It's taken me a couple of weekends and late nights, but I finally upgraded this blog to Drupal 5.1. Upgrading should probably be tedious, but the truth is I enjoy it. It's a good excuse to clean up some of the dumb mistakes I made in the last go 'round and have been putting off correcting. Like a digital version of spring cleaning, I shook the dust out of the old modules, sorted through and tossed out the junk that's been piling up over the winter, and generally gave the whole place a good scrub and polish. There's something very satisfying about sitting in the middle of a spic-and-span, orderly Drupal site.

If you're just starting out with Drupal, this book is an excellent introduction that will help you get up and running more quickly. Written for beginners, it gives a nice overview of what Drupal is capable of and step-by-step instructions for setting up a basic installation.

I've spent the last 40 work hours or more trying to figure out how to get Drupal to display a right side bar box that says "Ann's Class - 4th Grade." It gives one pause. 40 hours? Forty hours?

I was having trouble getting SSIs to work on this site. Usually my host is good about stuff like that, but maybe they were having an off week. Unfortunately, I really wanted to include a list of links on my sidebar, but didn't want to hardcode them in as I expect them to change fairly frequently. I needed to find a work-around.