Crooked Number

Path Blacklist (Drupal Module)

Woot! My first (publicly releasable) drupal module!

Path blacklist is a modest module with a very specific aim. Suppose you have paths in your domain that are handled further upstream (by Apache, IIS, etc.) and not by drupal, e.g., www.example.com/staff or www.example.com/intranet. You obviously don’t want your web editor mistakenly using these paths and, thus, creating nodes that will never be viewed.

Path blacklist solves this problem. Create a list of unavailable paths in the admin section (UI borrowed from the block module) and your editor’s hands are tied. End of problem.Module attached. I hope to have it on d.o soon.

p.s. — No, I did not think up the ridiculously specific issue outlined above. It was a real-life itch that I was scratching.

UPDATE (4/11/08): It’s up on drupal.org! [link]

Exploring Humanitarian Law Virtual Campus

This Joomla site provided me with a number of interesting challenges, not the least of which was understanding and then mastering Joomla. I created a custom theme for the site, integrated it with PHPBB, and installed/tweaked countless modules. Take a look; the subject matter is certainly intriguing.

Grassroots International

This ongoing project provided me with a real Drupal trial-by-fire. The dev site was in version 4.7. I ported over several hundred nodes from a blogger site and created almost two dozen node types. The Grassroots International site gave me the opportunity to learn Drupal theming, midule-building, image handling — and a number of other skills.

Sox Feeds

A rainy-day project that has been over a year in the making. Open source is all about scratching itches, and SoxFeeds.com is no different. Desperate for a way to view all my Red Sox/MLB news at once, I created this site, using Drupal, CCK, Views, a touch of jQuery and the incomparable FeedAPI module. Bookmark this one, as I hope to keep building in cool new features as the season progresses. Short on style, but tall on info.

Genuine Love

Ahhh. The first site that I created 100% on my own. Genuine Love — a Red Sox blog born in 2004 — which has gone through countless iterations (and raised a decent amount of cash for me). It’s now returning to its roots; we’re slowly getting rid of the ads and recently gave it a look — black and white, vertical rhythm — which was inspired in no small part by, among others, the great Koi Vinh.

Mets by The Numbers

Baseball meets Drupal … again. During Christmas 2007, Jon Springer contacted after moving his site — a catalog of every uniform number worn by every player — from Wordpress to Drupal. I helped him out with a number of administrative and theming issues. But the best part was the challenge of Drupalizing his very primitive database of uniform numbers. Using Views, CCK, a number of helper modules, and some good ol’ trial-and-error, however, we were able to create some slick rosters (by player name and uniform number).

Historiann

History and sexual politics, 1492 to the present. That about says it all. A simple Wordpress install, with some significant tweaks to an off-the shelf theme. The (not uncontroversial) content of Historiann is much more interesting than the story of its creation. Enjoy!

International Educational Systems

Creating the IES site was a great experience. It tested my PHP, SQL, and CSS skills. But I learned much more about client relations, information architecture, data migration, Python (to help with the migration), SEO, and teaching people to write for the web (if not always succeeding). The subject matter is pretty intriguing as well.

Education Development Center

EDC is my current employer. I am in charge of their main site.

Oxfam America

From 2002-2005, I headed up Oxfam America’s fledging online outreach program, helped build their e-list from 5,000 to over 100,000, and helped raise nearly $20 million online. In the process, I became very familiar with the Get Active (now Convio) application service provider - a 3rd-party web app which does a lot of the ‘heavy lifting’ (list management, bulk email, credit card processing, etc.).

No Tahoma Joomla: Greasemonkey Script

For work reasons, I need to spend time on various Joomla sites and forums. It occurred to me the other day what drives me crazy about the various official Joomla sites, as well as many sites created with Joomla: Tahoma! It’s everywhere! Driving me crazy! This script tries to remove as much Tahoma as possible, and replace it with a nice, clean, professional Helvetica.

Script.

The de-dzoner : Greasemonkey Script

When clicking on stories from dzone RSS feed, this script automatically bypasses the intermediary dzone page - and goes straight to the story.

Script.

Straight to Delicious : Bookmarklet

Also inspired by the ubiquitous Wikipedia search bookmarklet, this humble script allows one to move quickly to one’s del.icio.us page for a given tag. Either highlight a tag on a page and click the bookmarklet or simply click the bookmarklet and enter the tag name.

Simply drag the link below to the LINKS menu on your browser. Make sure you edit the javascript and insert your delicious user name. Then browse with amazing inefficiency!

Straight to Delicious bookmarklet (Firefox version)

Bam! Drupal Kicks it Up a Notch

I’m finding crazy Drupal news everywhere.

• Campaign Monitor, meet Drupal. Drupal, this is Campaign Monitor
• College of Science — George Mason University now drupalized
• OSI Using Drupal
• Amnesty using Drupal
• Greenpeace Launches Drupal Site

UPDATE: AOL Developer Network using Drupal

Flex Gotchas - Part One

I’ve bee immersing myself Adobe new(ish) Flex 2.0. In a nutshell, it allows you to code out Flash apps. The end product is the same as Flash (a .swf file) but the means is quite different. There’s no need for stages or timelines or toolbars. Instead you write out an XML file (in Adobe’s very XHTML-like MXML). It’s quite cool.

Much, much more about Flex later. But, for now, I’ll throw out the first gotcha I’ve uncovered. When embedding an mp3 in a Flex app, you might be tempted to throw in a super-compressed low sample rate rate file (especially if you’re dealing with a spoken word file). Here’s my advice: Don’t. It seems that anything less than 64K Hz is incompatible with Flex. Moreover, said file won’t simply cause compilation to fail. It will crash the entire piece of software and generally muck up your app and your computer until you change the sample rate on your mp3. Be warned.

UPDATE: That’s my experience at least. There’s some varying opinions on ActionScript.org. I would love to know what the official Adobe word is on this.

Enough Eyeballs Make All Data Dumps Shallow

I really felt like I was watching a little piece of history today. Congress asks the White House for information. The White House, in return, tries to bury them in paper. Except, nowadays, we live in the internet age. The left-leaning Talking Points Memo (TPM) asked its readers to comb through the 3000 pages of documents and add a comment if they find anything that hints at White House/DOJ impropriety.

The reaction was pretty amazing. People really dug into the thing — producing hundreds of comments almost immediately. Even better, commenters soon started offering other solutions: several wikis were create; there was talk of OCR-ing the PDF’s. One commenter even used Photoshop to try and read (backwards) hand-written comments that had bled through one document from the other side.

It really was a cool little manifestation of how the internet can be used to enhance democracy and open up government. Hooray!

UPDATE: One gleeful eyeball comments: “Y’know, it struck me just a minute ago that all of us who are helping with this effort are like the ‘Baker Street Irregulars’ that Sherlock Holmes employed. Indeed, we are the ‘TPM Irregulars!’”

The Black Market for Software Bugs

Actually, it’s much more gray than black. NY Times has the details about folks selling the bugs they find in Vista. It’s a fascinating article, but I find it equally interesting that reporter failed to mention that, over in the open-source world, they’re not really worried about such issues.

RSS Done Right!

Wow! I’m totally impressed with NRDC’s RSS page. Now this is how you get your members to start using feeds.

Tester to Post Schedule Online

Frosh senator hopes this will improve transparency. How many others will follow suit? (Full story.)

Federal Agency Cleans Up Its Own Wikipedia Entry

And, not surprisingly, gets caught. (But, in this case, tries to justify the radical edits.)