ted serbinski – entrepreneur & web architect

Well, it’s been a while my Drupal friends, almost 18 months… dusting off this old Drupal 6 blog and time to start posting again.

And what better way to get started again than by talking about Drupal 7, by far the best release of Drupal. And with almost 7 years being involved with the Drupal project, I’m speaking from experience :)

The biggest issue with Drupal is understanding all the wonderful complexity going on under the hood.

Automatically tagging content is becoming easier with services like OpenCalais and Yahoo Terms Extractor, offering their APIs for free semantic analysis of content. There’s even a great Drupal module, Auto Tagging (with a great writeup on usage) that ties these services together and makes it even easier.

However, there is still one common issue with these services: they really need nicely written, rich, keyword dense articles to produce the most logical, semantic tags.

Try any of those services with user generated content and you’ll see a common tag each time around: FAIL.

We experimented with over 20,000 pieces of content on MothersClick and our results showed that these semantic services weren’t producing quality & relevant tags: rather, we were getting very little, if any relevant tags for our user generated content.

After a little more trial and error, I then noticed a simple pattern: more often than not, the title to a user’s post usually had the most applicable keywords to what their post was about, rather than the body of the post.

So how to extract just the keywords and make tags from the title of a node?

So here’s what may be a crazy new IE8 CSS bug that can be triggered under the right circumstances. At MothersClick we started to get a few bug reports about “my browser crashing” when viewing the site. As hard as we could try, we couldn’t get the site to crash any of the browsers we tried. Then with a brand new, clean install of IE8, Nick Robillard was able to get the site to crash and we finally had a reproducible crash on our hands.

I’m working on a new project that has a Drupal site running in the cloud—specifically Amazon AWS with RightScale sitting on top to manage our servers and automated scaling scripts.

The advantage of RightScale is it allows us to manage our servers at a further abstracted layer than AWS itself — through the use of “RightScripts” we can script our way through the managing of low level resources.

Things started to get a bit hairy when our scripts needed to talk to Drupal, in particular, registering each new server as it comes online with our Drupal stack, thereby whitelisting its IP address as trustworthy.

Back in the late 1990s, Geocities was all the rage and free 2MB of space for hosting your website rocked. It was in 1997 that I first put my own websites online and Geocities made it very easy to host.

Fast-forward 12 years and the doors are closing. Geocities has offered some help & tips but for the most part these are lacking on how to easily download and save all of your files (that is if you’re on the FREE account). You really want me to “Save page as” with my browser? I’ll lose all the meta info with my files and what about all of those images or files I stored? No way to easily navigate to those, especially when there are 100s of files.

Well here’s a handy trick to get this working.

When the new myLifetime community launched we wanted to focus on performance, and one trick was to minimize HTTP requests by using the CSS sprites technique. For a great run down of this technique and examples of other major sites using this, check out this resource on Smashing Magazine.

Double checking this implementation with YSlow! everything was working great.

Well almost. Then we tried IE6. I hate IE6.

Then I discovered this excellent post detailing IE6 and its BackgroundImageCache usage.

After trying that JS trick, we noticed the page was significantly faster & smoother in IE6. With heavy CSS sprite usage this was a necessary fix. And with future sites in the works with this same technique, seems like a reoccurring fix.

To Drupal-ize & jQuery-ize this fix for resuability, I wrote this simple behavior below that works with Drupal 6. You can see in action on the myLifetime community.

May this code save you a few hours/days of head banging!

Recently, the new myLifetime Community launched and it has been an overwhelming success. With members joining at such a fast rate, it’ll soon be surging past 100,000 registered members.

This site is separate from the main myLifetime site (which also is Drupal) and was built to be powered by the MothersClick community platform which Lifetime acquired last year. This new community website was built upon the new version of our community platform, which now has Drupal 6 at it’s core.

While we’ve been quietly working on this new platform, we’ve been brewing up and improving some great APIs in the Drupal community, all of which we consider to be necessities for building rich, online communities with Drupal. Without further ado, here’s a top sampling of where our efforts have been focused:

Almost exactly 1 year ago I redesigned this blog and today, I unveil yet another new design. This time, it’s running Drupal 6 and all that goodness. I’ve enhanced the contrast on the design quite a bit and really improved the readability on posts and comments, along with using the GeSHi code filter for much better display of code snippets. This theme was built on top of the Drupal Blueprint theme, which I maintain, and also made theming this site quick and simple.

MothersClick.com and the rest of the ParentsClick Network have been acquired by Lifetime Entertainment.

I’ve been working on this site and with Dietrich (CEO & founder) for over 2 years now. Through the ups and the downs we stuck to it, determined to succeed, and I’m delighted that finally after these years, we will have all the resources behind us now to really build out the company and network of sites to how we both envision it. The coming years are going to be exciting!

An article for Drupal.org further outlines things from a technical perspective.

UPDATE: Earl comments below how this is already built in. Two different ways to achieve a similar result, each with their own pros/cons.

Hats off to Earl Miles and the rest the views developers they have done a tremendous job with Views 2. While the interface is entirely different from that of Views 1, it is so much more intuitive that within a few minutes I had quickly forgotten my bewildered “oh no, I know nothing” look :)

From reading all of the docs and quietly watching development commits, I knew Views 2 was going to eliminate a lot of the Views 1 helper modules and open up a whole new world of awesomeness. While I haven’t seen many blog posts detailing just which functionality/modules have been replaced with Views 2, I wanted to kickstart things with my own discovery as I played around with Views 2 quite thoroughly this afternoon.

With Views 1, to build an alpha pager you would use the views alpha pager module in conjunction with your view. But what about Views 2?