Hi there :-)

Welcome the Richard@Home's new Drupal powered blog. If I have any regular readers left, you will have seen this site evolve through a few incarnations:

1. A custom blog engine, written from scratch in PHP (http://richardathome.no-ip.com courtesy of the way back machine). Hosted on my home PC, I experimented when blogging was young adding more and more functionality as I went along. It worked well enough, but I found I spent most of my time tweaking the blogging engine instead of blogging. With that in mind, I moved onto...

2. ...a hosted Wordpress blogging service which has served me very well for the last 3 years. Wordpress is an excellent, free blogging service but the free service has several limitations, top of the list for me (a coder) is its absolutely atrocious inability to mark up code examples. I also found myself using services like twitter and del.icio.us which I wanted to integrate into my blog in a more fluid manner. It seemed like a false ecconomy for me to pay to ugrade my Wordpress account and still be unable to customise it in the ways I wanted.

3. Which leads me to version 3 of Richard@Home. I chose Drupal because we've started using it at work for a couple of big client sites and I've been very impressed with its ease of use, range of features and ease of customisation. 90% of our clients needs are provided for out of the box or via free 3rd party modules.

   I've also taken the opportunity to try out a new hosting provider (www.one.com). So far, so good :-)

So what now for Richard@Home?

• A more regular blogging schedule (I'm aiming for at least one main article a week) with a focus on web development covering CakePHP, Drupal, (X)HTML, Javascript, MySQL & web standards.
• Random rants and opinion on anything lucky/unlucky enough to cross my path.
• A new theme. I'm starting off with the Acquia Marina theme (a very nice theme), but I'll be developing my own unique theme as time allows.

If you have any comments or suggestions for articles or tutorials, get in touch :-)