More than a year ago I outlined some grand plans for the Hoeben.net theme. One of the ideas was that I wanted to be able to give each family member/blog and each topic a sub-theme. IE: mostly the same theme as the rest, but subtle (or not so subtle) changes to reflect the content of that section of the site.
This is now finally somewhat possible, and I have subthemed the kites topic as a showcase. If you're reading this message on its own page, you should already see the subtheme. If not, head on over! Do scroll down for an additional nice touch...
As of this morning, there's an actual bit of code in the CVS version of the core of Drupal. 4 lines of code in 4 different files. Woohoo! I have submitted a patch here and there before, but this is the first time a patch of mine is accepted into the core of Drupal.
So what's this patch about you might wonder? In the admin area of drupal - which most of you will never see - you can now see the referrer of a page that caused an error (such as a 'file not found' error). Exciting stuff.
Hoeben.net was migrated to a new server by our ISP. Apparently, it is all for the best, but I am not 100% impressed with the process; I had to get a bit too nitty gritty with .htaccess to my liking to get things to work, and they 'forgot' to migrate our images (sorry Tessa). I hope I can get them back...
Perhaps I am spoiled by speedy response of the new Drupal server park, but I think hoeben.net currently feels quite sluggish (and I am getting intermittent DNS hickups it seems). Anyhow, we'll see how this progresses.
This post was made on a local copy of the Hoeben.net website. I am trying to upgrade Drupal to version 4.6 (up from version 4.4.3)
So far, things are going ok-ish. What kept me back before was that I did some customisation to the menu module that isn't even available for Drupal 4.5 and up because parts of its functionality are now in a core Drupal module. As a result, the menu system will need some work to get it back to where it was.
One of the neater modules available in Drupal 4.6 is the tinyMCE WYSIWYG module. It's a pretty dramatic improvement over typing HTML code into a standard text area. Unfortunately it conflicts with the linewrap filter in Drupal, so I am turning that off for new content. But then again, posts made through other interfaces such as XMLRPC should ideally still use this filter so users don't have to add <p> tags manually...
Google will always be a bit of a mystery. I know roughly how pages get indexed and ranked: Google looks at body text and page titles for indexing, and ranks pages by the number of individual other pages that link to them. But some of the hits I'm getting from google are baffling.
Before Google launched their new scholar engine (and probably added a lot of scientific pages to their database), this page at the ID-Studiolab was the 7th hit when you searched for assistant professor. How on earth am I the 7th assistant professor? Even now, I'm on the 2nd page of results (though my ranking may change by merely mentioning the page on my blog).
Due to someone not paying their bills (...), hoeben.net was offline for a few days. Sorry for that.
Good thing the friendly folks at ashosting don't hold a grudge, since they kept the database intact. So we're back. Gotta look into that thing I hear a lot of people talking about, making backups...
On a more personal note, I hope to be doing some retroblogging soon, since a LOT has happened lately. I have to keep google happy.
This morning I conducted a quick experiment installing the newly released Drupal 4.5 release candidate. It breaks some modules (most notably for Hoeben.net the menu system is superceeded) and the theming system got a makeover, so the transfer won't be made with the flick of a button... Some hacking will be involved, and I don;t have time for that now.
But if - in the near future - the site looks funny or goes totally off-the-air, you know why: I have found some time to tinker with the software running the site ;-)
I slightly changed how the menus.module displays menu blocks. menus.module allows you to add custom menu blocks to Drupal's navigation system, based on taxonomy vocabularies.
Specifically, I added the possibility to make the title of the menu block a link. You can see this in action in the top menu bar, as requested demanded by Ianus.
The CSS dropdowns now work on IE under XP SP2 too! Unfortunately I could not change the mime-type of .htc files on this server, so I had to switch to a javascript solution. I am now using Dean Edward's excellent set of scripts that solves not only the hover problem that disabled the menu system, but also many other CSS related bugs as well as support for transparent PNGs.
