December 2008

Eight web developer warning signs

Most of us have been there. You talk to someone who has had a bad experience with a site built on a popular web framework and then once you look at the code you suddenly understand why. So I decided it could be useful to create a little cheat sheet. If you find yourself thinking I've done that as you read along, it might be time to get back to bagging groceries, building beautiful houses, practicing law or whatever else you're good at so you don't harm more folks out there who are just trying to make a living.

So here's the list:

Setting up send to a friend for non-members

Was working on some modifications for the Print module's send to a friend functionality. In this case we have a legacy database that has several years worth of site registrations. If a user isn't registered for the site yet we want to send them an additional paragraph explaining how to get the registration code for the site.

By doing a hook_form_alter() on the send as email form it's possible to extract the submit function for the form and have our own processor handle it. Here's a way to handle splitting the members and non-members up for mailing.

Opting out of Drupal Planet

Sure the title is a little overly dramatic. Really I'm not opting out of Drupal Planet in its entirety but I am being more selective about what gets posted there. This has been on my to-do list for a while so it's easier to post some little notes about Drupal here and there for readers of the site without the self-imposed weight of making sure a post is up to snuff to take the time of all the Drupalistas around the globe. A post that was only tangentially related to Drupal being posted to Drupal Planet yesterday reminded me to finally get it done.

So as of this morning a few new views of Drupal information are available on the site. If you're a die-hard Drupaler and want to add a feed to your newsreader the Drupal Feed is available.

A few other subtle changes happened over the weekend.

This includes some cleanup of the "In Brief" section and getting rid of the Atom feed, mostly because the module that provides it has an overly-broad embedded link in page headers which limits more useful specific feeds from sections of the site.

A holiday story

Between creating a few dozen websites, making several coast-to-coast trips and having a generally great year the holiday season somehow snuck up and is here already. The season of holiday bazars is upon us and it is tough to enter any sort of store without hearing holiday music floating through the air.

Our weekend got off to a great start with the storytelling of Christopher Leebrick. In an appearance at the Ada Community Library in Star Leebrick told the classic christmas tale of How the Grinch Stole Christmas and several other stories from around the world. If you're looking for a unique and wonderful gift for children of any age be sure to consider a CD from this award-winning North-westerner.

Ear splitting whine

For the last few weeks I've been dealing with the increasingly ear-splitting sound of a dying hard drive. Yup the MacBook Pro was making noises like the disk was a dying. It is one of those tough things because I can't really afford the time to take it in for repair. Sooner or later, however, it becomes necessary. The high pitched whine became more and more annoying. At the same time when you become aware of something annoying it is harder and harder to ignore.

Today I noticed the power cord indicated it was charging the computer. Odd I thought since it's been consistently plugged in for quite a while. When the power was disconnected the sound vanished. It turns out that while you can run a 17-inch MacBook Pro on a 60W power adapter it's not a great idea to do it for long periods of time.

So having stuck the proper power adapter on the computer and the other one back in the drawer it is time to enjoy the silence.... but wait my breathing just got a lot louder...

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