Richard Eriksson's blog

What Would Seth Godin Do?

Mon, 17 Sep 2007 16:31:07 -0700

Inspired by Darren's boring site note—which I usually find interesting—about his trying out a new WordPress plugin to his blog, and a brief email conversation, I developed the What Would Seth Godin Do? module. It uses code from the WP plugin written by Richard K. Miller, adding a block to Drupal 5 sites for the first few visits people make to the website, with a friendly message to that visitor. The administrator chooses how many visits constitutes a few, and what the message might be, such as 'how to get started' or, currently, a link to the site's main RSS feed. The block disappears after the number of visits set by the administrator.

The way it works is that it adds content to the enabled block if the visits are under the specified number, tracked through a special cookie, and if that number is reached, the block's content goes blank. (Drupal blocks do not display if there is no content to display.) The name of the module is inspired by a blog post Seth Godin wrote last year arguing that new users to a site should get a little more help than frequent visitors.

It took about a half day to write, test, create the project on Drupal.org, and re-learn the correct steps for checking it into CVS, and fix silly bugs like leaving in the dummy text during the initial checkin. Oops! I still have the module flagged as 'developmental', since I haven't done enough testing, and would like to make sure it works across browsers. It's a pretty simple module, so I would love to hear feedback about it before tagging it for a 1.0 release.

Taglines

Wed, 01 Aug 2007 15:01:53 -0700

Over at my personal blog, I've been writing Interesting Site Notes, the title an homage to those who call their mentions of what they change about their site "boring site notes". First in the series is an article about taglines, or, rather, automatically setting the Drupal slogan to whatever you want based on a custom content type and a little bit of module magic. For Bryght customers, it would require running a VPS, as while it makes use of CCK and Views, it also requires some custom code I wrote which, on saving a new item of a custom content type, picks out the title and stores it in the 'slogan', which appears in the title of the site and in the heading of most themes.

If you just want to subscribe to my Interesting Site Notes, then the 'changelog' tag is for you.

Looking for Help in Documenting Drupal's Syslog Module

Wed, 01 Aug 2007 13:49:47 -0700

In October of last year, I wrote a couple of articles, one about openness with regards to open source documentation and another about learning to embrace not knowing everything about the software or service you're documenting. I argued that if you're committed to openness in the support process, then you're also committing to asking for help when you don't know the answer to something. As the support master for Bryght, I've been tasked with writing some documentation for new functionality we added for in our new Bryght Basic profile, i.e. the ability to route system messages to essentially anywhere. This will be part of core for Drupal 6, and it has been backported for our Drupal 5 VPS customers. (Boris posted the reverse bounty, and Khalid came through with a backport.) I've written some skeletal documentation on the new Syslog module, I've been able to figure out and document routing Drupal logs to a file, which you can run the Unix tail command on to get a live view of what's happening on the site:

In that screenshot you can see that I typed in two URLs I knew to throw a 404 error message, tried a URL I knew would get access denied, created a test blog post then deleted it. It contains a lot of information, like the date, the site in question, the URL accessed, and the error/status message.

My Two Years At Bryght

Fri, 01 Sep 2006 15:37:19 -0700

Today marks the two-year anniversary since my official start at Bryght, easily the longest full-time job I've had, and easily the best. (It beat out other jobs I enjoyed as well, which included teacher's assistant at an alternative high school in Surrey and the Internet training summers at a public library. More on that in a bit.) Thanks to Lance, James, Adrian, Roland, Colin, Kris, Boris, and, this year, Djun, Steven and Petrina (her last day today, so sad) for making this an enjoyable two years so far. Because of Bryght, I've been to a few conferences and even met some of my online friends and, occasionally, heroes. Every day I learn something new about technology, business, and, importantly, myself. I've learned a lot about working at a small startup, supporting many customers at a time, improving my programming and system administration skills, and participating in an open source community that is Drupal. I've been very impressed with the quality both of the code and the interaction between community members, not only within Drupal but between the Drupal community and other open source communities.

I hope in the coming months to be a little more active outside my "official" duties at Bryght (do I even have official duties?) such as maintaing the small modules I wrote and participating more on the Drupal.org forums, as well as contributing documentation to the handbooks. I'd like to do more public speaking, something that, even though I consider myself an introvert, I really enjoy. As a teacher's assistant, I didn't so much as public speak as help a dozen kids at once on some of the more technology-oriented lessons, and as an Internet trainer, taught the basics to a group of people, sometimes as large as 20 people. Those numbers don't look so big, but I think they're about right for people to go to a session and have a good balance between lecture-style speech and question and answers, which I always prefer to have during the presentation, not after. That way it's more of a conversation than a presentation, and I think people get more out of those than someone standing up, showing slides and waiting until the end to have only a few questions due to time constraints.

My First Drupal Module: Talk Like a Pirate

Mon, 19 Sep 2005 16:16:57 -0700

Those reading our posts at the Bryght company weblog today might think we've stayed up a few too many late nights. Either that, or you already know it's Talk Like a Pirate Day, which means a lot of "yarr" and "matey" being spoken around the office. It speaks to the quality of the Drupal code-base and the developer documentation, our development process and open source development process that someone like me with an intermediate level of PHP coding experience can contribute to the Drupal project.

The day's almost over, and as coded, the filter should revert anything that appears as if it's in "pirate" back to its original contemporary English. For next year, though, check out the module and since I'm the official maintainer of the module (it's a side-product, since "I'm not a Drupal developer"), send in those bug reports and feature requests!

Drupal Is Starting To Become Real Competition

Mon, 28 Feb 2005 12:07:25 -0800

At the end of an article on Six Apart's purchase of LiveJournal in CRM News, reporter Jennifer LeClaire reports the following:

Ochman was referring to Drupal as a potentially fierce competitor going forward. Ochman said Drupal was organized by developers who were frustrated by slow fixes to bugs in Six Apart's Moveable Type and other popular blogging software programs. The Drupal project released version 4.5.1 of its open-source content management Latest News about content management platform in December.

"Drupal does everything that Moveable Type and a lot of the other popular software can do and then some -- and it's free," Ochman said. "Like Firefox, it's always being updated and improved. Drupal is starting to become real competition. The strong companies are going to be the successful ones."

Looking back at Drupal's birthday announcement eariler this year, which celebrated 4 years of development (since January 2001), it's clear that Drupal started development independent of any perceived need to fix bugs in Movable Type, which commenced development in September of 2001. Ochman is correct, however, about the amount of activity surrounding Drupal development, and releases are frequent enough to satisfy those who want bugs fixed and new features without overwhelming users into having to upgrade too often.

Of course, a little competition is healthy, but so is growing the ecosystem.

Audio of Dries' Presentation to the Vancouver PHP Association

Thu, 04 Nov 2004 16:15:19 -0800

Late last month, Dries Buytaert presented Drupal to the Vancouver PHP Association, and I recorded it on my Powerbook. The quality is such as it is because of my sitting far away, Dries' relative soft-spokenness, and because I had nowhere but my lap to put the Powerbook. Or maybe the problem was between the chair and keyboard, but I will deny that categorically if accused. The 76 MB MP3 of the presentation is available, and there were questions afterwards, most of which are included but may not have been picked up. It was Dries' first presentation about Drupal, and he says he whipped it up quickly, but if so, I was impressed with the level of technical detail included in it.

Bryght XBox Party

Fri, 29 Oct 2004 16:07:03 -0700

At Bryght, we work hard and we play hard. Last night, the Bryght guys attended a presentation by Drupal lead developer Dries Buytaert—the pronunciation of his name was a question for the post-presentation quiz, a "Powered by Drupal, hosted by Bryght" t-shirt being the prize—and Andy Smith of Sxip Networks joined us and took photos. He has uploaded the photos to his (and our) favourite photo-sharing application, Flickr. Check out the photo set, some of which have been tagged by yours truly with the 'bryght' tag. I also provided the XBox for the night, and after some initial confusion regarding the reversed display of the projecter, went to plan B and used Bryght developer James Walker's hotel room TV as well as created a wireless network from the one Lan outlet in the hotel room using, well, Powerbook magic. The Civicspace guys were represented at the party by Neil Drumm and Spread Firefox designer Chris Messina.

The Impact on Them Is About Zero

Fri, 17 Sep 2004 16:08:57 -0700

I'm on the mailing list for a certain weblog publishing platform (okay, I admit, it's for WordPress, which is an excellent open-source software, if not as feature-rich compared to Drupal) and the following quote from an email which is part of a discussion about a technical matter related to the location of some files. The email list is a technical mailing list, after all, but it struck me as relevant to what Bryght is trying to accomplish. First the quote:

I have no real idea what this file does and the discussion about it, but with regard to the average blogger - like me - if, when I upgrade, everything goes to where it should, and the .htaccess that is generated does what it needs to do, then the impact on me is about zero.

That last phrase is important. I just conducted a brief tutorial with people who know their business well, and want an outlet to write about it but don't want to worry about the technical details. The tutorial illustrated that, with the HTMLArea module added to a Drupal instance, there is no need to learn HTML or any other formatting language to create the content. My way of selling is was "if you know how to use Microsoft Word, you know how to edit content". (You can see HTMLArea in action at Boris' personal site.) The impact on them, in other words, is about zero. That's important because people who don't know HTML and don't have the time to learn it out number those who do, and it's up to those with technical skills to not only talk in a non-technical way but translate, if necessary, techie-speak into normal language.

Drupal Does This: Sticky Posts

Mon, 13 Sep 2004 12:11:19 -0700

Elise at Learning Movable Type (a weblog I recommend whole-heartedly for beginners of the Movable Type Publishing Platform) writes how to keep a post sticky at the top in MT. She finds 5 ways to do it, but each involve either manually editing the template code and installing plugins or changing the date of the weblog entry so that it is the "newest". While it's cool that MT has multiple ways to do it, 4 of them are not for those who are wary of (or don't have time for) learning to edit template code in a textarea. Drupal does this easily and quickly: if you want a node (Drupal-speak for "weblog entry on steroids", because you can have many types of content with different permissions settings for each) to appear at the top of the page, you simply check the "Promoted to front page" check box and check the "Static on front page" check box. That way, the date that the item was published on is maintained, and there is no template code (PHP or otherwise) to learn. In other words, it is something that is easy for non-technical people to do, so they can focus on the design and content of their site.

Moving from Drupal 4.4 to 4.5

Sat, 11 Sep 2004 21:28:15 -0700

Dries writes about the the process of upgrading from Drupal 4.4 to 4.5. Since the Drupal developers are in code-freeze mode, I had upgraded a test site or two, and Dries' notes are useful, especially because Drupal.org is one of the bigger sites running the software. It's good to see what can go right (and how to avoid having things go wrong) during an upgrade before the official version is released.

Drupal and External Authentication

Tue, 07 Sep 2004 23:23:52 -0700

David Raynes writes about the need for tools like Movable Type to hook into external authentication systems:

support for Apache-based authentication and a native user group/role system need to be implemented. As soon as MT begins allowing in users that did not previously exist internally, the need for a default user configuration becomes apparent. While implementing that as a default set of permissions is an option, it can become a signifcant problem if and when changes to those default permissions need to be changed either for one individual user or for all users. In a small enough installation, it is workable, but in larger organizations being limited to only a single set of default permissions is not going to be an option. All of those problems are avoided by implementing a native group/role system, as one group can be designated as the default group and overall changes can be made to that group to affect everybody, as well changes to individual users can be made without affecting any other group member.Hooking MT into External Authentication Systems

Bryght has freely editable wiki pages on work involving a SXIP module (more info on SXIP) as well as authentication initiatives using FOAF profiles (more info on distributed authentication profiles).