Albin.Net - friendly web development, graphic design & computer support

“Perl on Pogosticks” and other framework nonsense

John — Sat, 03 May 2008 01:04:05 -0700

Over at Brainnovate, Scott Miller writes that a CMS is bad for innovation. Now his opinion is clearly biased and ignorant of how innovation actually occurs, but there are some points I would like to clear up…

“Just because I haven’t personally used it, I do know a thing or two about Drupal. It *is* a powerful piece of software.”

The swing…

“However, at the end of the day it is still a CMS, not a framework […] in its own right.”

…and a miss! Actually Drupal is much more powerful than Scott knows. Because it’s both a CMS and a framework with an extensive API.

Making a promiscuous TinyMCE abstain

John — Sun, 23 Mar 2008 15:44:54 -0700

Here’s a quick one if you are in need of a noon-time distraction. If you’ve ever used the WYSIWYG editor TinyMCE, called “tiny mice” by some, then you know that it likes to hook() up with every <textarea> that it sees.

The results of this promiscuity range from annoying (I don’t need a HTML editor for a log message!) to the disastrous (?*$! That HTML editor just stripped the newlines from my list of pages in “Page specific visibility settings!” Oh, the humanity!)

Talking about Zen and Theme Settings API

John — Thu, 28 Feb 2008 06:02:31 -0700

I was just interviewed by Jeff Robbins for Lullabot podcast #55. I’ve listened to this Drupal-lovin’ podcast since its inception, so it was pretty cool to be asked to do an an interview.

We mostly talked about the Zen theme, which I’ve put a lot of work into and, if you don’t already know, is a fantastic foundation from which to build your own custom-designed Drupal theme.

Zen 1.0 theme now available for Drupal 5

John — Thu, 14 Feb 2008 06:40:33 -0700

After a month and a half beta period with only 5 bugs discovered (and squashed), the O-fficial Zen 5.x-1.0 version has been released. Yay!

Thanks to everyone who helped with new features, bug fixes and documentation suggestions! The help is greatly appreciated!

Fixed “elusive login issue” in Drupal!

John — Wed, 14 Mar 2007 13:59:43 -0700

Back at the beginning of February, chx (a Drupal master coder) posted a story to Drupal’s homepage asking for people to come together and work on an “elusive login issue” that people had been reporting for over a year. Some users were reporting that no matter how many times they tried to login to Drupal, they would be promptly put back in front of the login form without the anticipated “Unrecognized username or password” error message.

“Design for Drupal!”

John — Fri, 09 Mar 2007 13:43:15 -0700

Steven Wittens was a co-creator of Drupal’s beautiful default theme, Garland. And he has a thought-provoking post about the current state of design in the Drupal community and his frustrations in trying to improve it.

Fixing Drupal core!

John — Tue, 12 Dec 2006 12:37:00 -0700

Drupal 4.7.4 has a bug in it regarding story previews. The teaser preferences allowed you to set the maximum length of a teaser, but the underlying code treated it as the minimum length of a teaser.

So, say you wanted a teaser that was 400 characters or less; what you would get was a teaser that was always 400 character or more. Ouch.

We’re in the Paper!

John — Thu, 20 Apr 2006 13:23:23 -0700

We’re in the paper today. Check out the Ahwatukee Republic section of the Arizona Republic.

Everything you ever wanted to know about Essential ICMP traffic (but were afraid to ask rfc792)

John — Mon, 19 Dec 2005 15:22:55 -0700

Information on how to create a firewall using ipfw is hard to come by. I’ve found bits and pieces of useful information in various places. I’m working on creating a tutorial on how to configure ipfw for Mac OS X, but in the mean time, here’s some information on the extremely low-level internet packet, ICMP.

“Bullet-Proof” Rounded Corners

John — Fri, 09 Aug 2002 10:07:00 -0700

I started this exercise with a simple bordered div which contained four divs that each had a background-image and that were positioned in each of the corners. This worked great in Mozilla 1 and Netscape 6, but not anywhere else. As I fixed bugs in each of the other browsers implementations, I ended up with this code.