xdeb.org

The Colorbox module has now replaced Thickbox module for lightbox effects here on xdeb.org. Here follow some background around the projects.

In the Drupal 4.7 days I was looking for a jQuery based Lightbox solution and found the ThickBox plugin. I developed the Thickbox module to integrate it with Drupal. Today it’s used on more than 19000 web sites.

Since a couple of years the Thickbox plugin is no longer maintained and it’s becoming cumbersome to keep it updated with good browser support. Time for a new solution.

The search field is an important part of almost any web site today and it deserve some attention. Especially if you have implemented some really good search like Apache Solr (see How to set up Apache Solr search for Drupal 6 on a Debian GNU/Linux server).

This is an update to an older post on the same subject but for Drupal 5. This new version is for Drupal 6 and adds jQuery 1.3+ compatibility plus some nice CSS for Firefox.

If you use Safari, or any other Webkit browser, the spiced up search field looks like a standard Mac OS X search field:

With the help of some CSS I made the spiced up Firefox search field look somewhat similar:

All this is done with JavaScript and CSS on the original Drupal search form ensuring graceful degradation. If you turn of JavaScript all that happens is that you get the standard search field and button.

Here follows the code I use to implement this here on xdeb.org.

A common thing you do in Drupal web site development is to take a database dump from production/staging/testing and use it to update your local development environment.

In your local development environment you want other settings for things like error reporting and cache, enable/disable modules etc.

I recently upgrade my script for this to make use of Drush 3 and thought I would share it.

This is a followup to GyazMail replaces Eudora after 15 years. I have now used GyazMail for two weeks and it’s working well but has room for improvement.

What I really like with GyazMail

GyazMail is rock solid and fast, it feels like software I can depend upon. It uses only 50-60 MB RAM in everyday use! The developer Goichi Hirakawa must be an excellent coder to pull this off!

The Mac OS X integration with Address Book, Spelling, Services and AppleScript is working very well. Excellent integration with SpamSieve, one of the best client side spam filtering solutions there is.

Additional things to like in GyazMail is filtering, settings options and the ability to change/add shortcuts to commands.

I have been using Eudora as my mail client since 1995, except for a couple of years when I used Claris Emailer. This week I made the switch to GyazMail.

(Also check out the followup Two weeks with GyazMail).

In 2006 Qualcomm announced that there would be no more development of the original Eudora client. I have on and off been looking for a replacement ever since. It is not easy to find a good replacement for Eudora.

Eudora does so many small things just right, has really fast search, can handle any amount of mail with ease and have settings for everything.

The AirTel GPRS (EDGE) service on my iPhone that I wrote about earlier is working well but a little slow. Something like 60 Kbit/s down and 40 Kbit/s up at best. For Twitter and some e-mail on the iPhone it’s ok but when connecting a MacBook via tethering it’s to slow.

I checked out some of the 3G offers like Reliance NetConnect and Tata Photon+ and they are about the same price as similar services in Europe. People tell me they work great, when you have coverage. Here in Kerala, only Trivandrum and Cochin has the service at all from what I can tell and even there the coverage is not stellar.

The shop staff recommended Idea NetSetter instead. Slower that the 3G options but very good coverage. Idea GPRS (EDGE) has higher capacity than AirTel I was told, and that is indeed the case.

At BarCamp Kerala 7 in Kottayam I gave a Drupal session about how to build complex web sites the Drupal way.

Below you find the slides as a PDF file and the blog system “feature” I demonstrated.

It was real pleasure to be a part of this BarCamp Kerala! There are some seriously smart people here, many interesting start ups and most of all, really nice and friendly fellow geeks.

Earlier BarCamps included some Drupal sessions so many knew about it already and a handful of the participants use Drupal for there own web sites.

After a short background on Drupal I described the Drupal way, less coding and more configuration. I mentioned some example web sites and talked about the advantages of building web sites this way.

Airtel in India has a nice offer with unlimited GPRS (actually EDGE in cities) for 474 Rs. (€7) per month for pre paid accounts. Perfekt when you like me are traveling for some time in the country and want to have a mobil Internet connection. GPRS is not the most speedy connection when you used to 3G but it’s surprisingly ok I find.

You can of course also get 3G connections in India, but only in the bigger cities and they cost more.

På DrupalCamp Stockholm 09 11–12 november höll jag en föreläsning om “Versionshantering med Bazaar för designers”. Här nedan kan ni ladda hem presentationen som PDF-fil.

Föreläsningen inleddes med en presentation om vad versionshantering är, vad man kan göra med det och hur ett arbetsflöde kan se ut. Andra delen var en praktisk demonstration ur en designers perspektiv.

Video från föreläsningen: Versionshantering med Bazaar för designers (Fredrik Jonsson) on Vimeo

In Drupal 7 InnoDB will replace MyISAM as the default storage engine for increased scalability and data integrity. Most big sites are already using InnoDB, drupal.org does since some time.

InnoDB is generally a better choice for Drupal so why wait for Drupal 7. Lets go ahead and convert our Drupal 6 tables to InnoDB.