Alva and Fender

Alva and Fender
Originally uploaded by Leo Laporte.

Henry's new board!

Meta Theme

I love Drupal as a content managment system, but the default themes it comes with are pretty staid. TWiT.tv - which runs Drupal - is currently based on the Push Button theme that ships with Drupal. Creating a theme from scratch is no mean feat, which is why I've hired Lullabot to do the coding on Arktyp's design for the new TWiT.tv. I could never have done it myself. I had planned to get Drupal installed here with a plain generic template and then update the site to match Leoville.com and Leo.am. But then I found this template, meta theme, from Ken Collins. I installed it as a placeholder, but it's so slick I decided to keep it. The theme has some really neat non-obvious features like a gorgeous photo album template and a wild syntax colored code block format which is great for programmers. I'll probably fiddle with it a bit -- the font size is a little too tiny for my taste, and I'm not crazy about the funny little right quote things next to all the links -- but it's pretty gorgeous, and it turns out to be totally valid XHTML and CSS. Drupal represents my fifth blogging engine. I started with Noah Grey's Grey Matter in 2001, moved to Movable Type when that program was still in beta, followed Ben and Mena to Typepad, then used Expression Engine for a couple of years. I've been using Drupal for a year at TWiT.tv and have come to think of it as the premiere content management system due to its super clean code base and very extensive third party module support. Migrating six hundred entries and thousands of comments from system to system hasn't been easy. Expression Engine to Drupal offered the most tricky conversion even though both use MySQL for the data. Fortunately I found an excellent script by Tarek which worked pretty much out of the box. So here we are. A new content management system, new incentive to keep posting here, and some neat new features like forums, polling, and a photo gallery. I hope you like the look of the new place and you'll make yourself at home. I'm hoping to write a script to migrate the Expression Engine user database over here, but until I do you'll have to register to post comments. Sorry to have to do that but it's the only effective way to prevent blog spam. Let me know what you think! And thanks for visiting.

Out of the Country

Off to Canada once again. In some funny way these weeks up north are like a vacation. Taping 15 shows in four days is grueling, easily the hardest work of the month, but because I have to focus on that and nothing else it means I can leave behind mundane worries about doing the taxes, catching up on podcasts, returning phone calls, and all the normal cacophony of day-to-day living down here. I even put a message on my office phone saying "I'm out of the country so I won't be able to return your call until next week." Of course my phone works just fine in Canada, but the words "out of the country" are like a magical talisman. No one expects a call back when you're "out of the country." I might as well be staying in a yurt in Outer Mongolia.

Technorati Tags: Travel, LOL

All Things Considered

When I was a younger man my goals were few: publish a story in the New Yorker, appear on All Things Considered, and host the Tonight Show. At least one of them is going to come true. I'll be on ATC tonight talking about Apple's new Boot Camp program that allows Windows to run on Intel Macs. I have no idea when I'll be on, but audio from the show should be available on the NPR web site after 7:30p Eastern.

A Taxing Day

Ahhh. A very productive Sunday. Jennifer took the kids while I wrote two columns and finished the taxes. I had done most of the Federal return some weeks ago. Enough to know we'd owe money and roughly how much. That stopped me. I had to do the rest of it this weekend to leave enough time to mail it in case the electronic filing didn't take. I used TurboTax this year - I probably should have hired a preparer, but I waited too long. I had to do it myself. The program's good. I used TaxAct last year, and had tried it this year but it totally barfed on some of the more complicated parts of my return. TurboTax got it right. I think. I'm pretty sure anyway. I filed electronically this afternoon. It's even easier this year. Nothing at all to mail. And the Feds and the State can take their pound of flesh directly from my checking account on April 16. We celebrated by going out for Chinese afterwards. Now Jennifer and I are ready for a stay-at-home date, watching a video of Wonder Boys. I really loved the novel by Michael Chabon, and I'm looking forward to seeing the movie. Hope I can keep my eyes open.