Tuxkids

I'd like to invite you all to check out my latest Drupal site at trinityriverinterchange.com I created the site for the Lone Star Region of the NMRA 2009 convention in Irving, TX in Drupal 6. I decided to use the Image Module for it's ease of uploading hundreds of photos into galleries. Also, I used the 5-star module and created a poll using the voting API to solicit preferences for prototype tours.

Because of my use of the Image Module, when it came timeinstall Ubercart, there was a conflict between the Image Cache module required by Ubercart and the Image module. My solution was to host the shopping cart system on another Drupal 6 install at trinityriverrails.com.

Both sites use the free Sky theme found on the drupal.org site, and the menues are the same in order to give the impression of 1 cohisive site. 

I sent this letter to Apple after finding out that the refused to admit the application Podcaster into the iTunes App Store:

I am very disappointed that Apple would arbitrarily not allow the application Podcaster into the iTunes App Store. This functionality should have been built into the the iPhone already since it has WiFi and a 3G internet connection. I believe Podcaster is the killer app for the iPhone, and would increase its functionality 100 fold. This is mainly because the syncing functionality of the iPhone takes a ridiculously long time, and almost always fails at least once.

As far as Apple's excuse for rejecting Podcaster, I believe "duplicating functionality of iTunes" is an empty argument. Obviously, there are many programs available in the App Store that duplicate iTunes functionality: Last FM, Pandora, Stitcher, WeatherBug, are a few I have installed. However, I believe the application Simplify is the most extreme case of duplicating iTunes functionality. With it, you can listen to your own music library or without even installing iTunes.

I believe John Gruber hit the nail on the head in his Daring Fireball article: http://daringfireball.net/2008/09/app_store_exclusion As an engineer, I can't fathom spending my blood, sweat and tears working on a product in order to have it rejected from the only avenue of distribution. This guarantees the exclusion of quality, original applications and encourages the duplication of a few "safe" apps. Ultimately, this is going to hurt sales of the iPhone.

I've decided to not buy any more applications from the iTunes App Store until Apple becomes more transparent in admitting applications and Podcaster is admitted.

Thanks for your time,

Chris Atkins

 

BTW, if you would also like to complain to Apple, more information about the Apple Walled Garden Petition can be found at http://fdossantos.tumblr.com/post/49954917/apples-walled-garden-petition . 

TinyMCE is a great WYSIWYG editor for Drupal, but there are a couple things that it doesn't do right out of the box. First, you have to enable the Firefox spell checking. This seems like an obvious feature, and I'm not sure why it is turned off by default.

This topic was covered in the Drupal forums. To enable spell checking in Firefox, navigate to modules/tinymce/jscripts/tiny_mce/plugins/spellchecker/config.php and change the line $spellCheckerConfig['enabled'] = false; to true.

A second great feature that can be added to TinyMCE is integration with the Drupal module image assist. Specifically, this allows you to easily upload and add inline images through a button in TinyMCE.

If you don't have TinyMCE installed and running, here is a great tutorial on installing TinyMCE. In the tutorial, there is a section on adding image assist. These instructions are for Drupal 5, but are also valid for Drupal 6 except that the plugins folder for image assist has changed to modules/tinymce/tinymce/jscripts/tiny_mce/plugins/ Since there are several plugins folders in the tinymce directory structure, this can be confusing. An excellent resource is the INSTALL.txt file in the image assist directory.

When the image assist is working, you will see a camera in the toolbar. As you enter content in the TinyMCE window, you can place the cursor at the point you want to place an image and click the camera. This will bring up a window where you can choose an image that has been loaded previously or upload a new one. When you upload the images make sure you de-select the check box to promote the images to the frontpage.

I added a few blocks to my tuxkids Drupal 6 site tonight to show different ways a blog might be spiced up a little. First, the block on the right called Twitter chrisindallas is an example of a piece of custom php code that can add functionality to Drupal.

First, I found the URL to my Twitter feed at the bottom of my Twitter profile page. I could have also subscribed to the feed with all my friends. Once I copied that, I entered it in the aggregator module that is part of Drupal core by going to Administer->Content management->Feed aggregator. There I created a new feed called Twitter chrisindallas and pasted the URL and set the Update interval to 15 minutes.

Next I created an empty block under Administer->Site building->Blocks Then, I borrowed a piece of php code from the Drupal website. Instructions on setting up the code are there. Make sure you set the input format to php and update your cron tables to run every 15 minutes. That way your tweets will be fresh.

I also found a del.icio.us widget that uses Javascript on the del.icio.us website. This very small piece of Javascript can be placed in a empty block just like the Twitter php code. The main difference is that the input format need to be changed to Full HTML. I didn't add a title to the block because widget supplies its own.
Next I added another twitter widget. This time it is a Flash badge that is a little more colorful that blue text on a white background. I got the code from Twitter. Place it in an empty block and you are ready to go.

Several more Twitter badges can be found on their download page.

I also added a tag cloud using the Tagadelic module for Drupal 6. This common widget is simply a list of all tags used with an larger fonts given to the most used tags. After decompressing it into sites/all/modules and enabling, a block is added with php code from the Drupal website.

The last badge I added is also Flash, but this one has some animation. The Flickr badge can be found at http://www.flickr.com/badge.gne This one required the input format be be set to php code.

There are a lot more things you can do to dress up your blog. A list of 50 is available in the Mashable article.