Webmonkey, once a premiere resource on the nuts and bolts of web development, is back after a 6 year hiatus and I’m pretty excited about it. One reason is partly nostalgic, of course, since this is the place where I learned about web safe colors, made my first favicon and got serious about PHP/MySQL development. Remember, this was back in the days when Apple was charging $30 for a "preview" of what became OS X and tabbed browsing was only possible with the MultiZilla extension for Mozilla.

Ah, fond memories. I think I still have a copy of their HTML character entity cheatsheet somewhere.

Another reason I’m excited is that Webmonkey recently interviewed Acquia’s founders, Dries Buytaert and Jay Batson. Most of what’s discussed, such as Drupal’s history and future and how Acquia was started, has been already been said before but I did find it interesting that in the interview, Jay alludes to how Drupal’s "Community Plumbing" slogan may soon be on its way out:  read more »

This is a simple Firefox extension that redirects the browser to the secure (SSL) version of the user login and edit pages at drupal.org, drupalcon.org, groups.drupal.org and groupsbeta.drupal.org. The thought behind this was that I didn’t want to expose any passwords while using the open wireless network at Drupalcon Boston 2008.

Installation

Drupal allows creating posting guidelines for content types but not for comments. Countless weblogs and web columns today have comment posting guidelines and I’ve always been surprised that Drupal doesn’t have built-in support for it.

I’d like to see comment guidelines get into Drupal core but I needed a solution right away and starting writing a custom comment_guidelines module. I was almost done with a first draft of the module when I realized that it was much easier to override the comment form using template.php.  read more »

An entry in DreamHost’s official weblog jokingly predicted the future last December when it said, “If your next web hosting bill from us is mysteriously tripled, now you know why.”

In an cruel twist of events, the prediction came true today. Unfortunately, the predicted amount was short by several orders of magnitude. DreamHost’s billing mistake ended up overcharging their customers over US$7M — in one day.  read more »

Front running is usually a good thing, especially when it comes to the success of startups and long-distance runners. It’s illegal in other contexts (such as in the stock market), and the term “domain front running” is now being used to describe what can happen if a company unethically snatches your domain idea in between the time you search for a domain and try to register it.  read more »

A recent client asked us to help prevent members in her online community from using email addresses from throwaway email address providers, and it turned out that we’d already done this before in another project we’ve been working on in our spare time. How convenient! We simply exported the ‘access’ table and imported it into the new project’s database and we were good to go.  read more »

A post on the drupal.org discussion forum recently caught my attention:

I’m running a CMS which restricts access by using OG. As such users are registered to one group or another and in order to do away with unnecessary clicks I’d like a user to be automatically directed to the group front page to which they belong. As such if I belong to the ‘design’ group, the system should automatically redirect me to the ‘design’ home page when I log in. Is there a module that will enable this for me?  read more »

www.scitalks.com is about to launch!

Scitalks is the brainchild of Sam Bogoch. He realized that his wife, Ann Senghas, a psychology professor at Barnard, needed an appropriate place to upload and post lectures on emerging sign languages.

Scitalks is important and needed. In the general trend toward democratizing education, we hope that it can become an important tool for educators, home schoolers and those who are wanting to educate themselves.

You can read more about it on my weblog post at scitalks.com! Check it out everybody!

A client of ours was having trouble recently when uploading files to their Drupal site. Their webhost had set values in the default php.ini file too low (a common limitation of shared hosting), and we needed to increase the upload_max_filesize and post_max_size values. This account was limited more than most and overriding the php.ini defaults the usual way (by adding various lines to the .htaccess or settings.php files) didn’t work at all.  read more »

It’s a wonderful thing when a teacher gets amazing students. Then it’s not so much teaching as letting ideas loose in the room and watching them fly around.

The big question that I had was how to move design exercises that I’d taught using traditional media to the FabLab machines and have the class still be about design and not about learning the machines. This was a tricky thought game for me because the software is obtrusive for those who haven’t been exposed to it, so there would be a double learning curve for the class, especially if someone doesn’t have a design background.  read more »