By Dan Kennedy • The press, politics, technology, culture and other passions

Howard Owens is back online

Turns out the former GateHouse new-media guy was converting his blog from WordPress to Drupal. Don’t ask me why — that’s well beyond my meager technical knowledge.


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11 Comments

  1. Adam Gaffin

    Why? Because it’s fun for a certain geeky class of person. Also, Drupal is better for building a big community and is a better content-management system (I almost used the word “robust” there, phew). Not necessarily what he’s looking for in a personal blog site, but I bet it makes sense if your work happens to involve Drupal.’Course, I’m biased: Guess what I use? :-).

  2. io saturnalia!

    Nice impulse control vis-a-vis “robust,” Adam. I suspect you never worked in high-tech PR: then the temptation to use that now-meaningless word would have been impossible.

  3. Ron Newman

    I think of it as meaning “strong” — as in responds reasonably to being overloaded and doesn’t crash when that happens. Does it have some other meaning in this context?

  4. Nial Liszt

    But can you resist coupling Mac and elegant?

  5. Neil

    Howard’s going to require “real” names to comment on his blog, so I figure he’s moving to Drupal because it must have the capability to determine the reality of the names people register with. I thought of registering under a name that though was not mine, was real enough to slip through, so was toying with “Gary Raymond”. I’d prefer “Gulbuddin Hekmatyar” or “Newt Bonfiglio” but though one is real, it is taken and the other, though not taken, is possibly too-obviously not real to get past the patented Drupal real-name-verifier. Nuts. What is reality, after all? In this case what it means is that the name has to be attached to some made-up email account. Similar to blogger comments which must be associated with a made-up blogger account. And we all know how real those are.Over the months Howard will doubtless collect an amusing list of “real” names. One fun thing about spam–some of the auto-generated names are so beautiful: Rigoberto Duffy, Keiko Tijuana… are they real? They should be!

  6. Howard Owens

    Primarily, I’ve been hacked so much on Word Press and my geeky guys that worked for me repeatedly told me how much more secure Drupal is … that’s primary.Also, having worked a lot with Drupal in the past year, I’m more comfortable with it.As for real names … well, if I don’t think you’re using a real name, I’ll block you. I’m the final judge and jury on my blog. Generally, if you’re a troll, I can more easily block you. I’m not going to deal with trolls anymore.Honest people, professionals, never post on the Internet under fake names.

  7. Dan Kennedy

    Of course, I could be claiming that I’m a Kennedy.

  8. Newt Bonfiglio

    Honest people, professionals, never post on the Internet under fake names.That’s so cute!

  9. io saturnalia!

    And so utterly misinformed. Can’t wait to troll on your blog, Mother Superior Howard.

  10. Howard Owens

    You wont’ be trolling on my blog. I control the delete button.

  11. Fenton Rosewater

    In other words you’ll just be doing what any other blogger can do–calling anyone whose comments annoy you a “troll”, and deleting their posts. Fair enough of course, it’s your blog, but there’s no need to make being heavy-handed on the delete button sound like toughness, and it has nothing to do with the supposed reality of the names people use to register. Since you cannot detect trolls based on registration names (because alas, Drupal apparently has no such function after all), but rather only by the content of people’s comments, the requirement of providing a “real” name is misdirected. Look at Dan’s blog for example. Interesting content manages to get through daily, posted by the wackiest of monikers!

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