Internet and technology

I was looking for a shortcut to share an item in google reader, and came across a good list of shortcuts here. Ones that I use regularly: Shift S : To share an item S : To star an item J : Selects Next Item in list K : Selects Previous Item in list Space : Page Down Shift Space : Page Up

Listened to a great podcast on web page hierarchy, that gives insight into how to use hierarchy on a web page to increase usability, prioritise content, and to ultimately help attain whatever goals you've set for your website. He also presents a number of case studies, slides of which you will find in his presentation pdf. So much good stuff here, like how users actually read a webpage (we don't - we just scan), and what tools to use to create hierarchy (contrast).

Found that by default the background colour for tinymce textareas was grey with my newest drupal 5 installation. Found this node which shows which style to add to your stylesheet to change the background colour to white. Add the following to your theme's style.css: body.mceContentBody { background: #fff; color: #000; }

Took me forever to figure out that this was due to a tbody style in system.css. This border only showed up in firefox and not in internet explorer. The system style is: tbody { border-top: 1px solid #ccc;} I added this to my theme stylesheet: tbody { border: none;} Not sure if I'm missing something here, but this worked for me.

Instead of hard coding your theme path into your drupal theme templates, it's better to use some built in drupal functions or template variables:

• Use the $directory variable which will be available in your .tpl.php files
• Use the path_to_theme() function - this provides the same output as the $directory variable
• Use the base_path() function which will give you the url to the root of your site.

I always use absolute references, for example:

Virtualisation is going to be big! Apart from the benefits for businesses in server consolidation, virtualisation also is promising for software developers in utilising virtual appliances: "preconfigured, pre-installed virtual machine that includes the operating system and the application, all encapsulated in a virtual machine so that people can take a virtual appliance and install it", with out installing the operating system, configuring the operating system and the application". Check out the podcast on IT Conversations.

If you are looking for design ideas for colour schemes, check out Kuler (http://kuler.adobe.com). This is a site set up by Adobe which allows users to post colour schemes, and there's some great stuff there. Also, if you're an Adobe Illustrator user, check out this video on illustrator cs3 - there's some pretty amazing stuff you can do with colours...

I recently added a lot of data to a drupal site by running some scripts that I'd created in php. This was to save me the time of manually capturing the content. After successfully adding the content, when I tried to add a new content item, I got the following error: Warning: Duplicate entry '503-503' for key 1 query: INSERT INTO node (nid, vid, title, type, uid, status, created, changed, comment, promote, moderate, sticky) VALUES (503, 503, 'World Bank ', 'content_organisation', 1, 1, 1171017191, 1171017191, 2, 1, 0, 0) in It turns out that Drupal uses the sequences table to keep track of what the highest id in certain tables is. I had forgotten to update this table with the id of the most recent node that I'd added.

While I normally stick to all lowercase table names for my MySQL database tables, I often have to come in on a project where the database has already been set up using a mixture of lower and uppercase table names. Because windows is case-insensitive, when you create a MySQL table or export tables for use on a linux system, all table names will be lowercase by default. This will cause problems when the dump imported into MySQL on linux, as any calls to the original mixed case tables will result in errors, as these tables don't actually exist.

Firebug 1.0, a tool for the live debugging editing, debugging, and monitoring of CSS, HTML, and JavaScript, was released on the 24th January 2007. This tool is essential for any web developer who needs to know exactly what is going on in a web page, especially with those hard to track down javascript errors.