Since I got my self-hosted Ubuntu lamp server up and running some while back, I have made it my personal mission to find out exactly what she can do. "Why in the world would you want to run a home server?" is the question I sought to answer for myself, and sought to do so in such a way that any novice could benefit from what nifty things I did find. In this, I tinker with new (new to me) technologies, and see if any inherent level of novelty outweighs any technical level of brain hurt.

The first thing I installed was Drupal, which you can do with apt or synaptic, and it has become the bedrock and center of everything I do on this server. I love to find new ways to interact with my site, new ways to get the site to perform and interact with users, and generally any neat trick I can come up with that has functionality. Every time I discover a new technology, I see if there is a way to integrate it into my Drupal setup, integration is a wonderful thing.

• I can publish to Drupal from my Ubuntu desktop using drivel.
• I can further integrate my Ubuntu desktop with Drupal using Evolution and the excellent calendar module.
• My Tweets and/or Dents go to my Drupal installation via a custom block I got from Twitter
• And my Drupal installation can talk to my identi.ca account when I post new content via a small rewrite of the twitter module for drupal.
• I aggregate interesting news feeds I discover from my Tiny Tiny RSS installation with the core module "aggregator".
• I integrate my Gallery2 online picture gallery with drupal using a great module for the job, and I can publish pictures into that Gallery from my Ubuntu desktop using the excellent F-Spot photo manager
• I can take a picture, plug in my camera to my Ubuntu desktop, and that picture goes right into my Drupal, via Gallery, via F-spot...one click!

Get the picture? I am a geek for integrations between Drupal and my Ubuntu desktop, and between separate services I run on my Ubuntu server and Drupal. I am, in my way, attempting to make a nice transparent portal from my Ubuntu desktop to the internet via Drupal, and vise-versa.

So, in this ongoing effort to self-host and experiment with different technologies I recently decided to install and run with the Openfire Jabber/XMPP server, and see if I could get Drupal and Jabber to play nice together, showing up on my Ubuntu desktop via Pidgin.

I'm pleased to announce the addition of a new section to the site's content: "Joshp's Poetry". The content of this section will NOT, by default, be promoted to the Front Page of Nous Essence, nor will it be, by default, featured on the main feed for the site. But you may see, from time to time, snippets of the work which I decide are nice enough to promote appear in your reader if you are a subscriber to the main site feed. If you are interested in subscribing to the poetry/prose feed directly, just click on this link.

I have been writing poetry, prose, lyrics, short fictions, and literary experiments for the better part of 15 years, and have now decided to filter through the entire existing body of my work, burn the terrible word-vomiting, and publish and/or rework anything that I feel deserves attention. If you subscribe, I look forward to your comments and your support!

So I had a difficult time trying to understand "Why Twitter", even after I began using it. I like integration. Why have yet another method to stay connected, when we have blogging, social network sites, instant message networks up the wazoo, irc, etc and etc...?

So, I integrated twitter into my Drupal site using the aptly named module Twitter so that every time I post something new, it tweets out. Well this is a nice excuse as to "why use it", but isn't that just another way to do what is basically rss?

I continued on my Twitter adventure by installing a few basic desktop twitter clients, Twitux and gtwitter, but didn't like the idea of running yet another little app to stay abreast of my news, friends and family. Seems like Pidgin does this fine already..OH WAIT!

So what is the point? In my neurotic need to simplify and centralize everything I went out looking and found me some Microblog-purple , aka: mbpurple. This is a great little plugin for Pidgin that integrates Twitter (and beta support for identi.ca and so forth) with my favorite multi-protocol instant-messaging/chat client! Yay! Another reason to play with Twitter. And seeing Twitter in action in the same context of instant messaging and chat protocols suddenly brought Twitter into the whole "sense making" world for me.

It's a simple plugin, you get a new buddy-list category called "Twitter" with a new buddy called "Twitter" who's incoming messages are any tweets that hit your account prepended with the name of the tweeter, and all of your tweets from other clients. You post to Twitter by sending a message through Pidgin. It even has a 140 character counter for you so that you don't post over the limit. Simple!

Today finds this site Gravatar enabled. What is Gravatar you ask? From the site: "A gravatar, or globally recognized avatar, is quite simply an avatar image that follows you from blog to blog appearing beside your name when you comment on gravatar enabled sites. Avatars help identify your posts on web forums, so why not on blogs?" So this is a good thing. Keeping identities unified across several different sites can be a tough job, OpenID helps with that with the login (which is why I run an albeit seldom used id server using Clamshell, and here's my OpenID endpoint), and gravatar comes in to help with the image.

Just a quick note to commemorate the addition of a nifty new feature from the module Comment Notify. Now you can receive email notifications when someone adds a comment to a post that you have commented on...and the best parts: 1. You don't need an account to sign up for these notifications, 2. you can remain anonymous, and 3. you can unsubscribe at any time. Just a nice feature for that mysterious time when my blog-site actually gets readers who comment!

SPAM! Why should I have to worry about spam, right? This is a pretty low traffic site (sigh) and who's going to spam on me? I had a post a bit ago about passing a spam right of passage and enabling a bit of security to get around it. Well, the spam dude was not done with me yet! No sir, I kept getting hit, kept having traffic eaten by spam-spewing robo-jerks, and it was getting pretty tiring having to isolate every ip, and then ban them one...at...a...time. So, I overhauled my security and thought I would actually spell out here exactly how I set it up...

It's been all quiet on my blog for quite some time, so I thought I should make a post. I should blame school for this, but the fact of the matter is that I am just not so certain as to what direction to take this blog. I know I have the whole "technical progress" thing, which is fun, but doesn't fill what I am hungry for.
I do have my family, and ultra-personal things I could publish here, which I could do for hours, but I think I rather keep some things from the public arena. I also feel like I betray privacy when I get out to blog about my family. I suppose I am feeling out what I am comfortable publishing here on that level. I also feel there is only egotism involved in blogging about myself, and believe you me, my ego is pretty big as it is.
Socio-Political? This is easy. Almost toooooo easy. Seriously, who wants another rant-blog/opinion piece collection? I have some very strong opinions and ideas there, some bordering on the anarcho-communist, and some not quite so extreme. But I want to put out GOOD ideas, not just Angry ideas, and it seems that most political blogs are either angry or bereft with tunnel-vision. That is certainly not what I want to appear as. I think I might open up some forum space for that. I know there is ONE reader interested in that sort of EXCHANGE.

And here we have it, EXCHANGE. The platform I am using for this site is based off of communal exchange, community building, not just blogging or serving up the occasional media file. Exchange. This is what Drupal is good for. And I don't mean the blase` social networking sites like facebook or myspace. While they have their place, it seems that while they benefit from and, in a very nominal way enhance social bonds, they seem to me to be not much more than predatory spaces doing little more than exploiting existing social relationships and providing space for egocentrical expression without providing a means to, or encouraging the exchange of socially relevant content.
Let me explain that: social networking sites capitalize on pre-existing relationships and affiliations to build a user base. In essence they do nothing more than attempt to take the place of the "face" of the relationship, to become the channel in which the relationship is expressed without actually providing any new content. You see, it does nothing new and nothing more than attempt to exploit people's ego and egotism. While this is fine for them, and I am sure has its place...somewhere... What I would like to see, and would love to be a part of is something entirely different. Some thing which does not simply take advantage of existing networks, but promotes the formation of NEW networks based on the EXCHANGE of socially relevant, substance based CONTENT.
Another way to view these two differing ideas is to look at them as recipies which create similar dishes. In one, you start with pre-existing social networks, and you add an avenue of egocentric expression, and you get an online community. The other you start by promoting substance based content, provide an avenue of relating the content to other pieces of content, and you get a totally new community. Drupal is a brilliant platform for this. Community building based off of content, and the exchange of relevant content. Substance, not ego.

I think that is why it has been so quiet around here this month. I am looking to build a substance based site, with a focus on community and the exchange of relevant content. So I have been really muling over the direction I want. Really trying to keep things from being "all about me", and trying to brew up a good direction that still leaves the site open-ended enough to take on new avenues of thought and expression.
I want ideas to live and grow here, not just ego.
I could now go into a piece about how I think that the contrast between substance and ego is the very thing that is spurring degradation of our culture, our politics and our lives in general...but I will not. I will, perhaps, work on that as an opinion piece, and give it its own little place to live. I will leave it at that for now.
So, it seems as if the content here, is the concept of content itself. H'm. Content based content. Stop. In the end all things degrade down into nothingness. So, in the spirit of the totally confusing nature of thing/nothingness, I now have a blog/site which is content based in its intent, but has absolutely no direction for that content. In other words, it is a site for substantial ideas, not egos...but it is about nothing in particular and is totally fine with a purely egocentric expression, just so long as the egotism comes after the substance in the content, and doesn't try to create substance in order to validate the ego into content. Well, it makes sense to me...

Well, so Drupal 6 came out yesterday, the day of my daughter's birthday! Right, so I did absolutely nothing with Drupal, but we took Savannah shopping, and I made her favorite dinner, and we all went to go see a cheesy movie. :) She's 11!
((and I'm feeling old))

What do you do when you try to access your drupal site from school and all you get are blank white pages with no source and the absence of any 404 error or whatever? You promptly go outside, and smoke a dozen cigarettes, unless you just quit, then you clench your teeth together and freak out as quietly as you can. Then you go home, and realize that your page.tpl.php file had the wrong permissions and everything is soo happy, all the data is still there, all the sql tables all in their right place...ahhhhhhhhhh. But you still don't get to smoke.

Well, I almost did it. As a matter of fact, I did do it, for a little bit...I sold out. One of the reasons I made this site was to stay away from using any 3rd party hosted services. I wanted to be able to host my own site, with my own blog, calendar, forums, picture gallery, and anything else (the promise of a podcast or webcast, a streaming radio station...all sorts of things sound like fun, right?). Something nice about having it all right here, on my own server, my own connection, my own installation.