TechSparx News

Drupal Book node hierarchy went missing, necessitating database patching and a couple scripts to help

David Herron — Mon, 02 Nov 2015 00:55:43 +0000

Twice now I've had the Book hierarchy on a Drupal 6 site go bonkers. The first time was on this very site, back in 2009, while this site was being converted from Drupal 5 to Drupal 6 (it's now on Drupal 7). The /book page simply became empty, and I managed to fix the book hierarchy with some database twiddling. That was over six years ago and I'd since converted this site to Drupal 7. I have another site still running Drupal 6, and the same problem (empty /book page) just happened on that site.

How to stop your facebook page from posting tweets to twitter

David Herron — Tue, 15 Sep 2015 06:01:00 +0000

Automated postings to social media accounts - Facebook, Twitter, etc - are a great way to build your presence, and let your audience know what you're doing. Over the years preferred services have come and gone which automate cross posting to social media accounts. Where a few years we would have instructed Facebook to autopost to twitter, we might want to do that in a different way now. For example, I'm finding the dlvr.it service to be much better and offer better control over the format of postings.

The ultimate guide to a quickly customized mobile responsive Wordpress theme

David Herron — Tue, 14 Apr 2015 19:31:30 +0000

I'm getting up to speed with Wordpress. One thing I wanted was to quickly get a halfway decent looking mobile responsive theme, and then get on with the business of writing my content. My belief is that it's folly spending too much time on creating the perfect theme & look & feel, and that it's the content which is more important.

Drupal & Blogger user tries Wordpress after years of sneering, and likes it

David Herron — Mon, 06 Apr 2015 01:07:22 +0000

The other night talking with my girlfriend about developing a website for her, we decided that she needed a Wordpress blog. She's done quite a lot with Blogger blogs and is very familiar with them, but the goals she had were impossible given Blogger's limitations. While Drupal is a very powerful system and could have done what she wanted, it's not exactly user friendly.

Twerking your way to Skype on a Chromebook - ChromeOS future includes Android apps

David Herron — Fri, 03 Apr 2015 21:02:51 +0000

One of the pain points of Chromebook users is that certain kinds of applications either aren't available for ChromeOS or are impractical. ChromeOS is a Chrome web browser, running pre-packaged on top of Linux, with a bunch of security goodness backed up by Google cloud services. It's an amazing environment but the applications are limited to running inside Chrome. Well, unless you jailbreak the device and install Crouton allowing you to run Linux.

Do 3rd party commenting systems (Disqus et al) support my community, or theirs?

David Herron — Sat, 05 Apr 2014 00:45:49 +0000

It used to be that Web 2.0 was the cool new thing, and a core feature was that the audience could leave comments on websites. It's common nowadays for websites to support comments, and comment areas have become (in some cases) a war zone full of partisan bickering. It was ground-breaking the 10ish or so years ago that websites began to support 3rd party comments. Really.

Review: Mobile HTML5 by Estelle Wyll

David Herron — Thu, 02 Jan 2014 01:15:09 +0000

Mobile internet devices like smart cellphones or tablets are taking the computing world by storm.

Migrate module can be alternate Drupal upgrade process, not just for importing foreign content

David Herron — Tue, 05 Nov 2013 00:54:20 +0000

The originating purpose of the Drupal Migrate module is to import content from elsewhere. Where? Wordpress .. etc. Any place outside of Drupalsphere. The good thing is that the module is fairly open about what it will import, and therefore it's possible to import into a Drupal site from a Drupal site. And that by doing so, one can upgrade a Drupal site without going through the official Upgrade process.

Why might you want to do this?

Generating clean URL's for paginated content on Drupal sites

David Herron — Mon, 21 Oct 2013 05:59:54 +0000

One of my clients wants his paginated content to have clean URL's. That is, Drupal sites frequently generate sequences of pages with "?page=##" query parameters to select each page. But he doesn't want this as a query parameter, but instead in the URL. The idea we're working on is to decrease the chance of duplicate content on the site as recorded by Google in the Webmaster Tools.

Unfortunately there really isn't a way to do this. Except for the Clean Pagination module https://drupal.org/project/cleanpager

Add a Google CSE to a Drupal 7 site without using google_cse module

David Herron — Thu, 19 Sep 2013 21:06:18 +0000

The https://drupal.org/project/google_cse module appears to be a dead project - the Drupal 7 port hasn't had any activity in over 2 years. If you want to use a Google Custom Search Engine (CSE) on a Drupal 7 site, what do you do? Turns out it's relatively straight-forward to just generate the CSE over on Google's website, take the code and paste it into a Block, and that's it.