Blogs

Drupal Views Boomarks vs 'Promoted to frontpage'

To add granularity to the items in a given view that should be shown on a given list, you can either use:
  1.  Taxonomy terms - has the disadvantage of being listed in the term listing for that node unless you do extra work to exclude the vocabulary
  2. Re-purpose the 'promote to frontpage', or 'Sticky' settings already provide in Drupal - can have side-effects by affecting the promote and sticky features; since this is a 'misuse' of features
  3. Views Bookmarks - This module provides the features of the above alternatives without the disadvantages of either option.

Adjusting element transparency in IE and Firefox

Standards compliant browsers (FF, Safari etc) and IE browsers require different CSS selector definitions to implement transparency. Here is what is necessary to set the following element to 50% transparency.

div#header
    {
        opacity: 0.5;
        filter: alpha(opacity = 50);
    }

Why I stray from Web Standards ...

Being a staunch supporter of Web Standards, I am often at the forefront of implementing new formats and standards as documented by the W3C. Occasionally, I have no option but to compromise Web Standards. In my current situation, I am attempting to start using the element in place of . IE7 and a number of its predecessors are preventing me because they will not display

Website content above the fold?

Always trying to keep web content above the fold is a former-truth that has proven resilient, and is becoming a liability to web-page design today. It has been proven time and again that if your site has an intuitive and interesting design that will capture and keep the attention of your visitors, your visitors will scroll below the fold. Click-tale has recordings supporting this, and that prove the point that more that up to 75% of website users scroll below the fold, and many of them way down to the bottom of the page.

Apple Safari is benefiting Internet Explorer?

The introduction of Safari for Windows might appear to be an attempt to eat away Microsoft Internet Explorer's market-share. On second thought though, most of the people that use Internet Explorer do so because it is the already available Web browser who will not care to replace IE with Safari if they have not already moved to Safari.

Reusable CSS: make your life easier

I have come to find that while using CSS for layout, all hierarchical content is represented as UL or OL lists, and others items are enclosed in DIV or SPAN regions or left as orphan elements. CSS layout based on the above mark-up structure will have some repetitive definitions. For instance, all horizontal menus my require CSS to turn an unordered list into display: inline; layout, set the list-style-type: none; This means that you can make your life easier by creating a set of CSS definitions that can be the basis of all your layout and presentation.

Handling Elaborate projects using Worketc template sub-projects

We all have specialties in what we do, and this results in similar projects, or projects with similar steps. For example, I implement Content Management Systems using Drupal. For each CMS implementation project, there are sub-projects called

Drupal Shell that speeds up doing the things Drupal CMS admins do!

Most of use welcomed the GUI/Graphical User Interface kind of life when it because the norm... OK, remember the first time you used Windows (after using MS-DOS or PC-DOS or worse, Unix Shell)? that is the relief that I am talking about. But like many things flashy, we mostly get bored with the GUI and want to know what is going on in the dark engine-room.

Products, Services, Solutions, what could be the difference?

Things sold to customers for money are often listed as one of the above. It is relatively easy to distinguish products from services:

  • Products are physical are physical entities that are manufactured from raw materials and exchanged on a unitary basis for a fixed cost
  • Services are non-physical entities that are often a result of the application of know-how, skills and technology to transform a given situation

The distinguishing element in the above definition is the physical, and non-physical nature of each entity

A review of the Rackspace CloudSites elastic managed web hosting

Concurrently with my review of the Media Temple (mt) Grid Hosting Service, I took some time to review, and even install Drupal in the Rackspace CloudSites hosting environment. My main motivation for testing the Rackspace CloudSites offering was to find a hosting solution that was monitored, robust, flexible, and extensible.