One of the criticisms one hears about Drupal is that it does not include a WYSIWYG editor in the the core distribution.  I've never had much of an opinion about this one way or the other.  I do most of my substantial writing locally and use the old copy and paste technique to get the resulting xHTML that is generated into Drupal. 

For a number of years, I used an html editor called HomeSite for generating and testing my web pages and also as the tool for writing articles and blog posts.  It's not a WYSIWYG tool, but I've become quite adept at inserting the xHTML markup as I'm composing text over the years.  My mode of operation has changed recently and this is why:

To set the background for the remainder of this post, bear with me as I digress a bit. I had heard of  Windows Live Writer  (WLW), which is a WYSIWYG blog publishing application and decided to try it out as the tool for composing posts to my WordPress blog.  I had no great expectations as I was quite aware of the bloated xHTML markup generated by other Microsoft products such as Word.  Well, much to my surprise,  WLW not only  interfaced  seamlessly with WordPress, but it also generated efficient xHTML markup too.  And, in my opinion, has a feature set that is comparable with most of the embedded editors I have seen in various CMS and Blog software packages.  End of digression...

This got me to thinking.  Wouldn't it be nice to be able to use WLW with Drupal?  Well, I did some looking around and discovered that there is a 3rd-party module called Windows Live Writer BlogAPI. No doubt I was probably one of the last people in Drupal Land to find out about this!

I downloaded and installed the WLW-Blog API module and it works great.  As a matter of fact, I am sitting here composing this post using WLW.

So what has this all got to do with Drupal not having a WYSIWG editor in the core?  Well, for many who have Windows on their desktops, the absence of a WYSIWYG editor in Drupal's core becomes a non-issue, provided they install WLW.

Now to find a comparable application for my Linux laptop.  Anybody have a suggestion?

I've written previously about my genealogy web site.  The site uses PhpGedView, an open source application, to manage the server side genealogy content. 

PhpGedView, like other CMSs, has a user interface that supports data entry; however, in the case of genealogical data, entering data online is very tedious when there are more than a few updates to apply.  Until recently, I did the data entry and updating locally using  a commercial application called Family Tree Maker.  I then exported the updated information to a GEDCOM file and  uploaded the file to PhpGedView.

This procedure worked well for me until my recent acquisition of a new desktop PC running Windows Vista.  It was no big surprise to find out that my ancient version of Family Tree Maker was not compatible with Vista and I needed to either update it or find an alternative way to do my local genealogy content management. 

I thought about this for a while and decided to see if there were any open source applications that met my needs.  That's when I found the Genealogy Research and Analysis Management Programming System (GRAMPS).  The only problem was that although there is a Windows version of GRAMPS, it is not actively supported by the GRAMPS developers, and, in addition, is dependent of a number of other software packages that are typically present in Linux installations, the most notable of which is Python.  I thought about this for a few minutes and decided that I really did not want to go through the pain of installing GRAMPS on my Vista desktop.  Better to stick with Family Tree Maker in this case.  But then it hit me...I have a laptop that runs Ubuntu Linux!

Until now, I had not used the laptop for much other than your typical web browsing, email and other network-centric activities.  But I figured why not give it something more challenging to do.  So I installed GRAMPS, did a bit of testing and found out that it does everything that I need it to do, and in many cases, does it much better than Family Tree Maker.

And, in  closing, I can finally say that I found a "Killer App" for my laptop running under Ubuntu Linux. 

One caution: if you are running Ubuntu Linux 8.04 LTS, do not install the GRAMPS package included in the distribution.  It is a 2.x version and current releases are 3.x versions.  Instead, download and install the latest Ubuntu 8.04 LTS version from the GRAMPS download page.

Now that I had most of my "legacy" applications running under Win Vista, it was time to turn my attention to the drivers.  The only drivers that were installed to date were those that came with the system, which included drivers for an HP F4280 multipurpose printer.  I had two older printers (an HP 952C and an Epson CX3810) that I needed to find 64-bit drivers for.  So off I went to hp.com and epson.com respectively and found 64-bit drivers for both.  I installed the drivers and both printers were now up an running under Win Vista 64-bit.

The HP PC came equipped with a multipurpose flash memory card reader, so all my various compact flash and SD cards made an effortless transition.  The only remaining device I needed a new driver for was my webcam, which was about three years old.  I didn't expect to find a driver and my expectations were met!  It's been my experience that the webcam vendors rarely bother to provide drivers for operating systems other than the ones that were in existance when the device came on the market.  But all's well anyway, as the webcam remains up and running just fine on the old Win XP desktop.

And so far, other than the webcam, every device I've connected to the USB ports have worked as expected, including my USB-attached hard drive.

That left me with one more application to get running.  I use the Menalto Gallery on my web site.  For batch uploading of images, I had been using Gallery Remote.  Although everything I had read said that Gallery Remote was not compatible with Win Vista, I figured there was nothing to lose by giving it a shot.  As it turned out, there are indeed some problems with it, but the basic file uploading works.  There are problems with local image resizing and a few other nits, but all I ever used Gallery Remote for was batch uploading, so it satisfied my needs.

In conclusion, I've found Win Vista Ultimate 64-bit with Service Pack 1 to be quite stable.  I've had it running 24 x 7 for over a month now with no crashes and all my legacy applications are running just fine.  Is it perfect?  No.  Are there things I do not like about it?  Of course.  But the same can be said for all the operating systems I've used over the years.

In Part I, I had just taken delivery of my new desktop loaded with Windows Vista Home Premium with Service Patch 1 (SP1).  Once I got all the cabling done, it was time to turn the power on and let Vista do its thing.  Vista Home Premium ran through its initial setup and did a reboot with no problems incurred along the way.  I then installed the upgrade to Vista Ultimate, connected to the Internet and downloaded and installed the latest updates from the Microsoft.  Now it was time to find out just how many of my "legacy" applications would indeed run in a Windows Vista Ultimate 64-bit environment.

My first "legacy" install was an HTML editor program (HomeSite 5.5) from Macromedia, which is now part of Adobe.  I have been using Homesite for years now.  Although Adobe has not provided any new releases of Homesite since they acquired Macromedia, they still offer it as a product and maintain a HomeSite Forum which is still quite active.  Vista installed HomeSite 5.5 without complaining, so the next step was to see if the program would actually load and run under Vista.  Much to my surprise, it did, even without setting it to run in Win XP compatibility mode.  I have been using it ever since and have had no problems to date.  As a matter of fact, I'm using HomeSite 5.5 to compose this article.  

Next I tried some of my "mission-critical" open source applications.  I downloaded and installed the latest versions of FileZilla (both client and server), 7-Zip, PuTTY and Wampserver.  All are functioning as advertised and again, none of the programs had to be set to run in Win XP compatibility mode.  Sol far, so good!

I also installed the latest version of a couple of freeware networking tools I use quite frequently (TJPing and Win32WhoIs).  And same for both of them.

There were, as expected, some applications I use regularly that were not Vista compatible.  The most notable of these were:

• Winzip - I had to upgrade to the latest release to get Vista compatibility.  Yes I know I have 7_Zip installed and that Vista also has built-in zip/unzip functionality, but I like WinZip.
• Microsoft Money - same here, but I got a $20.00 rebate, so that easewd the pain a bit.
• CuteFTP Professional - again I had to upgrade to the latest release.  I could have just used FileZilla client on a regular basis, but I prefer CuteFTP as I think its user interface and navigation is much better.

I'm sure that some of the complaints about Vista are well founded, but my personal opinion is that it is not nearly as bad as some would lead you to believe.  Stay tuned for Part III...

I was planning on buying a new PC for a while now.  As I thought about just what hardware and software configuration I wanted, it occurred to me that there was one important decision that I had to make.  The decision wasn't about the PC hardware as this stuff is pretty much commoditized these days.  Rather it was regarding the operating system.  I'm well-versed in both Windows and Linux, but truth be told, most of the applications and tools I use on a day-to-day basis are Windows-centric.  I'm still not convinced that Linux is ready for prime time as my desktop operating environment.

That left me with the choice of continuing on with Win XP or finally dealing with Win Vista.  In the past I had been an "early adopter" of the various incarnations of Windows through the years, starting with the first semi-decent release (Win 95) way back when.  But I was really hesitant to migrate to Vista.  It wasn't due to all the negative press and Vista bashing on forums and blogs.  Those of us who have been around for a while heard many of the same complaints about Win XP.

What was really making me take it slow on Vista was all the things I had been hearing about the lack of and/or support for hardware drivers.  I wanted to continue to use my existing printers, scanner and numerous other peripherals that were in perfectly good working condition (and of course, the financial impact of replacing them all at the same time wa also a consideration!).  A secondary concern was just how well Vista would support some of my older application software packages, some of which had been around since the Win 98 days.

As I was having this great "XP versus Vista" debate with myself, I happened upon a deal being advertised on the Internet site of one of the "Big-Box" stores.  For a reasonable price, I could get an HP Pavilion equipped with an Intel Core 2 Quad CPU, 6GB of RAM, a 750GB Hard Drive, and a bunch of additional bells and whistles.  And a 22-inch Flat Panel Monitor and all-in-one printer/scanner/copier were also included in the bundle.  The operating system was Windows Vista Home Premium 64-bit with an upgrade to Windows Vista Ultimate 64-bit with a mail-in rebate.

I took the hook, ordered the system over the Internet and picked it up at the store a day later.  Stay tuned for the next chapter in this saga...