So here goes:

Make a file available without HTML extension:

RewriteRule ^article$ article.html [nocase]

Redirect to another path:

RewriteRule ^nice-article$ /articles/nice-one [nocase,redirect=permanent,last]

Remember to start the redirect path with a slash!

Redirect users ‘guessing’ an archive URL to the correct URL:

RewriteRule ^(20\d{2})$ /archive/$1 [redirect=permanent,last]

Redirect users to the domain name with www. prefix added:

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^domain.com$ [NC] RewriteRule ^(.*) http://www.domain.com/$1 [L,R=301]

Remember that you can combine multiple RewriteConds by adding them before the RewriteRule.

And finally, these are the flags shortcuts:

nocase|NC last|L ornext|OR redirect|R =[HTTP redirect status code] or [temp|permanent|seeother]

There I was, searching a way to migrate content from Nucleus (version 3.3x) to Drupal 6.
Some ‘migrate’, ‘import’ or ‘xxx2drupal’ modules for Drupal could be found, but none of them were suitable for Nucleus source data. It also seemed like some HTML fiddling was required to really make the content ready for publication on Drupal.

I decided to learn some Ruby and a bit of Drupal’s database scheme by processing exported Nucleus tables and transforming them into INSERT statements for Drupal’s tables. Countless hours were wasted learning how to preserve articles, comments, authors, categories and more…

The little Ruby script eventually did the trick. Now that it’s practically too late to be of any use (it’s been almost two years!), I’m nonetheless enticed to release nucleus2drupal.rb v0.1 onto the pipes.

If you want to try, here’s how it goes:

• Unpack nucleus2drupal.
• Export your Nucleus tables (category, comment, item, member) using phpMyAdmin into the queries-source directory (nucleus_category.sql, etc).
• Modify the query templates in the queries-insert/ directory so that they’ll work for your Drupal database.
• Take a look at nucleus2drupal.rb itself and the settings (and warnings) therein.
• Execute ./nucleus2drupal.rb.
• If the resulting SQL files (directory queries-insert/) look okay, then execute them against your (test!) Drupal database.

I’ve tried to clean up most hard-coded specifics, but your mileage may vary. Remember to pay close attention to text encodings along the way if your content is beyond plain ASCII.

Should you eventually fail, let me know how you’re liking that Migrate module instead

However, this input format is very complex and not very flexible.

An existing ‘link component’ patch to flexifilter is much more compact and easier to configure.

In my view, that’s the nice thing about flexifilters: you don’t need to dabble in code if you want to change or configure an input format. Instead all parts are small and self-contained, configurable units.

In this case, a dip in the code was unavoidable because of a known bug. While at it, I also built in support for clean URLs trough the pathauto module. The result is in the issue queue.

For easy installation, you can download the filter here as an installable module: flexifilter_wiki_url.tar.gz. Feedback is welcome…

Ik wel. Aanvankelijk. Na twee weken werd het me te machtig

Update: een helpdesker van Fortis PC Banking weet meer…

Hun reisblog belooft interessant leesvoer te worden: yugo-where-we-go.blogspot.com/

Veel plezier alletwee!

For fun and profit, I decided to check whether you can truly send SMS messages for free using Twitter (Wikipedia).

Yes, it does work, except that you can only send to other Twitters — the free part is more about receiving SMSes rather than sending them. So every receiver that you want to SMS needs to be registered with Twitter. Nonetheless, a pretty impressive improvement!

Especially since you can send the messages in a Jabber client (including Google Talk / GMail chat), right on the PC, typing on a decent keyboard.

The trick is to register the mobile with twitter, and setup your mobile to receive only so-called ‘direct’ Twitter messages.

Then, in the chat client, add twitter@twitter.com as a contact. Talking to this service you can send direct messages with “D [username] [message]“.

You get 250 mobile messages per month. Do keep it quiet before the big telcos find out and decide to block it!

Go look at the call for devrooms at the spiffy new FOSDEM 2008 website.

Speaker interviews for this edition are planned, but not yet available.

Trying out the examples in the book, I was a bit disappointed about the templating system in Rails (called ERB). This is just the same ugly HTML/code/indentation/tag soup mess as one would get with PHP. I’d expected someone would have solved this issue by now, preferably in an elegant, Rails-consistent way.

And lo and behold, via the Riding Rails webblog I notice the existence of Haml, “Markup haiku”. Elegant, readable, indentation-aware — and simple and efficient. Great.

Except for on thing: all code expressions only affect one line, which means that loops and conditionals with markup in them just don’t compile. Which you wouldn’t need anyway if everything is nicely componentized and such, but it still would be handy sometimes. Maybe in a next version?

It’s amazing to see how the conference has grown, and how much people the ULB campus can handle…

Skimming the blog posts about FOSDEM, some lovely quotes about the conference are revealed. Words like “well organized” and “best I’ve been to” weren’t absent. So it definitely seems like we’re on a good track. In fact, the only thing that could make future editions fundamentally worse instead of better is that the event would become too big… Already, most of the devrooms were slightly undersized.

I’ve noticed that for many projects, a devroom at FOSDEM serves as a mini European conference on its own right. Add to this the two main tracks — which draw another kind of public on their own, and the successful lightning talks, and you get a very tightly packed conference. Which will not change in the future, because there really is no other option for the location at ULB. Where else would you find affordably three ( — one huge and two fairly large) auditoria plus countless classrooms nearby, all being that close to a city center and an international airport?

I finished the weekend with some fellow organizers in a nice typical restaurant, which was fun. I managed to forget my jacket there, but was able to go pick it up a week later.

It’s weird (and fun) to really be a part of the “organizing team”, although I’ve helped out at the infodesk for quite some years now, so I already knew some faces. With me now knowing the other organizers a bit better, and their being such fantastic dudes, logic predicts that I’ll be a bit more involved next year.

In the weeks before the conference, I made an effort to draw some attention to our website. The results were not bad, but not exceptionally good either. And guess what happened the day before the event… Worldwide, blog engines were fired up and spit out an avalanche of organic word-of-mouth FOSDEM buzz… completely effortless.

I think we can consider us lucky if nex year’s FOSDEM can be as good as this one… We’ll certainly aim for it.