Whew! This was a long time coming, and just a tad more than a CSS reboot. We rearchitected the pingVision website from the ground up. Since the initial site had started with Drupal 4.5, there was a lot of legacy cruft in the database, left behind by modules no longer in use and, I have to admit, experiments I tried that didn't quite work out. The old site was launched in January 2005, back when Drupal was still pretty new to me. I've learned some things since then.

So we started over, and simply imported the published content, existing users and taxonomy structures. It was a lot easier than tracking down tables, variables and indexes left behind by modules of yore.

The thought of our past years in me doth breed
Perpetual benedictions.

-William Wordsworth, Intimations of Immortality

Two years ago

Wow. Two years ago we launched this pingVision site. Actually, as I write this, it was about two years and nineteen or so hours ago. I had been working with Drupal for several months at that point, helping people when I could and eventually parlaying that activity into some freelance work.

pingVision was the beginning of a formalization of that -- a shingle for a business partnership with my friend and colleague, Katherine Lawrence, as we contemplated a business plan incorporating Drupal web development, DVD authoring and other interactive media notions not yet ready for public discussion, into a coherent plan for world domination ... or at least a means to make a decent living.

Happy birthday, pingVision!

A year ago last week

We forged pingVision into a limited liability company a year ago last Wednesday. Alas, we had no birthday cake on hand -- too busy -- so we at the office just enjoyed memories of the seven-layer fudge cake we had for Drupal's fifth birthday the previous week.

Since that time a year ago,

One of the joys of designing and deploying Drupal distributions is when a new module is released. The developers working on the extended modules for Drupal truly make this the ideal open source CMS for most websites these days. (That's why we use it as our core for nearly all of our web projects.)

Our most recent delight: Jeremy of Kerneltrap has released a completely rewritten spam module, "Spam 2.0." Among its features:

We just updated pingVision to Drupal 4.6.3, a security-fix that addresses another xmp-rpc breach:

The Drupal project has released version 4.6.3 of its open-source content management platform. Drupal 4.6.3 is a maintenance release that fixes problems reported using the bug tracking system. Drupal 4.6.3 also fixes a new security vulnerability in the third-party XML-RPC library that Drupal ships with. Since the same bug is also present in the Drupal 4.5 series, Drupal 4.5.5 is released as well. If you cannot upgrade at once, we strongly suggest that you remove the xmlrpc.php file from your Drupal installation's root directory. The xmlrpc.php file is used only for Drupal to receive XML-RPC calls.

Anyone running Drupal should update immediately. The download tarball is here. Also, if you are running Drupal 4.5.x, there is an update for you here.