Front page access denied errors
I was trying to look at my very own site, which you see here, before I did the upgrade to Drupal 5.6. I got “access denied” errors on the home page! After a little bit of trial and error, where I...
View ArticleOur long electronic domain nightmare has ended
Yes, I forgot to renew my domain. Yes, that became a real pain very quickly when I realized what the repercussions were. For future generations, I suggest not having to deal with this when: you want to...
View ArticleSeeking Drupal 6 modules
In order to figure out if I can upgrade to Drupal 6, I have to review the compatibility of the following modules I use under Drupal 5: Bad-Behavior account_reminder acl actions akismet amazon_filter atom...
View ArticleGoogle Analytics plunge due to module change?
It looks like some recent change to the Google Analytics module for Drupal 5 broke my link to the Analytics service. Well, I’m being overbroad there. It really was working, but apparently only tracking...
View ArticleDrag and drop tabs in Safari
Frankly, I had utterly ignored drag and drop tabs in Safari. This feature didn’t work in older versions of the app and only appeared in Safari 3, so I hadn’t yet adjusted to it. The recent article on...
View ArticleWhen I ruled the world?
Does anyone else think that Apple has some ulterior motive for promoting Viva la Vida, the track on the new iTunes ad featuring Coldplay? That maybe its lyrics are indicative of something going on at...
View ArticleHunting Snow Leopard
I’ve been thinking for a few months that Mac OS X 10.6 (or the like) would be introduced to developers at WWDC 2008. I’ve said as much to those unfortunate enough to be within earshot. I haven’t...
View ArticleIs that site running Drupal, curl edition
The Lullabot Web site has a clever way to help answer the question of “Is that site running Drupal?” Angie Byron mentions that the HTTP “Expires” header returned by Drupal corresponds to a specific...
View ArticleMac OS X Service to shorten a URL with Bit.ly
Since the Bit.ly URL-shortening service is all the rage lately, and I hadn’t seen anyone create a Mac OS X Service for it yet, I decided to try my hand at it. Here’s the result. The core is a...
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Collecting important URLs for trips in Safari
I recently took a trip to Seattle, and reminded myself of a useful practice I’d developed a while ago. When I’m traveling, I collect import URLs for that trip in my browser — URLs for my organization’s...
View ArticleDrupal 5.10 and MarsEdit
Now that I’ve upgraded to Drupal 5.10, I’ve discovered I can no longer post from MarsEdit. I get this error upon submitting a post via XML-RPC, via Drupal’s core Blog API module: You either tried to...
View ArticleMicrosoft Entourage error -18576 as it happens
I have had a problem that has repeated since I first began using Entourage as an Exchange client since at least version 11.0. I’ve never been able to solve it, but let me at least explain it here,...
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Drupal Administration Menu module streamlines admin tasks
I just installed the Drupal Administration Menu contributed module, and I really like it. When you are logged in and have administrative privileges, it provides a small menu bar with drop-down menus...
View ArticleUpdate your Fastmail.fm address book from Apple Address Book
I am continually coming across useful features in my Fastmail.fm account that I have previously overlooked. For example, I now know that I can import contacts into the account’s address book. As with...
View ArticleUntar archive contents directly into a target folder
In my Mercurial-based workflow for updating Drupal sites, there is a sequence of commands I need whenever a new version of Drupal comes out. I have a hard time remembering the options for “tar” in this...
View ArticleList changed files in a Mercurial repository with a custom output style
While trying to troubleshoot what I’d done to mess up the Mercurial repositories managing my Drupal installations last weekend, I really would have liked a way to see what files had changes in specific...
View ArticleGetting the settings right for the Drupal GeSHi Filter module
I wanted to find a way to do syntax highlighting of code snippets on my Drupal blog. I came across the GeSHi Filter module, which lets Drupal sites take advantage of the apparently well-regarded GeSHi...
View ArticleCheck a new version of Acquia Drupal into a Mercurial repository
Here is a sequence of commands and output that show how I keep the Acquia Drupal open source content management system up to date with Mercurial, the open source distributed version control system. In...
View ArticleThe dummy domain and the domain pointer at Site5
I’ve been struggling with my Site5 Web hosting account for two years. In many respects, it has been great — good service at a price I was willing to pay. However, my biggest single aggravation has been...
View ArticleLinked on installers
John C. Welch’s article, On Installers, is linked from Daring Fireball today. He links to me — thank you very much John, for that and for the kind words about my signal-to-noise ratio (whatever my...
View ArticleConsidering Frontier DSL
After the news hit about Time Warner Cable’s intent to charge different rates for tiers of monthly data transfer — and an enormous $1/GB fee for overages — it seems eminently sane to consider the...
View ArticleOpenID delegation and Drupal accounts
I discovered — after I’d set up OpenID delegation (using the Drupal OpenID URL module and Sam Ruby’s instructions) — that each OpenID used with a Drupal site needs to be associated with a Drupal...
View ArticleA case for Web hosts to offer search as a service
Apache Solr provides a Web service front end for the Apache Lucene indexing and search engine library. Both Solr and Lucene (upon which Solr depends) are Java-based, which has implications for shared...
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McAfee DAT update 5958 as trending topic on Twitter
The McAfee DAT update 5958 was issued on April 21, 2010, and created quite a situation. Heretofore, I will remember what transpired as “the events of April 21.” I think that someday, examining what...
View ArticleRun Drupal cron with Drush at Site5
After starting to use Drush, I wanted to switch my Drupal cron jobs over to it. I’d previously been running these jobs the standard way, loading a URL for each of my Drupal sites with curl. That curl...
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Hope someone enjoyed this crash report
As you may know, I absolutely live to submit crash and bug reports to vendors. Normally, these reports are staid affairs involving copious amounts of detail, exquisite reproduction steps, and both...
View ArticleEnable the Drupal Token Filter module to insert the current year into a...
In the course of a conversation with Jesse today, I launched into action to fix the copyright statement in my site’s footer block. It still listed the copyright dates as “1999-2009” when the year had...
View ArticleOn winning and my low user ID at Drupal.org
I stumbled into winning a copy of Beginning Drupal 7 by Todd Tomlinson from Apress and the nice hosts of the Drupal Easy podcast. The announcement on the podcast had me laughing out loud. (Luckily, I...
View ArticleParse a vendor RSS feed to get the latest available product version
There may be times when you want to obtain the number of the latest available version — not just the latest installed version — of a software package through automated means. If the vendor or project...
View ArticleTurn RSS feed items into Keynote slides with Python Appscript
I wanted to set up a kiosk system that displayed some static and some constantly-updated information. I already had a kiosk that used Apple Keynote in full-screen presentation mode to show a slideshow,...
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