June 1, 2010
Update: As of August 2017, this site is no longer managed with Drupal. It is instead a static HTML/CSS site updated by hand. The reasons for this are explained in About this site. Drupal is still a very cool tool, just overkill for my present purposes.
In my work as a web developer at UC Berkeley, I used Drupal for a number of websites, including http://ist.berkeley.edu/, http://technology.berkeley.edu/, and http://inews.berkeley.edu/. My purpose on this site is mainly to provide a platform for downloading my original music, in the form of audio recordings and sheet music PDFs.
I also want to create a blog where I can talk about my work and whatever else catches my interest. Since I want to get away from techie concerns such as managing MySQL databases, site security, server configurations, and so on, I briefly considered using WordPress, and even set up a one-button WordPress install on my web hosting provider. WordPress looks like a great tool for blogging — you actually can get a blog going in a half hour or so, especially if you can live with one of the basic themes (which I can). But I found I need more control over site structure and navigation, with nav menus that make it easy to find particular pieces of content. I'm sure this is doable in WordPress, but I already know how to do this stuff in Drupal and wasn't ready to face a new learning curve.
So I did the one-button deinstall of WordPress and proceeded to the one-button install of Drupal. Now the challenge will be to keep it simple in Drupal. And to integrate this site with my content on Facebook and Flickr. I'm not going to try to duplicate the functionality of those sites. Flickr already does a great job of managing photos, so all I'm going to do here is point you to http://www.flickr. com/photos/kallenemvalts/.