Amber Eyes Solutions - Event, Web & Business Solutions

Long Time, No See

amber — Fri, 03 Apr 2009 14:29:13 -0500

Well, it has been a long time since I posted an entry here. I had been working feverishly on two major web designs -- one which is finished and the other is almost finished. So I literally forgot about this blog.

In the meantime, I became an ubercart, event, nodeprofile, panel, views and og aficionado! At the same time, however, I seemed to have missed the memo to upgrade anything to drupal 6.

Yeah, I pretty much gave up upgrading anything. It became too time consuming.

I will consider upgrading my 5.x sites to 6 when and if I suddenly get some time and ... some motivation. The main problem is that I sort of burned myself out on the big projects.

I am curious. How do you motivate yourself to upgrade sites that are working just fine, thank you very much?

DC Drupal Lab Video Aug 30

amber — Mon, 11 Aug 2008 17:14:50 -0500

I gave a presentation on my newest site (www.meditatelive.com) at our local DC meetup. I come on at about 54 minutes in, I am the effervescent black woman in glasses!

http://www.ustream.tv/recorded/597956

Drupal White Screen of Death

amber — Fri, 27 Jun 2008 19:38:53 -0500

Another blank screen troubleshooting tip per torgosPizza on ubercart.org:
"... to troubleshoot your white screen problem, put this into the top of your index.php:

error_reporting(E_ALL); ini_set('display_errors', TRUE); ini_set('display_startup_errors', TRUE);

That'll show you any fatal errors (which Drupal chokes on). It's helped me tons."

I think this is a wonderful tip, so I am sharing it here.

Step up to Web 2.0!

amber — Sun, 04 Nov 2007 11:56:05 -0600

What is Web 2.0?

It is the next phase of the world wide web.

In the beginning, there was HTML.

In the mid-nineties, Tim Berners-Lee crafted a new markup language by extracting a subset from an older markup language and boom! The Web was born.

Web technology continued to improve over the next decade, producing a whole slew of applications with each having their own set of bells and whistles. Then in 2004, ten years after the birth of the web, another Tim, Tim O'Reilly, declared the birth of Web 2.0.

With all the new technologies and seemingly endless array of options facing web users, Web 2.0 in many ways goes back to the basics in terms of usability and scalability.

In Web 2.0, no longer do you have to handcraft each web page, or know a programming language to have a web site, you do not even need a web guru to run your web site. In Web 2.0, you enter the world of content management systems(CMS), search engine optimization (SEO), web services such as RSS and Amazon, web automation such as Google sitemaps, and countless other improvements.

What does this mean for web site owners?

Design vs Theme

amber — Mon, 22 Oct 2007 10:06:11 -0500

So what is the difference between a web design and a web theme?

A web design is how a web site works, what you can create, and how it all fits together to satisfy some goal or create an outcome.

Amber Eyes, for example, is a small one person company that excels in making affordable and attractive web sites that are easy to use. So our web design includes this blog so you can tell that I am a real human being. I list all of my web sites on the front page so you can see my work. I include my design notes to illustrate my design philosophy. I showcase my most recent designs and I offer a menu of things right at the top to take you to areas you might find interesting as a potential client. And I keep the whole thing simple and pretty straight forward, a lot like me in fact.

A web theme includes all the graphical elements, colors and fonts. It is what the design wears.

Amber Eyes, for example, is wearing a sturdy pair of shoes, khaki pants and a comfy t-shirt. Every element says casual and laid back. Of all the themes I have created, this one is the simplest -- all I did was increase the font on an existing design template. I let my client designs showcase my talent. Low key, sturdy and accessible -- that is the theme for Amber Eyes.

So when you purchase a design from Amber Eyes, we include a theme for free. If later you want a new look, all you do is order a new theme, and all your content stays exactly where it is.

Simple, hunh?

My thoughts exactly!

Thanks, Mercury!

amber — Mon, 22 Oct 2007 09:41:03 -0500

Well it must be a mercury retrograde, because everything is happening at once!

Drak.net, our server host, is upgrading Apache, PHP and MySQL all at the same time. And Drupal, our content management system, just announced that another security upgrade is now available, version 5.3. So just as I need to work on web sites like crazy, the server ~~may~~ will be acting up!

Ai yi yi! And I just finished getting most of the sites on 5.2!

Well last night I managed to upgrade Katrina's Joy and since it was available, I installed version 5.3. Great! One down, six to go!

But first, I am going to skip over futher upgrades in the 4.7 version and bring Connect DC up to 5.3 in one swoop. Wish me Luck!

But first I have to create four new themes and modify some workflow elements on the current site.

At some point, I need to explain the difference between a web design and a web theme. I will make that a separate post.

In the meantime, I have my work cut out for me this week.

So follow my example, measure everything twice and show some respect to Mercury.

Blessings

Playing Catch Up

amber — Sat, 29 Sep 2007 21:10:35 -0500

I am finally making some forward movement on site upgrades. Amber Eyes is now running Drupal 5.2!

I have four out of seven sites on Drupal 5.2 and my goal had been to upgrade one per week. I have one more straight forward upgrade, Treptower Keys.

Next are my two biggest upgrade headaches;

Katrina's Joy which will need a new customized theme, and
Connect DC which has four customized themes, a specialized workflow and over thirty users!

What fun!

I am hoping to finish all the upgrades in the pipeline by mid October.

Wish me luck!

Sometimes Stuff is Stuff

amber — Tue, 21 Aug 2007 09:13:51 -0500

So I am upgrading a 4.7.x site to 5.2 and I managed to get everything working great till I tried to create the custom theme. I got the blank Drupal screen of death and the following in the httpd error log as soon as I turned up the new theme ...

Call to undefined function module_exist() in /Library/WebServer/Documents/rms/includes/common.inc(1342) : eval()'d code on line 2

So I go crazy ... I pour over the code in the common.inc, increase the php memory, created the new theme over and over again, and the more I messed with it the worse it got till even the admin area was the white screen of death ... WHOA!

So instead of searching for solutions on drupal.org, I did what I should have done in the beginning... searched for the problem. And lo and behold, this little gem pops up.

I think at least one of your blocks is using this function. Try searching boxes and blocks tables in your database for module_exist. If you can find then replace it with module_exists.

OMG, I hadn't thought to take the error message literally. I thought it was pointing to some esoteric mystery within php. When all along it was simply saying that this function is not defined anywhere.

Seems the function name had changed from version 4.7 to 5.2. And it had been hard coded in to several blocks by a module that was not upgraded to 5.x ... so of course the specialized code missed the change. Wow!

Too funny ... so remember ... sometimes stuff is just stuff!

And ... search drupal.org for the problem first, not your supposed solution.

Garbage in, Garbage Out ... sometimes

amber — Thu, 12 Apr 2007 14:31:10 -0500

I just fixed an annoying bug. And the obviousness of it just bugs me.

I am creating a local sandbox for all my sites, so I can test modifications without having to repeatedly upload to test them over the web.

I at first just copied over the version of software and linked it to a copy of their respective database. This worked swimingly for every site except www.treptower.com.

All of the blocks in the sidebars went missing. I started this process last week, decided to skip this site and came back to it today. I finally figured out that is was a theme issue.

But get this, if it was a bug in the theme, why did it work okay on the server but not on my laptop?

Well because real servers have to be very forgiving. But my laptop OS X web server OTOH had no such pretensions. "If it is a bug, I am damn well gonna treat it like the big ugly hairy bug that it is is. Dammit!" Searching on Drupal revealed no knowledge of the issue UNTIL I figured out where the problem was. And there in the theme project, listed as FIXED was the answer. The block template file had a simple php error in it.

AARRRGGHHH! It took less time to actually fix it then it is taking me to talk about it.

Whenever you are moving around sites, always change to a default theme first. Then log out before copying the database. That way you will know instantly when the problem is theme related.

You will thank me for this later. Truly, you will.

How Much is Enough?

amber — Mon, 02 Apr 2007 14:54:13 -0500

Maybe you are considering getting a web site, maybe you have a domain and need hosting or maybe you need hosting, design and a domain.

Here at Amber Eyes, we can help.

But the first question we usually hear is, "How much space, bandwidth, etc do I need?"

If this is your first web site, and you do not intend to open a storefront on the net -- at least not yet .... just get a blogger site.

Why?

Because unless you suddenly get as popular as Google, you will not generate much traffic initially. And unless you have a storehouse of very large images, you will not need that much storage capacity either. You can always upgrade to a larger site when you need to.

As examples, Connect DC and Katrina's Joy (my most popular sites), together generated less than 15 Mbs bandwidth for all of March. And Blue Moon Studio, my largest site, is using less than 125 Mbs of storage.

So don't worry so much about going for a larger site initially.

Also beware of hosting companies that offer huge storage and bandwidth capacities that you will most likely never use. They also may charge for technical support or will not help you with issues surrounding site design.

Use your best judgement.

Here at Amber Eyes, our primary product is web site design.