Updating Drupal and Cleaning Out Old Posts
I spent some time updating Drupal to the latest version that is currently available. The last install had been running on the same old version for a long time, and it was about time. Surprisingly the following update method worked very well:
Download Drupal 5.16, use the update.php script to update the blog to the 5.16 version. No errors were presented in any way shape or form which really surprised me, hats off to the Drupal developers for building a system that is stable and works correctly. After which I had some trouble, off course the old theme was now missing so logging into my Drupal was going to be an issue without an actual theme to display any of the menu's. After using some SQL-fu I regained access. Changed the theme back to the default, and things were good to go.
Next up, I grabbed Drupal 6.10. Ran its update script and everything once again went smoothly. Way smoother than any other upgrade for any of the other PHP scripts that I have had the pleasure of upgrading, then again it has been a long time since I last upgraded something as complex as Drupal. phpBB was an absolute mess to upgrade at one point in its life, have not touched it for a while so it may have improved.
Besides the newer version, there are also some modules I have now enabled. You will see that the URL's to the posts no longer contain the node/[number] format and instead are /[yyyy]/[mm]/[dd]/[post title], this should make Google and other search engines more happy than they were before, and it will make linking to a post on my website much easier. All of the old URL's still exist but will be a 301 redirect so that Google and the likes will update their search index's with the new links.
Stale content on this website, or content that was not relevant anymore has also been removed. Mostly related to things that were happening in my personal life at the time (some of the content is still up), also removing content that if it were read now, it would do more harm than good. Other content that I have removed were posts that were time/date limited and do not apply anymore to the current situation as it stands and had no real historical value.
With all of these changes in mind, I would like to apologise for those of you with feed readers that don't correctly check the date on when posts were created, you will have had all of these changes show up as yet another item in the news feed. The feed reader I personally use had no such issues since the date on the various articles had not changed, just the URL.