Drupal does not ship with an RSS feed that will show you the latest comments posted on the site. There is a module called Comment RSS that does the same thing, but I have had some issues with it and did not want the overhead of using another module for something as simple as that. Instead, you can use the Views module to generate the RSS feed. I am posting here the one that I am using. Just import it into your feed and use it.

A while ago, I moved this blog and the other site that I help to run, on to Drupal. After going through various nightmares (the other site had first moved from Blogger to Wordpress.com to Drupal 6 to Drupal 5 to finally settling down with Wordpress 2.5), this is where things stand: This site currently runs Drupal 6 on my own server, while the other one is on Wordpress, on a different host.

The simple and important conclusion for both products is as simple as this: if you intend to make a living running sites that are powered by either software, ensure that you have the patience/tenacity to understand how the software works or find someone to do it for you. Publishing, on a professional scale, is still far from being "push button publishing." Below are some of my observations:

Ease of Install: The out-of-the-box (OOTB) experience for both Wordpress and Drupal is excellent. The only requirement for both is for you to know the database-specific details, once you unzip/untar and upload the files into a directory. While Wordpress, being MySQL-only, gives you only that option, Drupal's installer detects available database support for PHP on your host and it is up to you to select which one you would want to go with. Click through a few screens on both and you'll eventually land up with an admin user and a password in the case of Wordpress and a password set by the user in the case of Drupal.

Configuration: Wordpress supports clean URLs OOTB, provided your host allows you directory level .htaccess. Drupal follows a similar pattern, but I have had trouble getting it to behave with Nginx in anything other than domain/sub-domain root. For descriptive URLs you will have to use the "pathauto" module in Drupal, the "clean URL" module will only display the URLs without any cruft.

So, the deed is finally done. I've moved finally from the Wordpress.com blog to my own digs. The weird thing is that I've been online for close to a decade and I have never owned a domain, nor been on any actual paid hosting setup of my own, so it is kind of weird that the first step I've taken in that direction is to be on a Virtual Private Server. Following is the stack that is powering this site: Web host: Slicehost (256 MB slice) Web server: Nginx0.6.29 Scripting language: PHP 5.2.5 (FCGI) Database Server: PostgreSQL 8.3 Object cache: Memcached CMS Framework: Drupal 6.2 Email: Google Apps for Domains It has taken me close to a month to get the set up tweaked, tuned and backed up to my liking and from the tests that I've done it should hold up well against reasonable traffic levels. If it were to go any higher than that, I'll slap on another slice to it and push the database on to that. It is a bit of a pain to hold a day job and also administer your own servers, but I love the freedom and flexibility it gives me. First impressions: Slicehost: Absolutely stunning service levels with zero problems. I have never pinged support for anything till date and almost everything is well documented. Can't say enough good things about them. The day they would allow me to save instances to deploy new slices based on them, I would be over the moon about it. Though I'll give you a fair warning, if you are not comfortable with the command line, stay clear of it.