Category Archives: web

The Art of Pragmatism

The web (or let’s say, the technology underneath the hood) is once again facing an evolutionary step towards becoming more userfriendly for both developers and consumers. I put big hopes into CSS3/HTML5 and a more streamlined production process for creating websites due to less workarounds. With more and more websites haveing heavy usage of ajaxified [...]
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Nodes: Inserting Images

While Drupal provides a lot of extensions and gimmicks, one of the big downsides currently is image handling. Basic image handling, like inserting images into a node’s body field are quite the task to achieve – there’s plenty of approaches but almost all fail at some point. Mostly because of bugs or lack of basic [...]
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Byebye IE6

I am really really tempted to officially drop IE6/5.5/5 support and just show those browsers a big, huge “UPDATE NOW” image ASAP. I can’t tell you *how* very excited I am that it seems like IE6 is going to vanish probably during the next 6 months or so. Life is going to be so easy. [...]
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Say “hi” to drupdater v0.1

After some bugfixing and testing, Drupdater version 0.1 is ready. Not for download yet, tho. I am still trying to find the perfect balance between stability and ease of use. I also rewrote the update procedure to gain performance and stability: Instead of running a synch over the whole “modules” directory, I know Tar/BZip the [...]
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Drupal: Limited drush magic (update)

I was trying to figure out how to create a simple way to keep my 15+ drupal installations clean and up to date with a single mouseclick for a long time now. Of course, drush was the first thing I looked at, but since it is a command line tool and all my clients are [...]
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Drupal: Columns for the Body

Probably not entirely groundbreaking, but a nice way to achieve nice layouts using Drupal + WYSIWYG occured to me about 3 projects ago when I was trying to figure out a way of haveing multiple columns in a page’s body field. Sure, you can do the same thing by using CCK and define a couple [...]
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My Drupal Arsenal V1.1

I previously introduced you to a list of my favourite plugins. Some time has passed and I am able to present to you an updated version of it. New plugins are marked with *, removed plugins are marked with † and the “swiss knife of modules” is marked with a +. Keep in mind that [...]
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Drupal: Session, Cache and other Mysteries

Drupal is a nice and massive tool for deploying websites, but not everything is perfect, as we all know: Session Management: Drupal’s session management is somehow inconsistent. But as I found out later on, it is due to the fact that IE sucks. However, this should be a known problem and the workaround is to [...]
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The IE7-js project

“…make MSIE behave like a standards-compliant browser.” I’ve come across this little script which can be loaded in a conditional statement in your website’s header, to enable old IE versions (<=7) to display certain CSS properties correctly. This will help you to reduce the amount of CSS you have to rewrite for classic IE browsers:  The [...]
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Drupal: WYSIWY(should)G

A rather annoying problem with Drupal is the lack of a *really* standard WYSIWYG interface. WordPress made the example and included TinyMCE as a default which is expandable with a couple of plugins (“TinyMCE Advanced”). Putting together a solution which also allows users to easily upload and include pictures into article texts with Drupal took me [...]
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Xenocode Browser Sandbox

On this website, you can run a browser based “virtual machine” which loads IE 6/7/8, Firefox 2/3, Opera and Safari (all for Windows). Only problem: Requires Windows and IE to run. But still: quite handy if you don’t want to mess around with your installation of win/IE (in my case, the VM running on OSX [...]
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MySQL server has gone away

Like almost everyone, we use shared hosting servers for our websites and most of our clients’ websites aswell. This has advantages (monetary/outsourcing) and disadvantages (no custom configurations, sometimes performance). An error which pops up quite a lot recently, at least around here, is the famous database error: [MySQL server has gone away] This is a [...]
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My Drupal Arsenal

I use the following plugins on every base installation, since it covers (most) of my client’s needs. The * indicates, that this is a plugin which is active on basically every installation. Also, I only run “real” CRON tasks via cPanel options – no virtual CRON triggers. Additionally, I have a test installation which is [...]
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last.fm no longer free

At first, I am no avid last.fm user (or any other webservices in general). I was listening to last.fm radio only very rarely. The big, chunky music library I have at home has some very personal advantages over last.fm. But let’s get to the topic, shall we: even if I agree totally with everyone who [...]
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WTF is Twine?

For all you people “getting old”: Twine is a way to collect, share and connect information, featuring some fancy web 3.0 technology. In a way, it’s like digg + delicious + semantic web functionality. I’m not gonna go deeper for now, if you’re interested, go have a look: What is Twine?
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