Borderland

I’ve had a class website at tellraven.us for about a year and a half. Before I set that up, numerous requests to the school district for server space got the same agreeable but non-responsive responses, so I did what anyone with a little knowledge and desire would do given the present state of the Internet. I got my own site.

I learned about an offer of free server space for US teachers. It took about two days to activate the account. Excellent. Too bad I didn’t know about that sooner.

Then came the choices. I set up a drupal system that ran there more or less trouble free for a year and a half. I had content and comment moderation. I used the site for student blogs and for posting links to web resources that I wanted the kids to have. I had to weed out a little spam every day or so from the comments moderation queue, and that was a nuisance. But otherwise, the system ran well.

I did not, though, maintain a schedule of regular upgrades, and the drupal development team moved on without me. They’re now on version 5.2. My class site used version 4.2, I think. When I tried to upgrade the site at the beginning of this school year, it broke. I don’t have the technical chops to fix whatever went wrong. So I reinstalled the site from my backups, and set it up in a subfolder. I installed the most current version of drupal in another folder. I call the old site “Archives.”

I didn’t want to do this, though, because I know that anyone who has previously linked to specific content will now get an error message. Maybe there’s a way to remedy this??? Htaccess rewriting, maybe? I wish I’d put the site in it’s own folder to start with so I didn’t have to move it. No. What I wish is that I knew how to upgrade the software properly, and figure out what to do when I get the “white screen of death.”

My other, bigger, question is about whether it’s important to upgrade site software. I did it because I hoped there’d be new features that might help me do more with the site. But, while I may have gained some things, I’ve also lost a couple of features and committed myself to having to learn a new set of admin controls. A lot of people hate doing this stuff. I don’t. But I’m also not real good at it, and it takes me a very long time to get it right.

My solution is just a workaround, I know. But now I’ve got a new site in development that I’m pretty excited about. I’ll link to it once I get it to do what I want. I’ve switched on all kinds of new features. I want to allow the kids to vote on each others’ contributions. It will have a page, or pages, for RSS feeds. Better spam controls. AND, if I can find all the right switches, we’ll have more than one classroom using the site, with other teachers administering their own students’ work. I’ve got my fingers crossed on that one.

That’s what I’ve been doing lately, anyway. Messing around, building something interesting.