testing here on my home network. The server uses the following LAMP configuration:

• Linux – Ubuntu 9.10
• Apache 2.2.12
• Mysql 5.1.37
• PHP 5.2.10

Installation

The installation was uneventful.  I noticed that it now requires that the following folders be present in the Drupal root.  If they are not present, the installer will not proceed until they are created.  One must leave the installer and create the folders via the operating system’s file management utility or command line interface.

• sites/defaults/files
• sites/defaults/private/files
• sites/default/private/temp

Other than that, and the much improved UI, my impression is that the Drupal 7 Installer isn’t a big departure from those of previous releases.