ekes's blog

I keep meaning to write shorter blog posts. For once this one is easy to write as a short piece. Solr is a powerful search server, and there has been some great work making a solr module that integrates really cleanly with Drupal. I've kept putting off trying it out because of the expected pain of having to get the correct java version, and then fight with tomcat to get it to work properly etc. etc. But and it short...

Finally upgraded this site from Drupal 5 to 6. There's nothing special in that, it all went very smoothly and I just changed the theme again. But on the way I thought I'd get a bit of RDFa into the site - so the most interesting stuff on this, and other pages, you probably can't see.

I've recently been spending more time getting Drupal sites served to survive the storm. We've had a site running the multiple apache mirrors trick using Boost and now a few sites using Varnish as a specialised reverse proxy.

It's been a really busy four months but it's just great to see NABUUR.com go beta with Drupal.

I'm just finishing something of a large migration from an old Xoops site to Drupal. I've not had to get too down and dirty with the Xoops database, for which I'm quite happy as it wasn't so coherent after lots of upgrades and customisations. I've made a small migration handbook for myself which could be handy for folks.

One of the issues with user generated content multi-lingual sites is that content will often be in only one language, or maybe translated into a few others. You can be certain that not all content that is even translated will be available in all languages.

The way that the Drupal i18n module, for both Drupal 5 and 6 by default handles translated content is to offer you:-

So I'm not so much of a graphic designer, but I often end up doing the technical implementation of website designs. Usually this involves describing how this perfect picture, or fixed implementation on one computer, won't actually look like that everywhere. Most of the time I'm talking about font styles, sizes of screens, differences between fluid and fixed layouts etc. But colour is another one.

A first part of many about feeds.

The Transmission network, a group for sharing videos for social change, have been working on developing a free metadata standard for video interchange. Before this what there has been is tied to Yahoo! MRSS which one wouldn't call proactive in working with the community for growth and development of their standard.

So the Transmission folks have got some backing and come up with an XML standard for video metadata that in the docs (and in political free background) is linked to Atom. There's a working sort of beta version 0.9 on it's way to becoming a real 1.0 release.

I've implemented it for the video module for Drupal. An example atom feed with plenty of metadata. This requires the patch I committed to the Atom module to allow enclosures as well as additional namespaces.

It's sometimes really cool to be able to share some of the tables between multiple Drupal sites. Just think your users have the same logins for example. It's pretty standard stuff there's a simple 'how to' here. But what happens when the sites are already up and running, and you hadn't planned this?

I just had to write a description of What I do so thought I'd share.

At the moment:

I'm developing customised solutions for NGOs and campaign orientated new media organisations primarily using Drupal. Setting up campaigns solutions, like 'cyberaction' e-mail campaigns; writing a module that allows for collaborative and publically 'open editing' of content; working as a part of the team creating the RSS and Atom feed input system for Drupal to share content between diverse sites; and creating solutions for shared multimedia content within sites.