Topic “code”

With Ohloh reporting Drupal core to have roughly 25k lines of code, I was curious to determine how many lines of code were in some of my projects (useful to estimate costs). Finding this out wasn’t nearly as easy as I thought and after the past hour+ of Googling, testing, and resting, I found the following command to work the best for counting lines of code in a Drupal project—-at least for me on OSX that is. Enjoy!

That’s right, the all new Mom Blog Network has finally launched!

This site is a very similar to Digg and allows moms to submit interesting links around the internet and/or add their blogs, allowing other members to vote on the content, determining what’s hot and what’s not. There are RSS feeds and email updates, delivering the latest mommy news to you each day.

And I must say, the site is highly useful. I visit it everyday to check on it but find myself clicking around and reading about all sorts of interesting things. Quite cool to see it being adopted so fast :-)

For this project we wrote some custom modules that control a proprietary system of algorithms to reveal hot topics, blogs, and users, both by time based, vote based, and category based filters. It’s an extensive system and it’s been written to be extremely high performance in mind—-very noticeable as you click around the site.

Mom Blog Network also joins MothersClick in becoming part of our all new platform, ParentsClick Network, Inc., a new digital media venture to serve the needs of parents. It’s going to be a busy 2008 that’s for sure :-)

Stay tuned for updates!

So, ahem, my earlier post was slightly off. A beta release of SimpleFeed didn’t come for nearly 3 months, doh!

As noted in my previous post, the previous ts theme, called “Orange Mint” is now available for download :-)

NOTE: This project has been superceded by the most excellent jQuery Calendar. All development on this plugin will now be merged with that project.

I am pleased to announce that my jQuery date picker is now ready for consumption, check it out here:

http://tedserbinski.com/jcalendar/index.html

This plugin was originally written to improve the interface for adding activities on MothersClick.com and will be working as the new input widget for date module. Initial mom reactions have been extremely positive (from a couple beta testers) and we hope to roll this into production after we iron out the kinks with Karen to get this into date module as the new default widget.

Out of frustration with aggregator module in core and the lack of any clean, easy to use, and easy to extend [e.g., feed api/hooks] contrib modules that parse feeds, I embarked upon a quest to build a Drupal module that did feed parsing correctly.

And with that, I’m pleased to announce SimpleFeed, which has now stabilized [e.g., no more planned major database changes, nor code shuffling] and is slated for a 1.0 release quite soon (a couple minor bugs to fix).

Finally, the much anticipated SimpleMenu 3.0 is finally out!

Brand new is an entire rewrite of the jQuery menu code and CSS. The menu code is now based on Superfish which is an “an enhanced Suckerfish-style menu plugin for jQuery” written by Joel Birch. This new version most notably adds a hover delay on menu display, giving those fast-moving hands a breather this time around—that’s right, those submenus don’t disappear right away any more, much easier to use :-)

Additionally, I’ve rewritten it to remove the unnecessary AJAX callback, I’m not even sure why it was there to begin with, ah well. That drastically speeds up the menu now and reduces flicker.

As I was re-rolling my JS aggregation patch for Drupal, I stumbled upon an interesting solution to an age old problem I’ve encountered numerous times.

When I write various JavaScript files for websites, I often like to serve them out compressed—-not only to save on bandwidth but also to speed up the loading time for users. To accomplish the task of compressing JavaScript files, I usually resort to using tools like Dojo ShrinkSafe and Dean Edward’s packer (the same compression that jQuery uses as well).

Yes, that’s correct—my new OLF module is ready for consumption. What’s OLF? Well it stands for “outgoing links filter” and this module is a simple filter that finds all outgoing links (e.g., links that point to external websites relative to your website) and allows you to add a customizable class to these links. From there, you can easily add some CSS magic to add in icons or attach some unobtrusive JavaScript.

So why do that? Well it’s a method for making more accessible links. And plus, opening a new window to show that you are leaving the site is just super annoying—an icon is far more unobtrusive.

A little less than one month ago, I released version 1.0 of my Drupal admin menu bar.

Today, here at EuroOSCON 2006 in Belgium, I am pleased to announce that version 2.0 of Menu bar for Drupal is now out—a full blown module, fully contained, no more theming hacks necessary :-)

So what’s new? Here’s a short list:

• Self contained module that can be turned on and off
• Access permissions for viewing the entire menu