ted serbinski – a blog about drupal, macs, productivity, health, and bmws

UPDATE: Earl comments below how this is already built in. Two different ways to achieve a similar result, each with their own pros/cons.

Hats off to Earl Miles and the rest the views developers they have done a tremendous job with Views 2. While the interface is entirely different from that of Views 1, it is so much more intuitive that within a few minutes I had quickly forgotten my bewildered "oh no, I know nothing" look :)

From reading all of the docs and quietly watching development commits, I knew Views 2 was going to eliminate a lot of the Views 1 helper modules and open up a whole new world of awesomeness. While I haven't seen many blog posts detailing just which functionality/modules have been replaced with Views 2, I wanted to kickstart things with my own discovery as I played around with Views 2 quite thoroughly this afternoon.

With Views 1, to build an alpha pager you would use the views alpha pager module in conjunction with your view. But what about Views 2?

Getting Drupal to play nice with your CDN can be a bit of a hassle. You have to make sure your assets (like JS, CSS, and image files) work not only on your webserver but when copied to the CDN, are served from there instead of your webserver. There is one Drupal module, the CDN module that attempts to make this a bit easier but right now, it's not in production, and in my opinion, is a bit too complicated. There is a slightly easier way :)

How do you keep an Apple Macbook cool? Simple: ice.

Seriously.

I have a first generation Macbook Pro that is known for it's overheating and fan issues. My laptop is no longer under warranty and I don't want to shell out a lot of $ to replace the motherboard and fans.

Initially, not much of a problem. A fantastic program, smcFanControl allows you to adjust the fan speed based on your computer temperature. A manual process but my laptop is still usable.

That is, till the right fan completely dies. Running one fan at full speed is not enough for this Macbook -- this sucker gets really hot. Continue reading to see how I built my own solution...

My brother wrote an excellent article on how to connect Drupal and Silverlight. This is pretty indepth and shows what needs to be done on the Silverlight side to work with a simple XML-RPC Drupal module. Definitely worth checking out, great job bro!

Last week we were in upstate Michigan and went to see the Paulding Light just outside of Watersmeet, MI. This is a mysterious phenomenon of blinking lights, that almost looks like a mini star.

You can read more about the Paulding Light here and also find directions and other theories that try to explain where this light comes from.

When we saw it, there was a pathway that followed the power lines that looked like you could walk closer to the light. We walked a bit but the light never appeared larger. Some other folks there that night walked considerably closer and they said they never saw the light at all--despite us saying we saw it a few times as they walked! So it disappears as you get closer, crazy!

Below is a short movie I made putting together clips from our cameras that we had. Can't wait to go back next year with some more equipment to explore!

The .htaccess file included with Drupal tells Apache to send all 404 requests to Drupal to handle. While this is great in some cases, the performance degradation can have a huge impact on a site that has millions of users.

When Drupal processes a 404, it has to bootstrap Drupal, which includes Apache loading up the PHP process, gathering all of the Drupal PHP files, connecting to the database, and running some queries. This is quite expensive when Apache can be told to simply say "Page not found" without having to incur any of that overhead.

Now you might say your site doesn't have any broken URLs as you haven't changed any. Well that's great, but as your site grows, it is going to be a target for spammers and hackers. They are going to start requesting all sorts of file to see if they can find an exploit. Instead of bootstrapping Drupal each time to tell them that DLL file doesn't exist, it would be much better if Apache could just say that, to save resources for your real users.

So, what can you do? How can you stop Drupal from handling 404s but not break modules like imagecache?

At the ParentsClick Network we are soon to be rolling out many more sites on our platform. Because of our unique community API (which I will be detailing in a future post) we are running many sites (many not yet released) on the same install of Drupal, with the same database, and no shared tables. Yes, no typos there. More on just how that works in a later post.

One thing we have to do is change the theme based on the URL, along with a host of other things. ZivTech recently posted about changing themes, but for our setup, we need something more low level. Hence this technique.

SimpleFeed 2.1

SimpleFeed 2.1 has been released, grab it while it's hot!

This release fixes a number of outstanding issues and greatly improves the robustness of SimpleFeed. Highlighted fixes include:

* Critical update, fixes updating of feed items to use the new unique identifier, before it only made it through 50 items, causing duplicate headaches
* Unique identifier for feed items now relies on a combination of title & link, which will pave the way for updating changed feed item bodies later
* Support for much longer length URLs
* Improved database indices
* Fix expiration of feed items so it can run properly as anonymous user cron

Well, it took longer than I expected (announced it a couple months back), but I'm pleased to announce that my Blueprint Drupal Theme has been released!

This theme uses the most excellent Blueprint CSS framework to setup a starter Drupal theme to make theming websites faster and easier, especially in the cross browser area. The benefits of this framework include:
* An easily customizable grid
* Sensible typography
* Relative font-sizes everywhere
* A typographic baseline
* An extendable plugin system
* Perfected CSS reset
* A stylesheet for printing
* Powerful scripts for customizing your layout
* No bloat of any kind

Compared to the YUI grid CSS, I find Blueprint simpler and more elegant. I have used both frameworks on various projects and the Blueprint has consistently been easier and faster to work with.

MothersClick is a flourishing site that is growing very quickly. As such, tracking user behavior with Google Analytics is becoming very important as it helps to determine how to adjust the site to better meet the needs of our users. And now, as we prepare to launch our full ParentsClick Network of sites, we need to track what they are doing across our network of sites.

Well thankfully Analytics makes this easier through its ability to track outbound links and cross domain links. But the problem then arises, who is going to update all of those hardcoded links with Javascript code? Is there an easier way?