Web / Drupal

I recently started a photoblog and I wanted to convenience of posting my photos directly from flickr with the 'Blog This' button. I found that the BloggerAPI functionality was very poor but MetaweblogAPI worked very well with Drupal's XML RPC module.

This worked well in testing when I was using a separate content type, but when I configured the main site I had problems. Flickr kept returning the following error:

"The username and password you entered do not have any weblogs associated with them."

Since it worked in testing I was baffled, then I realized that I have chosen to not use a special content type, I just used the plain old blog entry content type. All I had to do was go to the settings for the BlogAPI module and make sure that Blog Entry was checked.

www.filbar.org has now been upgraded to the latest and greatest Drupal version (and about time!). Once I started upgrading I couldn't resist changing the look and feel as well.

If you find any links that are broken or problems please don't hesitate to let me know so I can correct the problem, just use the convenient contact form

When I first published my photoshop tutorial for creating quick filefolder style tab buttons, many people asked how I always made the selected tab appear to be in front of the others.

Unfortunately there is no easy way to accomplish this with straight html or css. The reason this is complex is because you are not only altering the selected tab, but the tabs on either side as well. You might be able to get away with this if you ditch the highlighting that I used and just have the tab outline.

Here is an idea that I had, when I was designing a website for a friend, about CSS standards and browser implementations. Opera, Safari and konqueror all render extremely well; Firefox is pretty good but still has some bugs; and Internet Explorer just sucks ass. I always have to break the standard by adding special '_' css rules that only IE parses. It annoys me slightly because it is not standards compliant, but it is incredible useful because I can now override the real rules with special IE rules.

A version of the GeSHi filter is availble that has been updated to work with Drupal's new forms API. Check out the GeSHi Filter project page for more details.

On filbar.org I wanted a 404 error page that is helpful rather than just displaying an error that indicates the page has been blotted from existance. When I migrated my website to Drupal I had to radically change the organization of my website and some of the content didn't make it over. I have noticed that many of my "Page Not Found" errors were referencing the url's from the old site. My solution was to create a custom error page that offered a short explanation and a link to where the content might be located. I also wanted to include search results for the words in the URL. To see an example go to the following URL: www.filbar.org/Personal/Resume/Resume.php (no longer used on this site).

When I converted filbar.org to Drupal I kept the same styling by creating a custom theme. That theme never did get much attention and was always alittle rag-tag. So I recently decided to update filbar.org with a brand new shiny theme.

Before

After

To get started open photoshop and a new blank document. It is a good idea to make the document bigger than you need, you can always shrink images but you can't always enlarge them. Work big then scale down.

A Cheap Tab Shape

I am a comp sci student so I often post code on my website. I just happen to use a wonderful CMS/blogger called Drupal that supports filters and all kinds of other goodies. I wanted a filter that would take anything posted in <code> tags and automagically apply syntax highlighting.