Jul 26

In general, I don't really care if a website passes validation so long as it looks okay and performs well. While teaching an XHTML class a few months ago, I was randomly typing things into the W3C validator and discovered that BBC validates perfectly on XHTML 1.0 Strict. For a site that large, that's very impressive! I decided to do a comparison of similar sites.

Website Type Errors Warnings
bbc.co.uk XHTML 1.0 Strict 0 0
washingtonpost.com XHTML 1.0 Transitional 599 265
foxnews.com XHTML 1.0 Transitional 138 5
cnn.com HTML 4.01 Transitional 76 25
msnbc.msn.com HTML 4.01 Transitional 274 31
reddit.com XHTML 1.0 Transitional 5 147
digg.com XHTML 1.0 Transitional 191 293
Jun 25

Attached is a module that styles the IMCE module to match the CKEditor module. This is based on the previous work that Mike the Coder and Danny Joris before him. I made it so that you don't have to modify your theme to get it working, and more specifically, two themes since I'm using admin theme. The only thing you have to do for it to work is to put the "sprites.png" from the CKEditor download into the "images" folder of the module. It's found at "skins/kama/images/sprites.png".

Jun 24

Well, I finally cracked and got a twitter account. follow me at @jrowny.

twitter
May 29

Unfortunately, I will be turning on comment approval because I am getting a lot of spam, despite reCaptcha. I thought about Mollom but I don't want a paid service. Their free service might work, so I may give it a shot.

May 27

WOW! PressFlow is amazingly fast. My question is, why would anyone NOT use it? I've got a pretty basic site running now, which should launch too, that's loading in 0.15 seconds. The site, previously running on ColdFusion and a CMS called FarCry averaged load times of 4 to 5 seconds. That means It's gotten about 30 times faster.

In other news, I'm confirmed as a speaker at Drupal Design Camp Boston. It's a free conference. I'll be giving the same presentation I gave at DrupalCon San Fran. http://boston2010.design4drupal.org/sessions/jquery-views-and-view-themeing

May 26

I previously posted how I solved the problem of RadioButtonGroups inside repeaters, you can see that post here. Unfortunately, today, I discovered that radio button groups are a scam. You don't need them at all!? Why, you ask? If you just set the "groupName" property, they are automatically created.

<mx:Repeater id="someRepeater">
<mx:HBox>   
  <mx:RadioButton id="Yes" groupName="{someRepeater.currentIndex}"/>
  <mx:RadioButton id="No" groupName="{someRepeater.currentIndex}"/>
  <mx:RadioButton id="Maybe" groupName="{someRepeater.currentIndex}"/>      
 </mx:HBox>
</mx:Repeater>

If you ever need to access your RadioButtonGroup, you can just call a radio button by its id, and use the "group" property. I really hope this wasn't common knowledge that everyone but me knew.

May 25

As I'm teaching some friends the basics of Drupal I see a common mistake, putting too much functionality into the theme. The real problem with this is simple: the site's look and feel may change with or without the site's functionality. If you're using a custom theme, it's tempting to throw functionality right into page.tpl.php and call it a day. But you're setting yourself up for headaches. Trust me, I know from experience.

Once upon a time, I embedded views directly into my page template. It was simple, easy to do, and gave me the result I wanted. But when the designer handed me a brand new design it meant I had to manually move all of the views logic into the new theme... maybe that's not such a big deal but it felt ugly. If I had just put those views into blocks and created a region for it, I would have saved time.

Use Regions!

Most themes have 4 or 5 basic regions. Header, footer, left, right, content. But there's no limit to how many you can have. You can have one called "banana" if you want. All you need to do is put the region definition in your theme's .info file and

<?php print $banana; ?>

anywhere in your page.tpl.php file and you're done! Now you can assign blocks to that region and keep your code modular.

Use modules!

Modules are great! How many times did I look at the Google Analytics module and thing "man, that's stupid... why wouldn't I just put the JS in my page.tpl.php and forget about it?" Well, when your design changes and you forget to move that Google Analytics code you'll know that you should have just used the module. In addition, that module also gives you more integrated tracking and drupal specific features.

May 24

I installed the latest build of Drupal 7, and I must say, it is going to rock! Many complaints against usability have been addressed.

This site is running on D6 and I just installed the Fusion base theme and I'm playing around with it. I'm really excited to use Prosper on an upcoming project. Those guys and gals over at TopNotchThemes know what they're doing.

drupal 7, fusion
Apr 27

If you've got an app and are hoping to test it using FlexMonkey, be careful that you don't have any references to Application.application. This would normally return you a nice reference to your main app MXML file, but since MonkeyAgent is doing the loading, it will return you a reference to MonkeyAgent instead. Rather than change your code, I'd recommend using MonkeyLink. You need to include a bunch of stuff, but at least it works.

Another gotcha, compile your own MonkeyAgent and MonkeyLink projects because you can't run an app compiled with 3.4 in a MonkeyAgent compiled in 3.1. You will get incompatible override errors.

flex
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