David Herron .com

Yesterday I saw an interesting tweet ("Quick question: How is resilience distinct from sustainability? #green #transition #climate") and made a response ("@appropedia sustainable=long term while resilience=adaptable to change, the focus is different and not necessarily have same result?") and then he replied to my reply ("@7genblogger Thanks - good summary."). That happens all day long among tweeters.

 Last week Apple released their latest product destined to change the world (the iPad).  At least that's what they want us to believe.  Perhaps the biggest controversy over the thing is the lack of Flash capability.  However this being java.net I have to wonder out loud, where is Java capability, and more importantly why isn't as much controversy being raised over Java being missing? But I think we all can enumerate some reasons for both being missing.  And it's worth it for the Java community to ponder this issue.

The Advertisement module for Drupal is pretty darn powerful and is quite adequate for serving ads on the site on which it's running. That is, you can configure the module, add in a bunch of ad nodes, configure a block to select ads from given ad groups, and they show up on the page. This module also supports "remote ads". This is a bad name for the functionality but "remote ads" generates a bit of javascript which can be embedded into other websites to display advertisements hosted by the Advertisement module. I've been using the Advertisement module to host ads within the Drupal instance on which the ad's are running, however I am partway through converting to using the remote ads feature and am liking the result so far.

I recently wrote a module implementing a CCK field. There is a lot of undocumented information required to be known to do so. Fortunately some people have written tutorials ...

Functions needed to define a new CCK field; Field placement module thoughts

Poplar ProductivityWare Articles: Creating a Compound Field Module for CCK in Drupal 6.x by Jennifer Hodgdon

Back in the day Technorati was the place to be ranked as an important or unimportant blogger. Today it seems to be to have lost its way, and the services it used to offer now seem totally useless. The straw which broke open this rant I'm writing is the ranking widget I used to display on another of my blog sites that has now been removed.

Looking at the traffic data google Analytics collects on my web sites I see a high "bounce" rate which means many visitors leave right away. It means they come to the site, then look only at the one page, presumably to go elsewhere. I've been pondering what might be a good way to entice them to stay and look around. After all, my websites exist to instruct people, so the more pages they look at on my sites the more instruction I'm able to impart. Oh, and there's a higher chance they'll click on an ad or something.

Drupal's taxonomy system is wonderful in many regards, but it has major FAIL issues. One of those is the navigation of vocabulary term pages where the vocabulary has a hierarchy. By default the taxonomy system uses pages at "example.com/taxonomy/term/%tid" to display teasers for nodes having the given term. Ideally these pages would enable browsing around in the hierarchy of terms in the given vocabulary, but that's not the case. Fortunately the fix is pretty simple though rather obscure.

The ideal in my mind is for the vocabulary term page to display these items:

References: 
Customizing the display of Drupal taxonomy elements
References: 
Directory-like browsing of Drupal taxonomies

Del.icio.us is one of the earlier social media websites which had its own 15 minutes of fame several years ago. It's fading into relative obscurity may (or may not) be a warning to upstarts like Twitter but I digress. It seems that del.icio.us has had a facelift of sorts with a bit of modernization or at least the incorporation of some (ahem) twitter support.

Speaking of which here's the setup screen for the twitter support:

In the Drupal community there's a paradigm that every time you hack core you kill a kitten. And who would want to kill a kittens? The point is that any time you hack core (modify the Drupal core files) it becomes a nightmare to forward-migrate your changes as Drupal core is updated. The Drupal team does routinely update Drupal (about every 2 months) and it's best to keep your Drupal installation up-to-date especially as many of the fixes are for security bugs.

I came to the Drupal community with (to the best of my recollection) Drupal 4.6. That makes me a sort of old timer though really there was a lot of Drupal releases before my time. In the 4.6 days most extension of Drupal meant writing modules whereas you youngsters today don't know how easy you have it with Views and CCK ... What drew me to Drupal was the tagline "Community Plumbing" as I was looking for a platform with which to build online communities or what's now known as social networking. My vision is the use of online community to create positive social change.