Prettify code blocks
Google has a project to do “syntax highlighting of code snippets in a web page” using javascript. Its here:
http://code.google.com/p/google-code-prettify/
Safely mashed
I’m working on a mashable page for FH’s intranet, and one of the potential issues is safety if we allow content that isn’t on some “approved list”. That’s exactly the point of Caja (from Google) – “A source-to-source translator for securing Javascript-based web content.”
The Caja page also links to some other pages of groups working on other problems. Most notably:
The Caplet Group (on Yahoo tech groups) : The Caplet Group is discussing the situation of the web browser, in particular the Mashup Problem, and the possibility of using a capability messaging system to allow safe and useful communication between frames, worker pools, and other client technologies.
Dynamically add fields to forms
On my old site I had an example of adding fields to forms dynamically, which continued to get hits even long after I had forgotten it was there. The example looked like this:
City
Address1
ZIP
Phone Number
Name
The code looked like this:
[cc lines=”20″ lang=”html”]
function forminsertrow(theForm) {
var insertHere = document.getElementById(\’cloneme\’);
var newElement = document.getElementById(\’cloneme\’).cloneNode(true);
insertHere.parentNode.insertBefore(newElement, insertHere);
}
Search For:
City
Address1
ZIP
Phone Number
Name
[/cc]
This leaves you with kind of an ugly array that looks something like this:
[cc lang=”php”]
$_REQUEST[‘search’][0][‘field’] = ‘address:city’;
$_REQUEST[‘search’][0][‘value’] = ‘Phoenix’;
$_REQUEST[‘search’][1][‘field’] = ‘name:full’;
$_REQUEST[‘search’][1][‘value’] = ‘David’;
[/cc]
You generally need to do something with this to make it more usable. A loop like this one transforms it into a more nicely formatted array:
[cc lang=’php’]
foreach($_REQUEST[‘search’] as $key => $value){
$search[$value[‘field’]] = $value[‘value’];
}
[/cc]
I have used this approach quite successfully, and visitors seem to find it easy to work with. If I was doing this now, I would probably use a javascript library to do the clone part. For example, with jQuery, you don’t need the function at all. Just change the onclick on the button to this:
[cc lang=’javascript’]onclick=’$(“#cloneme”).clone().appendTo(“#cloneme”);'[/cc]
In fact, that’s what the working example above actually does.
/proc
A long time ago in another job far far away I was responsible for managing system administrators, and for ensuring the eternal availability of all network services. As is the wont of people trying to make sys admin jobs more efficient and tolerable, I wrote a number of automation scripts to collect information from servers and report it centrally. The actual sys admins in the department at the time had their hands full with their day to day work, so I dedicated some of my time building automation tools for them (at the expense of other things on my to do list, I’m sure). Now there are lots of projects you can borrow other people’s hard work to accomplish this, but back then there was less and I did it myself.
During that time I became way too familiar with the /proc directory on Redhat servers. I have since forgotten most of what I knew at the time, but this nice article by Federico Kereki on Linux.com brought quite a bit back for me. Everything you ever wanted to know and more about a host you can get from /proc.
More than the actual results, I remember going through source code figuring out what the information in the /proc files actually meant, and which information could be reliably used to provide which results. Its easy to misuse statistics, as much so on understanding system health as in any other arena.
Anyway, nothing productive to say here, other than the article is worth reading.
Drupal 6
I have quite a bit of experience using Drupal, at this point more than with any other CMS platform. In the past I’ve run a variety of others, but by a good margin most of my development on these types of things has been on Drupal. I’ve written several modules for Drupal 4.7 and 5. Of course, I’ve also developed a number of apps and sites that were built from scratch, or on my own code base, or on miscellaneous other products that someone else implemented and then I got to fix, but those are a different issue altogether.
I have been facing the release of Drupal 6 with some trepidation. I have a number of deployed Drupal 5 modules out there (I think all of the 4.7 sites that use my modules have been updated by now), and the job of updating the modules is daunting. There needs to be a pretty compelling reason, I think, to update them, considering the amount of work that is going to be required.
I should probably say that none of these modules are released publicly. They were all to solve specific business needs, mostly of my primary employer (Food for the Hungry). Updating the modules would mean updating the private sites that use them to Drupal 6 as well.
Now that Drupal 6 has been released, I don’t see any compelling reason to bother. Yes, Drupal 6 has a number of very good improvements. Its a good product, and they are continuing to take it in a very promising direction. But the improvements for an established site don’t rise to any huge reason to spend significant time updating these sites. And it would take quite a bit of effort, since the changes are considerable.
I also considered moving this blog back to Drupal, since that is the software on which I base so much of my ongoing work. There is little chance that my development work will stop emphasizing Drupal. However, Drupal does not do anything like the nice job on basic blogs that WordPress does. I guess that’s partly a difference between a more generalized content system (and for me framework for business process automation oriented modules) and a more specialized blogging package like WordPress. I’m fairly confident I would not try to do the things with WordPress that I can do with Drupal. On the other hand, for a basic blog, WordPress is much nicer.
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