Errors

My Internet Connection was down all day yesterday and half of Friday, and so I took the time to burn the rest of the interviews to CDs to ship out.

I also upgraded my Macintosh OS from 10.1.2 to 10.4. I've been dreading this upgrade since there are always things that are thrown out of whack.

Mozilla displaced my mail folder and all of my e-mail messages had temporarily disappeared. Luckily I was able to fix that this morning.

But I've run into bigger troubles with Final Cut Pro that I can't get around without upgrading my video card and the amount of RAM that I have.

One of the concerns that I have with a Drupal site is getting overwhelmed with traffic without the proper configuration. A link from Slashdot.com -- a tech discussion community website & "News for nerds" -- can bring a site down from so much traffic.

OurMedia.org got slashdotted on the same day it launched back on March 21, 2005.

It didn't take long for Ourmedia to be slashdotted.

Just what we needed with our servers already getting slammed.

I just discovered first hand what separates the contributed Drupal modules (aka "contrib modules") from the modules included in the core release.

The contrib modules are able to scratch the itch of the developer, but they don't always scratch the itches of all Drupal users -- in other words it may not work with some particular core Drupal settings. A Drupal web admin can download a Drupal module from the list of modules, but it may have some unresolved issues that might conflict with your site.

Since I do have limited knowledge of the Linux/Apache/MySQL/PHP -- LAMP combination. I've been reaching out more to some of the Drupal developers that I've met at SXSW Interactive, Activist Technology gathering, Personal Democracy Forum and CivicSpace User's Summit.

Brady Jarvis (aka grohk) runs a site called code0range.net. I came across his site because he catalyzed the development of the node moderation Drupal module, which I'm interested in helping him expand for my site and other media-related sites that need some sort of self-moderation mechanism.

I'm experiencing some technical difficulties with Drupal, and I thought I'd document everything weird that's going on so that I could get some insight for how to fix it.

I beefed up my website with pictures in preparation for the Personal Democracy Forum, and suddenly one morning the interview page was filled with errors (screenshot) instead of what it should look like error-free (screenshot). (more details below)

I sent my Drupal helper Moshe Weitzman an emergency message, and he said: