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I’m a good bit into upgrading the Global FlyFisher to the latest version of the publishing system. Meanwhile the old site is gasping

It's time for another of these major updates of the tech behind the Global FlyFisher

For a painfully long time in August 2023 the Global FlyFisher was dead and gone. Our DNS-provider stumbled and took all their clients with them in the fall.

GFF is running on Drupal 7, and Drupal 7 is terminal. It’s destined to die. And upgrading is not an easy task, not least because version 10 is already there.

Maintaining a site with close to 18,000 pictures, 11,000+ video links and close to 3,000 articles means having a lot of stuff to keep up-to-date

I have build a small Drupal-module, which enables me to see how many recipients open my newsletters and click on links in it

There’s a bunch of modules to help importing content into Drupal. My experience is that they are inadequate, and don’t do what I need. I prefer DIY.

The blocks of nicely laid out images on GFF has required quite a bit of work to refine.

Lazy loading is a performance improvement where images (and other assets) are loaded when needed, not when the page is loaded

It seems to me that a lot of software problems are solved by adding complexity. It's a bad solution. I hate it.

The GFF video section uses a few neat cowboy tricks to smoothly integrate videos from YouTube and Vimeo into the site

I'm surprised how little web publishers cherish their old URLs. When I browse old links to the outside from our articles, I constantly meet 404-pages. I value GFF’s old web-addresses, and here's how I maintain them.

Google can pick up quite a lot of structured information from your site, and you can help by presenting it correctly

Just the other day the Global FlyFisher crossed the 50,000 node nid mark in the database. GFF is a large site, but still far from any boundaries set by Drupal.

A site as GFF needs some level of caching in order to be able to deliver pages fast without bogging down the server or database

Here's a rundown of the different things I do to keep spammers from posting on the Global FlyFisher

A lot of sites feature a part of the page – typically a top menu – that is fixed to the top of the screen when you scroll down. Here are some thoughts about such a feature and how to do it.

This is the story about the adaptation of the old LeaderCalc spreadsheet to a Drupal module that drives a web based system

The Drupal theme that's used on the Global FlyFisher is home made from scratch. I deplore large and complex themes, and prefer simple and compact.

I reinstated the GFF Newsletter that we stopped sending a decade ago. This article is about the system driving the new newsletter.

This section tells a bit about the technology behind and development of the Global FlyFisher. Nothing at all about fishing or fly tying, but interesting to some.