where is bouncing santa?

Im not really sure this is the right section, so you can move it if you like as its not really a suggestion, but more of an obvservation or 'comment of praise'.

I was editing my account, and noticed in the signature box that is has that little thing on the bottom to resize the box to make it bigger or smaller. That is really cool. Its the first time ive seen it. Today just keeps getting better! Props to you tim for inventing it (wink, wink)!

Oh hey, its on this box too. I think I should just start making webpages again just so I can use this cool new feature.

Just one last then, to let you all know how it's going so far.

I've been living with Mum since November 27th and I don't quite feel settled yet. I need a blind that stops the 5 street lights, all placed within mere feet of one another, from keeping me awake most night for starters!

Dolly is absolutely loving watching all the different birds that come into our garden to the numerous feeders Mum has out. I'm loving watching them too, as a matter of fact it's been ages since I had a garden.

So anyway, on Friday morning I decided to upgrade the site to the latest (stable) release of Drupal, going from 4.7.7 to 5.2 and taking all of the various modules we use with me. 5.x has actually been around for quite a while, but the thought of updating everything had me veering towards the dark side of sticking with what I knew worked already... the problem with that, is what happened to the old Postnuke-based site.

Just thought I should mention - Planet Boinng is 8 today!

How about bringing Buddy back? Sofie and I were talking for a bit, and I got tired of hitting refresh every minute or so to see if there was a new message. Buddy was one of the best features of the boinng of old, and I think it would be a welcome addition to the new site also.

+5 Bonus points if this suggestion is accepted
+15 Bonus points if this is implemented before the end of the year
+100 Bonus points if Buddy is renamed "Andy!"

Difficult decision this one. If you've been on Mars over the weekend, you won't know that hackers exploited a massive security hole in the Cpanel software safeguarding a huge number of websites using shared hosting like this one - they just happened to target Hostgator, our host, which is exactly the sort of luck I needed and I'm sure you appreciated it too. The result was a lot of nastiness based around yet another exploit in Internet Explorer, which I think most of us avoided because I pulled the site before things escalated to that level. If you were looking at the site on Friday in Internet Explorer and you suspect you may have caught anything, try a free scan with the Ewido spyware scanner, it's cleaned up most reported cases from the other sites affected.

not sure how easy this will be to explain...

you know that notice you get at the top of the content when you have new private messages? well, sometimes, i dont click the link right away and might check out a forum topic or comments before i go for the new message. when i click to another page in the site, i get 3 of those notices when i have only one new message. then, if i click back to the homepage (either the logo or the 'home' link) or if i click to my inbox, i get 5 of those nifty lil guys. from there, clicking to any page, there are 3 again. if i click on my inbox link then, there are 5. if i then click back to the homepage again, i get either 3 notices or 1 notice, i guess depending on the site's mood at the moment.

You might notice that In Orbit has returned to the main menu, since I've spent a bit of time getting to grips with Drupal's news aggregator (previously used for World Cup stories). At the moment, the orbiting categories are split into two - Petersfield News for us locals, and Orbiting Members - which is a collection of feeds from members' journals and blogs outside of Boinng. The latests posts from those also now appear in a block on the front page (like the old World Cup stories), or you can go straight to them here - http://www.boinng.com/orbiting-members

Let me know if you've got a fee

This old Planet's been running as a Drupal site for a little over a month now, but there's probably still a few features you haven't found yet...

1. Did you know that Drupal allows you to change your username to anything you like? So if you're slightly embarrased by that five year old nickname, all you need to do is edit your account. Just remember that your login will change!

2. Did you know that there's a few other things you can change on your account page? When you're editing your account, click the "All about me" tab at the top to tell us more about you, and "My favourites" to tell us some of your favourite things. The answers to all these questions will appear on your account page.