Hearth.ws is a simple Drupal site with a single purpose: to bring together all of the feeds from the unrev.org entelechy into one site. At a glance, users can see all of the latest content from Free Language, Freestyle Language, Money Flows, Mandarin Chinese Info, Small World Servers, Free Wiki, Free Music Software, Free the Sounds, Anonymous Photo, woodriff.org, Drupalize.org, Babel Stack, Conscious Manifestations, Conscious Manifestations dot com, Freely Renewable, Opal Myth... and so on. Basically, all the sites in the entelechy, some of which are still in the works.

I used the core Drupal Feed Aggregator module to achieve bringing all of these feeds together into Hearth.ws. Every 12 hours, the Feed Aggregator updates itself via cron.php and all of the latest content is dynamically pulled into the aggregator and displayed on the front page, with the latest five articles from each site featured on the front page. :)

I have just installed Drupal 6.0rc2 at Hearth.ws.

For quite some time now I have been meaning to set up an aggregator for all of the unrev.org web entities. I wanted to be able to have it all come together in one place. Not just that, the desire was to be able to clearly show the entire unrev.org entelechy on one page, dynamically.

Take that and add the ability to condense all those feeds into one, and a very powerful syndication mechanism emerges.

In toying with theme choices, I originally went with Splender. However, I found out that it didn't support "no sidebars", and the content stayed in the middle with blank spaces right and left where the blocks would be. So I switched over to Nista, another really simple, fast theme that allows content to fill in the sidebar area when no sidebars are displayed.

I chose not to add a single contributed module to keep it really light. (That said, I will install and use the Poormanscron module once it is updated to Drupal 6.) The purpose of the site is so straight forward, and the number of url aliases relatively minimal as they are limited to a single feed aggregator category and each feed, that Drupalers can get away with a nearly strictly core + theme instance of Drupal.

For other sites that I use to aggregate larger amounts of feeds in this way, I would sure like to have the Pathauto module take care of paths generated by the core Feed Aggregator module. This is something I must make a feature request for. I have wanted this since early versions of Drupal.

I am noticing some sweet upgrades to Drupal with the new version 6. The positioning of blocks is smooth as heck, editing menus is a breeze, heirarchy of vocabulary takes a fraction of the time it used to, some core lingo has been changed (access control -> permissions, news aggregator -> feed aggregator, categories -> taxonomy) and major update/upgrade support has been kicked into the system. I am particularly impressed by this last point, as the system itself keeps you up to date with key info about the Drupal version, modules, themes, translations, etc that you are working with.

Back to Hearth.ws (and Earth): Overall, it was a super-simple install, and now I just have to finish adding all the feeds from the many web entities unrev.org is currently upholding.

This is the start of a new way to keep track of all my "drupaling".

I have too many Drupal sites all over the place and I need to harness them into one unified web entity. They will remaining individual and poignant in content and style, with each individual entity of the Gestalt must feed the other entities, in turn receiving a symbiotic traffic flow thanks to the technology available once you step up to the Drupal platform.

Core modules such as Feed Aggregator make this all possible.