Award Sounds Music, Photography and Consultancy

I'll be updating the underlying content management system of this website in the next week or so. I'll be moving it to Drupal 6.1. I know there will be a few features missing such as Similar Entries.

You'll also come back to a new look - ok, I'm cheating there, I'll be using on of the default themes while I'm waiting for contributed themes to catch up. That suits me, I wanted to change from this theme since it was looking a bit too busy.

I'll leave a maintenance message up, hopefully for only an hour or so.  read more »

I've had to look at a few options for improving performance on this site. I noticed that the introduction of the Feedburner module and moving the RSS feeds across to Feedburner had caused some performance issues.  read more »

I'm in the process of swapping this site's RSS feeds over to Feedburner. It allows me to manage the feeds better and understand what readers use the feeds for. For a start, I had no idea how many of you subscribe to this site or which parts of it.  read more »

Leaving comments may be a little awkward for a while. I've had TinyMCE on since I started this site, but as a writer I've stopped using it. I can imagine it being awkward for users who aren't used to it and a lot of the features never seemed to work. It was never number one on my priority since readers can always leave basic messages - just don't try to do anything complicated.....yet.

Easy-to-use

I value easy-to-use above lots of functionality in this case. So I'm on the search for something better. I'll post back when I've installed something.  read more »

I've been implementing the SEO Checklist from SpryDev SEO. Whether it will help with ratings is partly besides the point for me. I like the idea that it's helped me organise the site so that it's now a better, more easily, accessible site.  read more »

Rather than just having a test site on a home server, I've been playing with different Drupal features over at this site's sister site at www.alancward.co.uk. I'm also using that site to host less professional articles than at this site. There may be some overlap as I put articles that may be of interest at both sites, but by and large I'll keep the articles and the sites separate with the odd article present on both sites.  read more »

I've added the Book module to this site. It allows for easy navigation between related pages. The first book is going to be the Musical Creativity series.

I'm going through the articles assigning them to the book's outline.  read more »

I'm trying out a few new Drupal themes. I was never really that happy with the original Garland theme. It worked as a basic theme to get going with, but I'd made a slight error in modifying it (my fault). If you were quick to notice, you'd have seen an image of a microphone in the top right-hand corner. Rather than try to fix it, I wanted to start afresh.  read more »

After adding the HTML Corrector, I noticed that Blogrush (and not that site widget alone, some of the image adverts as well) were not displaying anymore.

The way around it is to create another input format that has free html input without the HTML corrector. It's also probably best to under the use of only the Administrator and not for general release for other user profiles.

Then apply the new input format to the blocks that weren't working properly with the HTML Corrector.  read more »