Tech Tutor

Tech tutorials and advice from a web guy who uses Drupal and the things that make it work.

Oh, Fido

5 Oct 2011 - 18:06

This August I bought a snazzy Sony Ericsson Neo during my trip to Estonia. For my two weeks there (using my local, Estonian number) it was my portable Wi-Fi router and I could access my work computer half a world away while we were doing 100 km/h driving between Tallinn and Tartu. It was my first experience having a self-contained, 24/7, mobile internet workspace and it was pretty cool.

CCK fields saved in DB differently depending on # of content types using them

19 Nov 2010 - 00:46

I recently had the unfortunate experience of having to alter SELECT statements between my dev machine and testing machine since the database structure, which should be an exact match, had somehow changed between the two. Everything worked at good ole' localhost, but when I uploaded to the testing server, no query results were forthcoming.

That was Easy!

13 Oct 2010 - 17:15

Yesterday I sat down for 20 minutes with a friend who wants his website re-done. Until now he has had what I would call a proof-of-concept version that I threw together years ago as a starting point. (an online equivalent of a paper-based wireframe) I guess he was satisfied because we never subsequently sat down to develop any actual look/feel or functionality requirements. The site just stayed that way - even the bogus content I entered as placeholder text.

3531 is my car stereo's unlock code

7 Oct 2010 - 00:00

My 1995 Volvo has a stock radio/cassette player (yes, cassette player) that has a self-locking anti-theft feature. Specifically, if the radio is disconnected from its power source (for instance, if the car battery is disconnected) the radio asks for a code before it will play. I don't know how many radio thefts this feature has prevented, but I suspect it's not too many. A potential thief would have to recognise ahead of time that, if stolen, the radio will be useless without its special four-digit code.

View results into a dropdown

24 Sep 2010 - 21:38

A department at work organises and hosts events on a regular basis and they finally wanted to get their info up on the website. However, even before they had their first events listed, they wanted an archive of past events and wanted to have a dropdown on their page which listed monthly archives (ie. September 2010, August 2010 etc.). I decided to approach this using Views. Building the view to list past events was no problem, but loading this information into a dropdown was much more involved than I had expected.

Skype ruins my layout

15 Sep 2010 - 17:35

I recently noticed that the main menu of a site I work on had an approximately 5x5 px white box at the beginning of the main menu that shouldn't be there. Some pages had it while others didn't. I tried to right-click and "Inspect element", but my context menu was the kind you get when you right-click on a Flash object. Huh? I didn't have any Flash on that page.

For Krista, an IE user

23 Jun 2010 - 08:33

Pesky space screwed up string comparison in javascript

18 Apr 2010 - 11:25

I implemented a small script to recognise IE 6 or 7 browsers and tell them to upgrade or switch away from IE totally. It's a jQuery fade-in box at the top of the page. After offering that the user should either upgrade or switch to another browser I provide a "hide this warning for the rest of your visit" link. Clicking the link sets a cookie value that is then used to hide the IE warning for the rest of the session. (ie. hide_ie_warning = 1)

When does content type count get ridiculous?

14 Apr 2010 - 21:43

This is just a small, personal site built for experimentation and fun, but I already have 8 content types to choose from when I want to add a new article. Without fact checking, I think Drupal has about 3 content types (Page, Story and Blog?) when freshly installed. However, the templating system in Drupal is so powerful and, dare I say it, intuitively structured that - once you get it - it's easy to have an explosion of content types and corresponding template files to suit your needs. But when does it get out of hand?

Inline list items were breaking where they shouldn't

12 Apr 2010 - 12:46

One of my Drupal modules (combined with a node template) looks for (intra-article) anchor links at the beginning of the article code and then dynamically builds a menu with these links at the top of the article. (This was a somewhat messy but effective way of bringing old content with anchor links into a new environment without having to re-write the old article code.) So what? Well, it turns out a lack of white space / line breaks in my code was messing with my layout. I'll try to show you what I mean.

Do you use Drupal's Schema API?

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What's Drupal?

32%

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