Technology

This is the third post in a series. I wrote about my experiences moving this website from Drupal 7 to Drupal 10, and then zeroed in on theming the site using Radix as a base theme. Out of the box, Radix subthemes don't generate sidebar regions for block placement, something many websites want.

As a way to illustrate theme development using Radix, and as a recipe for a common site-building requirement, this post will walk through how to add sidebars to a Radix subtheme.

I recently wrote about my experiences migrating this website from Drupal 7 to Drupal 10. In that post I said that I would write separately about my experiences theming the site. This is that post.

I was broadly happy with the look and feel of the Drupal 7 version of the site, so didn't want something vastly different. At the sametime, I wanted to make sure that I was using the most maintainable underlying code, behind what end-users see.

I've finally updated this website from Drupal 7 to Drupal 10. This post runs through my experience of this upgrade, including explaining why I bypassed Drupal 8 and 9, and why I didn't upgrade straight to the latest Drupal 11. Overall, I'm very positive about running it on Drupal 10.

For a long time, this website has had a sidebar giving details of one book (at random) on my bookshelf. That sidebar linked to a page giving the covers of every book on my bookshelf, from where you could get to another page giving a sortable table of covers, titles and authors.

I've temporarily removed that, but plan to put it back.

I've removed it for two reasons.

I run a webserver on Virtualmin, and it also handles incoming email. Sometimes some more details help people apply what I'm about to write to their server, adjusting for any differences they may have. So I'm using AlmaLinux 9.5, Postfix 3.5.25, Procmail 3.22, and SpamAssassin 3.4.6. The system has Perl 5.32.1.

I got errors (Subroutine File::Spec::Unix::canonpath redefined at /usr/share/perl5/XSLoader.pm line 111) after adding the razor crowd-hashing spam detection tool into my SpamAssassin system. Nobody else online seemed to have the same problem. Here's how I solved it, in case it helps anybody else.

This is a note to self, where I'll find it, to switch from using 7-Zip to using NanaZip for Windows. WinZip became redundant when Windows integrated archive files into Explorer, but 7-Zip has good right click integration. For Windows 11, that doesn't work as well, so use a fork called NanaZip.

Today, I had a very annoying problem that I managed to fix. It's a couple of hours of my life that I won't get back, and I found very little online to help me.

So, to help anyone else with the same problem, here's the problem and the solution.

For what it's worth, this is with Fedora 39, KDE Plasma spin. But I honestly suspect that makes little difference. Other distros (Debian, Ubuntu, etc.) are probably just the same.

"MinIO is a high-performance, S3 compatible object store." So says their homepage.

In brief, it's a self-hosted suite of tools to let you run your own storage server that is fully compatible with the Amazon S3 standards. They have a free version licenced under GNU ACPL v3, and a commercial supported version with their own licence.

I'm currently running a computer that uses Fedora Linux, with the spin that comes with KDE Plasma as the desktop (I happen to prefer that to Gnome).

I wanted a script that will download a desktop wallpaper from the internet, and then set that to be my current wallpaper.