Serendipity

Yesterday, I was looking for information about authentication hooks on drupal.org, when I spotted a forum request for a drupal developer to rebuild grouphug using drupal. I find grouphug fascinating, but didn't think much of the post at the time.

Four hours later, there was a follow up post about how to keep the old URLs with a drupal site. Having dealt with this issue with the gallery migration from PostNuke to Drupal, I posted an answer, then realized I could probably reuse my scripts to help this guy out. I sent an email, and about one minute later, received a reply from the site creator, Gabriel Jeffrey.

We chatted for a while. I think the combination of grouphug fan and drupal expert convinced him, so I'm now part of the site conversion project. I'm terribly entertained by the prospect, and managed to finish the confessions import last night. The site has a forum, with users and discussions, and those might take slightly longer. I suspect the scripts from the gallery migration will work for them.

Today I met (as far as online meetings go) Gabe's partner in conversion, Erik Swedberg. Gabe is in Boston, but Erik is local. The meeting was quite entertaining, almost like an online blind date: here's everything about me, what about you? Turns out, Erik and I both went to the Yahoo! hackday, two ships passing in the night.

The grouphug project should be fun.

I should redesign this site quickly, though, in case I get a link from Gabe when this is over. This design has been up too long, and it's stale and BOR-ring.