Since the news that I will be attending Drupalcon stuck over a week ago, I've lost the thread of what's going on with OSNews 5. Every night since then has been spent either in abject exhaustion, or in a frenzy of worry and anticipation. I suppose I shouldn't be surprised that this happened. It is, however, frustrating and the interruption a terrible detriment to my productivity.

So where *are* we with OSN5?

For the last year, I've been working on writing import code for OSNews.com. It's been a lengthy process due to the fact that I'm doing this when I can spare the time. Some weeks there's furious development, others none at all. Some months ago I had the first complete version of the import code working. It was a completely custom module, relying only on core APIs to get the job done. I knew that the Migrate module existed, and provided a lauded framework for importing content into Drupal.

For the last year I've been working on writing import code for the OSNews website into Drupal 7. It actually wasn't such long task as it might sound. I'm working on this project gratis, and spending my limited free time in order to make it happen. If I someone had hired me to do this, I might have gotten this done inside of a month. 

The project has gone in fits and starts for the entire year since I agreed to work on it. Some days I would just have no time, or no energy, or the requirements of work or home life were simply too demanding to set my mind to coding.

I've been putting in a lot of extra hours at work the last week in anticipation of an editing deadline. Despite this, I thought it was about time that I attempt a little hardware hacking. Even before computers, I was facinated by electronics. I read book after book, but had little success in applying any of that knowledge beyond kits bought from Radio Shack. Given my recently revived interest in Ham Radio, it was only a matter of time before I'd turn my attention back to this, my oldest of hobbies.

Click here to read Part 1.

Click here to read Part 2.

Click here to read Part 3.

I've never been particularly good at taking vacations. I've become particularly bad at this in the last two years as my job and private life have become hectic. The last week summerizes this well.

First, let me yammer

Lately I've been writing some patch code for the Drupal 7 version of Organic Groups and Organic Groups Create Permissions. Both modules are cornerstones on which I plan to build deninet 7. This isn't the first time I've written Drupal code, but it is the first time I've done so for a patch to contrib modules. 

After my last post, I decided to try my hand at porting content from the old site to a clean Drupal 7 installation. The experience has been enlightening.

Drupal 7 often feels like a completely different content manager compared to Drupal 6. It quite literally thinks differently compared to its previous version. Fields are everything, right down to the structure of the database. This became more than apparent as soon as I created the first node.