To learn about Drupal 7 I'm going through Tom Geller's course, Drupal 7 Essential Training, on Lynda.com. In the video about creating user accounts, Tom talks about the site developer's need to understand why the site is being created in order to decide what policies to set for new users:

• can anyone in the world create an account? 
• can only the administrator create one? or
• can people create accounts that will be activated when approved by the administrator?

He ends his tutorial by saying that it depends on whether you are creating the site because you want to publish, or because you want to invite others to comment. That made me stop and think ...

This should not have been a revelation for me – I've done this for a living! But I did not think that part completely through before I started working on this blog-site. My first thought was to create a mechanism to tell our family and friends what's going on with Robert's melanoma so that we don't have to go through the same story and answer the same questions time after time.

So far, however, more of my posts have been about learning Drupal 7. That may be because, until now, that's been more immediate – we have been playing a waiting game on the melanoma front. That's about to change, however, as surgery is only four days away. I suppose that means it's time for me to tell people about this blog, and decide the sign-up will work if they want to comment. That’s a task for tomorrow ...