Fixed the site, it was down for an unknown amount of time.

Still not back into it much yet!

I think it may be fixed now, we'll see. I have installed a not yet completed module that is supposed to be handling the time zone info better, Date.

http://drupal.org/project/date

**UPDATE**

It was late when I wrote this. The time zone portion seems to be working correctly, the only thing I don't like is that the time stamps seem to get updated site-wide. For instance, if I wrote a blog entry a couple months ago at 7:00 AM, it will now appear as 8:00 AM because of DST. The way I understand it, drupal saves the time stamp in UTC, then converts it for display using an offset. I think the Date module looks like it is correctly identifying the DST information for the current time, but it doesn't look like it can determine whether or not DST was in effect on an older date. I may be wrong, but looking at some of my older entries that I know I wrote before I went to work, they look like I wrote when I would have been at work. I guess this thing is no huge deal, but it is nice to know when things actually occurred, especially in the logs.

I think it may be fixed now, we'll see. I have installed a not yet completed module that is supposed to be handling the time zone info better, Date.

http://drupal.org/project/date

For some reason, the timestamps here are messed up. I wonder if it has something to do with the changing of daylight savings time or what? Right now I got 12:30 AM on my computer, but I am sure the timestamps on the site will be an hour earlier.

Hmm...

I failed in my first attempt to upgrade to 6.1.

There are actually quite a few modules I use that have not made the update yet, so I may hold off for awhile and try again in a month or so.

I could not get update.php to work properly. I think it may have had something to do with not modifying my .htaccess file correctly or maybe because I left in a bunch of my old modules. I ended up hosing everything including the database, so I had to restore back to my back up that I made. Oh well, I will try again soon!

Well, I am going to take the plunge and upgrade to Drupal 6.1 from my current version of 5.5. I put off doing the 5.6 and 5.7 upgrades knowing 6 was coming out.

So hopefully this will work.

I just updated all of my modules to the current versions.

I will back up everything one last time and then take the plunge.

I just upgraded to Drupal 5.5. It was my first experience doing this. It seemed to be straightforward, but I of course made some errors and had to re-do it. Luckily I backed up first so nothing was lost (that I have noticed so far!). I will post what I did later, right now it is too late to get into the details.

Let me know if you notice anything is not working.

Tip:

I messed around with my favicon.ico (see my first post) and didn't know what I was doing for a minute.  I thought I created the file correctly (I did) but it wasn't updating.  To ensure it updates correctly copy the favicon.ico to the following:

1.  To the root of the website  (for browser compatibility and avoid errors in the logs)
2. Copy it to files/ as is
3. Make another copy in files/ named with your theme (for example, garland_favicon.ico)

I'm not sure if #2 is absolutely necessary, but I think that will make things easier if you have multiple themes.

One of the things you can do with Drupal is customize the "Error 403 Access Denied" and "Error 404 Page Not Found" pages. Drupal gives an option under Admin->Site Configuration->Error Reporting to redirect both of those to a custom URL.

My first try at updating the very spartan default error page was to create a node. I thought this would be be the easiest way because of course, that is what Drupal is good at doing. It would also maintain the theme of the site, and I could drop on blocks or whatever I wanted to in it easily. I drafted up a nifty "Page Not Found" node, aliased it to 404 and set it up to catch the redirect. One minor thing that I had to do was create a new content type. All my content requires categorization, and I didn't want those error pages showing up in category lists (taxonomy). So I created a new type that did not require a tag.

Okay, the Blog API sucks even worse than I just described.

If you use it to edit content that is already published

1. You lose all of your categories/free-tagging. So after I made a post, then edited it on the website manually to add the tags I wanted, I tried to re-edit it in my external client app (Drivel). Submitting the update wiped all categories that it had been previously assigned.

2. Upon an update, the original node is wiped and replaced. I was under the impression that it would just update the text in the body field, if that was what was edited. Nope, it created a new node. This messed up my Pathauto automatic URL and everything. I had to go and manually restore it to get back what I wanted.

So in short, this blows. I think I will not be using it any more until some improvements are made. I will leave it enabled just in case I want to use it, but I can't see using it for much.