Last week I finally uploaded to Drupal.org the Vineyard theme - ie the theme I created and use for openlife.cc. Releasing the theme as open source is something I always planned of doing, but never really got round to it. I'm especially proud of the fact the theme looks different than most Drupal themes I've seen, so I hope others can use this as a basis for creating nice sites.

In June I upgraded the Drupal version running OpenLife.cc. Unfortunately I forgot to turn on caching again - or maybe I didn't even understand it was so important. Turns out requests to the front page without caching on would easily use up 7-15% of the shared server's CPU, per request!

I've been enjoying a nice vacation - the Sun is shining, so to speak :-). But a couple of days I've enjoyed upgrading www.openlife.cc to a newer drupal version, and also adding some much delayed blogging and Web2.0 enhancments.

Notes about the upgrade process (Drupal 4.7 to 6)

I had never upgraded openlife.cc, so I had to go through 2 major version upgrades. To do this, I created a staging site on my laptop so I could spend several days fixing things that would and did break when upgrading.

If you are reading this it means the nameserver update is in effect and we have officially moved to a new web hotel. From its inception openlife.cc has been located on a GoDaddy.com server, and almost from day one I had my doubts about it: "BTW, is this GoDaddy server slow or what? Or is it just Drupal? I wonder what will happen when I actually get some visitors." Now I know what happened. After the site was added to planetmysql.com, response times went from slow (like 20-30 secs) to unusable (60 secs, which means 50% of the time you'd just stare at a white page after page timeout). I already relocated the Finnish sister site avoinelama.fi some time ago, and actually regretted my first choice of hosting provider DreamHost, only to find out that the current one HostGator, wasn't perfect either (doesn't support unix style directories /~hingo/, but at least allows a hacked redirect to save the day).

Modified by Henrik Ingo from
original picture by "Just Taken Pics'" @ Flickr. CC-BY

I haven't written much on this blog related to my work. There's a simple reason: Apart from some welcome exceptions, my work at Sesca is not at all related to Open Source. And even when it is, we are not supposed to talk about our work much in public. Also, as a manager my work is rather boring sometimes, not something I'd want to write about.

All of this is about to change though. On Monday I will start working as a Sales Engineer (or some call it "pre-sales consultant") for MySQL! Here's a list of things I'm looking forward to:

Last week I was supposed to be in Spain for the Free Software World Conference. I was invited there to give a short speech, but due to some last minute changes I had to stay in Finland. Just as well, because then I caught a really bad flu, so I wouldn't have enjoyed air planes and hot weather that much.

I'm glad that somebody has already asked how he could contribute to the collaborative version of Open Life. We came to the conclusion that the collaborative edition will be a completely new book, written in collaboration by all of us who want to be a part of it. The new book will be called "Open Life 2.0" as a working title. The "old book" will be referred to as "Open Life 1.0"

In the second part of this "The making of..." series, I will tell a little about setting up www.openlife.cc with Drupal.

The domain name

Already when I was publishing the Finnish book I prepared for an eventual translation and had in mind the name "Open Life". Unfortunately, domain names like openlife.org, openlife.info and openlife.net were already registered then, although none of those had functioning websites. I believe openlife.com might had been free, but even so, a .com name didn't feel appropriate. So instead of paying hundreds of dollars to transfer those to me, I did a trick I've used earlier too, I added a dash and registered open-life.org instead.