I just upgraded my site to Drupal 7. The upgrade went pretty smooth, apart from the migration of my image content which I had to reupload. There is also a change for my drupal rss feed, which changed to another URL due to the upgrade and I'm now using a planet tag too. The old drupal tag is aliased though, so you can keep that if you like. The URL for the planet tag is http://realize.be/taxonomy/term/201/feed and the URL for the drupal tag is http://realize.be/taxonomy/term/50/feed. Planet tags will also be posted on http://drupal.org, so update to your needs.

It was also time for a theme change. I'm using the Sky theme and the Sweaver module to make changes to the css. Not all css is perfect yet, but that will change over the coming days. If you find any other errors, don't hesitate to contact me. In the meantime, have fun reading!

It's around this time of the month that I started working ten years ago. My first job as a web developer started at XS4All, now called Evonet. Visiting the site brought me back immediately to those days, even more because that site is the last project I worked on back then and is still up now. Guess it isn't that badly written :)

A lot has happened during those ten years if you look at the evolution of the internet and web in general. Unless you've been living under a rock, a crucial moment for me was when I discovered Drupal, now over 5 years ago. It allows me to travel all over the world for free, meeting a lot of remarkable people and even speaking on conferences. Sometimes people come up to me and thank me for the modules and patches I've written and give me beer. Seriously, that's freakingly cool! Having a non-programmer background, that amazes me all the time and I'm very grateful for the chances I've been given during all these years.

People often ask me where the passion began. I'm pretty sure it all happened when arriving the first time at Urgent, the student radio I've had a lot of good times as a student and the years after. Somewhere back in 1998, I sat down to get my first e-mail address and saw a little penguin on a black screen. That penguin is now on my wrist. During that time, besides having fun making radio shows - Jazztronautica! - I got interested in the internet and web in general. 'Start learning PHP' someone told me. Back then, 3.0 was out. Turns out he was a real visionair. Living with geeks under one roof together made things go even faster of course, hell, I still have a machine running Dave/Dina at my place. Thanking people on a blog might be a bit corny, but here comes a big thanks to Wiebe, Thomas, Peter and Klaas for the inspiration back then.

I'm not sure what the next ten years will bring. I'm still having a lot of fun and tons of challenges ahead of me, so thank you internet. Please don't leave me :)

It's been a few weeks now since I sold my house where I've lived for 7 years, pretty amazing since I have this internal clock which forces me turn around stuff in my life every 3 years. Who knows if that changed too .. Anyway, I'll be homeless from the beginning of august if I don't start looking around for a new place to spent the next x years of my life - or at least sleep now and then. If you happen to know something around Gent, drop me a note, I'll be very interested to come and take a look if it's me-worthy.

Despite some rumours, I'm not moving out of the country - yet - New York will have to wait for a few years before I settle myself over there. And with the elections coming up, I might be moving to another country faster than expected .. :)

When looking at my resolutions for 2009, I noticed nothing happened yet. But it has been a very interesting year so far and we still have 3 months to go. I can at least predict the concert of the Pixies within 2 weeks will be on the list of highlights for 2009.

Travel: I visited Washington, New York, Paris, London, Paris, Bristol and Norwhich and I probably forget some smallish places. 2 places involved Drupal conferences which might not sound so exciting for most people, but for me it's the right time to get my batteries reloaded. However, I'm getting used to leave my laptop behind now too, equally refreshing.

Coding: there are times I can really profoundly hate what I'm doing, but after a few hours of hacking, mostly during the weekend, my passion is cracking me up. We also had a few good ideas at work which resulted in the release of ND, not fully done yet, but we're getting there. And last but not least, I got to work on the new site of StuBru - but all I got was an unsigned 'lijveken'.

Personal: with all the stuff going on, I can only say I became a few years older in my mind, say 23 ;)

So for 2010, I wouldn't mind if I can't fulfill one of my resolutions.