Bytes in the Margin

Does URL length matter?

2009-10-27T10:48:40-04:00

Particularly in emails? I'm curious, and while I'm a fan of cleaner, and short, urls, I can't find any evidence to support my hunch. If you're sending links via email, and the url is not hidden behind an href, do complicated looking urls get less clicks? I suspect they would, because users will ignore them if they look to complicated. A short URL can give useful scents regarding the destination.

Jakob Nielsen looked at URL's as UI ten years ago. Do you think his advice still holds?

We found that searchers are particularly interested in the URL when they are assessing the credibility of a destination. If the URL looks like garbage, people are less likely to click on that search hit. On the other hand, if the URL looks like the page will address the user's question, they are more likely to click.

Can you clone Drupal sites?

2009-10-23T11:39:49-04:00

I was asked the following question today and this is my stab at a response. I'd appreciate and welcome any feedback if you've worked with a Drupal multi-site instance.

Can you clone sites? Or would you have to clone every part of a site and reassemble it for each site?

It depends on what you have to clone, but it tends to be more cloning parts of a site (encapsulated in modules and themes, in Drupal parlance) than cloning entire sites outright.

If you mean to easily add, update features and presentation, the way to go about it is through modules, themes+subthemes, and use of code versioning (I like subversion).

My assumption is that each sub site will be its own drupal instance. Drupal lets you share modules across themes through the use of its /sites directory, particularly /sites/all, anything in that folder is available to all sites. Updating modules/themes in that folder would make the updated code available on all sub sites once they run Drupal's update command. For a more detailed explanation, see Setup of /sites directory for multi-site

That takes care of moving functionality and some theming changes. Its much trickier to move layout changes, although its possible. To do so, you can forego using some of Drupal's configuration options (for example, to position blocks). Instead, alter the layout via themeing hooks done in PHP code. This makes it easy to store and track changes with code versioning, this is where subversion (svn) comes in. This means that layout changes affecting how blocks of content appear on the site, more often than not, have to be done my an experienced drupal developer but it saves you from manually having to make these changes via Drupal's admin interface on every site that you manage.

I would say that using SVN has been the key to making this process mostly painless for me. It is easy to move changes through testing > staging > production environments. The 'svn update' command does the work and knows what file-level changes need to be made, including adding/removing files. Coupled with Drupal's built-in update functions available in modules, and you have a predictable way to propagate changes.

I didn't touch upon moving actual content from one site to another, since that requires a wholly different approach.

This in not offensive

2009-10-19T00:13:44-04:00

Ugh, is it a rule that when you become an activist you lose your sense of humor? Target had to pull this "Illegal Alien" costume, because some of mi gente didn't like it. I find it funny, is there something wrong with me? See - its an Extraterrestrial - and , get this, he's not on Earth legally.

It'd be offensive if the alien was wearing a poncho or had a big sombrero, but otherwise, why cry foul? You're just making it easier to be ignored when something really offensive comes around.

For the record, I also liked the Taco Bell chihuahua.

Mozilla Weave - cool PHP app

2009-10-09T10:50:38-04:00

Wow! Mozilla Weave is a PHP application that you can run on your own server. Weave lets you sync data - bookmarks, passwords, and more - between Firefox on separate computers. HT: Untangling the Web with Mozilla Weave.

Syncing passwords and bookmarks is old hat. Mozilla Weave, a Mozilla Labs project is a tool designed to let you sync everything down to your tabs and do it securely.

The shocking science behind vaccinations

2009-10-06T12:02:19-04:00

If you read one article about the ingredients in Vaccines today, it should be this one. While it starts out as a bit of a rant, I did learn about the importance of dosages of supposedly harmful ingredients. And, some of these "toxic chemicals", including NaCl, are in other everyday things that you may already be eating/drinking. Cue the scary music!

This is just plain ignorant. If you want to see the difference between an education over a weekend or two at Google University and actually understanding medicine, look no further than the above. Neomycin and polymixin are indeed antibiotics. They're used in the manufacture of vaccines. Specifically, antibiotics like this are usually used to prevent bacterial contamination and overgrowth during cell culture and the growth of the viruses. After the manufacturing process there often remain trace amounts of these antibiotics.

All the facts are made more entertaining by wonderful gems like the following.

Not only did Dawn not stop digging when she was in a hole, but she got out a freakin' backhoe. Heck, she did more than that. She got out the dynamite and started blasting. No, even that's not enough. She actually decided to start digging by detonating thermonuclear weapons of stupid.

Microsoft VPC IE Images may require activation

2009-10-02T11:30:08-04:00

I've written before about using Microsoft's IE Application Compatibility Images with VirtualBox. These images provided a very convenient, and free, way to setup testing environments in all versions of Internet Explorer.

The images, since they are free copies of Windows, expire after a time, requiring you to download a new image. The latest images provided by Redmond, require activation if you use VirtualBox, or probably any other virtualization environment instead of VirtualPC, which is windows-only. Whether or not this is intentional is hard to say, but I don't think that it is.

If you have the old images, it seems like you can keep using them. The only limitation I've run into is that the machine shuts down after an hour. For web-development work, that's been sufficient time for me to test and fix web broswer rendering bugs.

To keep up to date, you can follow this thread on virtualbox.org, or Pete Lepage's blog, he's "Product Manager, Internet Explorer, Developer Division." and is trying to track down a solution.

Can the government impose Net Neutrality?

2009-09-21T22:27:38-04:00

If you missed it, today the new FCC Chairman made a significant announcement regarding "Preserving a Free and Open Internet." Hint, here's one way to start - don't lock everything up in a PDF, but thats not the point. The stated purpose of the policy is

That’s why Congress and the President have charged the FCC with developing a National
Broadband Plan to ensure that every American has access to open and robust broadband. The
fact is that we face great challenges as a nation right now, including health care, education,
energy, and public safety. While the Internet alone will not provide a complete solution to any of
them, it can and must play a critical role in solving each one.

You'll excuse me if I read that an hear "We're from the government, we're here to help." in the back of my mind.I'm very leery of getting the government involved in regulating the Internet because I'd rather let millions of consumers decide how the network should work than just a few bureaucrats in the federal government. The latter also invites companies who want to undermine neutrality to concentrate their lobbying efforts on currying favor with the FCC.

TLF breaks down the whole announcement, Government thinks it can “preserve” Internet, scrutinizing the major arguments made by FCC Chariman Julius Genachowski.

Regulation always starts out small, before it grows really big. It has to: Loopholes and other unintended consequences (and opportunities) are always discovered after the “product” launches.

Finally, in the TLF comments section is Ed Felten's concise and rational position on net neutrality.

Even without a regulatory czar, wheels are turning to punish Comcast for what they've done. Customers are unhappy and are putting pressure on Comcast. If they deceived their customers, they'll face lawsuits. We don't know yet how things will come out, but it seems likely Comcast will regret their actions, and especially their lack of transparency.

Using RewriteMap for many URL redirects.

2009-09-16T13:33:03-04:00

Migrating platforms can lead to broken links on your website. If you've cultivated links from other sites or if search engines send a lot of visitors your way, you'll want to redirect users from the old links to the new. Many content management systems have facilities for manually maintaining redirects, but you can also do this with Apache. The big benefit of using Apache is that such visitors won't hit your CMS until they get to the correct page.

One way to redirect users is through mod_rewrite and clever use of its Rewrite Rules. If you have a lot links to redirect, you don't want to create one rule for each link, since its essentially the same pattern for each link. This is where the rewrite modules RewriteMap directive comes in handy.

In your VirtualHost or Server sections, add something like the following, making sure to change the rewrite rule regular expression to match your own situation.


RewriteEngine On
RewriteMap redirect_map txt:/path/to/mysite/redirect_map.txt
RewriteRule ^/news/detail/(.*) ${redirect_map:$1} [R=permanent,L]

Then, in the redirect_map.txt file, you can put the old link and new link one per line and separated by one or more spaces or tabs.


1877-avoiding_frustration_with_php_sessions     /avoiding-frustration-with-php-sessions
1877-avoiding_frustration_with_php_session      /avoiding-frustration-with-php-sessions
2062-howto_use_virtualbox_to_setup_an_internet_explorer_testing_machine /howto-use-virtualbox-to-setup-an-internet-explorer-testing-machine
2067-peter_wilts_pillars_of_management          /peter-wilts-pillars-of-management

MLS Playoff Widget

2009-09-10T23:57:50-04:00

Now that the MLS season is close to an end, the playoff picture will start to come into clearer view. Using the Embed Widget module for Drupal, I was able to take a block containing the standings as a single table and make it available as a widget that anyone can put on their own website. The hardest part was theming it to look halfway decent, because the module wants to use the Color API module to generate a color scheme automatically based on one color. I overrode that with a single theme preprocess function to get the exact colors I wanted.

You can get the code for the widget over at Behind the Badge.

Sounder at Heart has questions about how ties are broken, so I'll have to give that another look to make sure its on the up-and-up.

Habari Project impressions

2009-09-08T23:43:57-04:00

I have to admit that i jumped over to using Habari for my blog mainly based on how well designed and obejct oriented the underlying API seemed from the documentation. Coming from looking at Drupal code all day, which is painfully NOT Object Oriented, yes with capitals, the code is more readable and, so far, less mysterious.

Don't believe me? Go read the instructions for Creating a Content Type. Like Drupal, it depends on function name conventions for some hooks, but beyond that everything else is nicely encapsulated in a proper class.

But I haven't developed my own plugins yet, although I have an idea for one. My main impressions are from installing it and using it.

The installation itself is very straightforward, at least on par with Wordpress. If, like me, you find yourself installing it multiple times, one can Predefine configuration settings and not have to manually enter them each time.

The admin interface is elegant and useful, certainly less cluttered than Drupal's admin pages. A simple pull down menu in the top left corner of the page lets you add posts, configure plugins, and access other admin functions.

The plugin system is in a state of flux, due to a change in how plugins are defined/discovered by the system between versions 0.6 and 0.7. This means a lot of plugins are available for the former, but maybe not the latter. It's also difficult to track down a solid list of plugins, so I've been using http://svn.habariproject.org/habari/trunk/htdocs/user/plugins with svn:externals to install and update plugins.

The new "Bytes in the Margin"

2009-09-04T00:32:49-04:00

Its time to relaunch my blog as Bytes in the Margin. I like the new name, which is not an anagram of my own name. I was inspired by all the notebooks I have from school and work meetings, which are decorated with pen and pencil doodles in the margin.

While the title is new, the content won't really change, and I've left the Feedburner feed at RecordAsIAm still enabled, so hopefully I don't lose any subscribers.

This also gives me a chance to check out a new blogging/content management platform - Habari Project, which, from looking at the code, looks like a very nicely designed PHP blogging framework. Given that my major point of reference is Drupal, that may not be saying much. If you're particularly geek, learn Why Habari? or look at how they've implemented Plugins

Myths about Usability

2009-09-04T00:01:59-04:00

Nielsen has a better than usual alertbox today trying to dispel the Misconceptions about Usability. One of his points really resonated with me regarding the tensions that can exist between creativity and usability.

Design is basically problem solving under constraints: you must design a system that can actually be built, that's within budget, and that works in the real world. Usability adds one more constraint: the system must be relatively easy for people to use. This constraint exists whether or not you include formal usability methods in your design process.

...

Knowing real-world facts increases creativity because it offers designers ideas about design improvement and inspires them to focus their energy on real problems.

Its hard to say that adding a constraint is going to increase creativity. However, when a designer is thinking about creativity they're usually talking about coming up with a site design from scratch and resist the way that usability guidelines force them to work in accepted ways such as boxy-columnar layouts and avoiding mystery meat navigation. I think what he should have really said is that usability, like any other constraint, forces designers to focus their creativity to improve, mold, and refine accepted website design conventions for a particular deployment. Of course, this takes the creative joy out of the process and routinizes it.

SWAT Review

2009-09-04T00:01:59-04:00

I've been meaning to write a review of the movie SWAT since I saw it last weekend. Overall it was a good summer action movie without any noticeable slow parts. The cast was good, although not full of too many known actors. Colin Ferrel did an excellent job as the SWAT officer who lives and breates what he works. Samuel Jackson was his usual cool and funny, ass-kicking self.

My favorite part of the movie had to be the scene where my Latino brothers from East L.A and the brothers from Compton come together - with enough firepower to equip the standing army of the Netherlands, I might add - to assualt the SWAT trucks carrying the movie's villain to a federal prison. The moral of that segment must be that there can be racial harmony when it comes to liberating a French drug kingpin from the clutches of the US Government.

I hate the martyr people

2009-09-04T00:01:59-04:00

We all know a martyr person:

Anything that goes wrong in their day means the universe is against them,
They always misinterpret events in a way that makes them the injured party,
Someone or everyone at their workplace is out to get them,
Mundane tasks are too mundane to get done because they're too busy being persecuted,
Choices they've made in life were never wrong on their part, the world just didn't let them work out in their favor.

How do you deal with a martyr person?

Comments away!

2009-09-04T00:01:59-04:00

Two of my most (only?) loyal readers pushed me to put comments on the site so here you go. Check the [more] links for any item on my blog and you'll see a little comments form for you fine folks to use.