The seed sprouts...

June was a month of reinvention for me in many ways. Individually, I started a new job in a completely new technology, and began a personal Android side project (more on that elsewhere). But more importantly for those of you reading this, I decided to change the vision and purpose of Rotary-Dial, while simultaneously changing web hosts and migrating it to new technology. It's been a lot to take on at once, but honestly I find it more effective to overhaul everything at once--including long-held mentalities--than to incrementally tweak and change. Cerebral moss tends to grow in the corners that aren't getting light, so to speak.

I started Rotary-Dial in, what? 1997? Something like that. Over the years, the website took shape much like an under-weeded garden (yes, ladies & gentlemen, apparently the analogy of the day is plants). It grew and spilled in fits, eventually becoming a mish-mosh of Perl, PHP, Flash and flat HTML. I avoided content managers because the customizability was low. Certain areas--such as the pointfive page, were a little easier to manage because I implemented XML feeds to drive the content, but it still wasn't a snap. As a software developer, this always irked me, but since it wasn't my day job I just lived with it.

Now, enter Drupal. As I redeploy Rotary-Dial, gone will be the custom-to-the-punctuation site whose teeth slowly go crooked as browser versions increment. Though the programmer in me feels like I'm selling out to use a content manager that I didn't build myself, Drupal is pretty rad. First off, it's open source, which agrees with my sensibilities and ($0) budget. Secondly, it's about as modular as it gets, has a thriving community, and has plenty of capability for custom code should I get the itch.

Plus, as a programmer, I'm at the point in my life where I'm not interested in doing stuff I've done before. Yet when you're running a site--especially one like Rotary-Dial that isn't updated every day--that's what you're doing 90% of the time. Rehash. I'm confident Drupal will be the solution for that particular headache.

So in I dive, both feet. What better way to shed the moss and briars?