Weblogging

So what's taking so long with the all new and spiffy Hoeben.net theme that I have been promising, apart from the ever-popular excuse of not having the time?

Basically, CSS is. I want to change the two menus on the left to be nice hierarchical dropdowns at the top of the page. That shouldn't be too hard (even with some IE specific CSS deficiencies), but I want to do as little hacking into Drupal's xtemplate theming system as possible, which makes it just that bit harder to accomplish.

Now I promise I won't do this for all patches I send in, but I'm once again proud to be contributing to Drupal, the software behind this website.

This time I sent in a patch to the core of Drupal, and even though it is not receiving the warm welcome my Notify mods got, some of my code may make it to the CVS version ;-)

The patch I sent in allows visitors to use the calender (currently on the right of this page) to browse articles by month. "So," I hear you say "you couldn't do that before?". Nope, but you can now...

I'ld best be doing something about that

With lots of trial and error I fixed some issues with the Drupal contributed email notification module. See http://drupal.org/node/view/8964

You'll notice that I'm showing a certain clumsyness sharing my patched code, but that's because this is my first time contributing code to a larger project. I'll have to look into CVS and such. Needless to say, I'm very proud either way!

In short, if at some time your drupal goes haywire, from now on it just might be my fault ;-)

Next up in my drupal work is the archive.module, which is part of the core of drupal!

In preparation of the new hoeben.net theme I'm working on, I swapped the menu blocks left to right and vice versa. (Amazing, isn't it?)

With the help of a very nice patch, I now have the topics working almost as I want them. Only interested in what we Hoeben's write about cars? Follow this link. If you have a broader interest in everything gadget? See here. The cool thing is, you can even get a p

One of the reasons I'm not being an active blogger, besides the fact this blogging is new to me and I'm just a busy guy, is that Tessa and I are in the process of buying a house. Exciting stuff!

Problem is we can not move into the house untill the current owners move out. We agreed on a date no later than december 1st. We're hoping we'll move before our current house collapses...

In the mean time, since I'm too much of a nervous wreck to do any decent work, I have been working on some improvements on the hoeben.net website.

Ola Hoebers and specially Hoebje (if she'll ever read here...)

Well, I guess that I'm online at the Hoeben Weblog. Well, nice things to do around here... Hmmm, I'm only not that superfammiliair with html encoding, so there'll be a lot of handtyped stuff from my side.

What's going on lately. I'm busy (o yeah? YEAH!) with the completion of my study International Economics and Economic Geography at the University of Utrecht, NL. It;s about time to start working on my final thesis.

Furthermore am I trying to enjoy my last half year of the good ol' college life. Because after december this year I'll be pounding in the big pond of workers, working hard every day until our pension do us part (the work and me, of course...)

Hi,

As part of the Hoeben family, and Internet savvy person, it is an honour - no, a duty - to be active with a blog on hoeben.net. Favorite subjects of my blog will probably include gadgets, cars (a special kind of gadgets really; Volvo's, Healey's and other classic english vehicles I'll be adding to my collection), music (Bach) and my favorite pet, Hobbes. So let's get going...

Yesterday I bought a Roomba. Remi (friend and colleague at the Digital Home team of Conexant) was raving about the Roomba, and I overheared Ronald (dito relation) ask Remi where to buy one. I chimed in that I would like to have one too, so off Ronald went to buy 2 Roomba's at the MediaMarkt. After a long night charging, I finally got the Roomba to do some vacuuming. First impression is that it is really good at it; it collected lots of Hobbes' hair and seemed to be pretty intelligent about obstacles. At the moment I write this post it is doing the most complicated room in my house; the kitchen. I just saw it rotate around one of the table legs, quite neat! The only downside would be that it sometimes gets stuck on doorsteps; I probably need to improve the 'Roomba friendlyness' of my house. A more fundamental issue could be that the Roomba I have is really designed for spaces up to 5 by 6 meters; observation learned that the algorithm uses the size of the room (small, medium, large) to determine how long it should travel along the walls with its patented side-brush, or how long it should traverse a room before doing circles again (I'll explain more about the algorithm in a later post).

Experimenting with drupal, I have now added a set of topics for blog entries, or a 'taxonomy' in Drupal. One of the neat things things about topics/catagories/taxonomy terms is that you can use them as a filter for the website, showing only content of a specific (set of) topics/catagories/taxonomy terms

It would be nice if all family members had their own set of topics that they could edit and moderate themself, but drupal doesn't readily allow that. On the other hand, 'sharing' topics is very interesting too, as for example my brother and I both like (buying) gadgets, and now we can create a single hoeben.net gadgets blog.

When I first started tinkering with hosting blogs on hoeben.net, I thought it would be a nifty idea to base it on phpBB. One of the sites I visit regularly is myHTPC.com, and I liked their idea of the whole phpBB based 'portal'; everything that happens on the front page comes from somewhere in the bulletin board. Different authors have different (moderation) rights, and the whole thing looked pretty spiffy to me.

Toying around with phpBB I found out that it just wasn't ready to do what I wanted: have a number of differently styled weblogs, and have them aggregated on a main page. Sure, with some hacking and slashing, it could be made to publish rss streams, and have different parts of the system display different themes. However, I found that creating themes was far too complicated, and tweaking the system to my liking was looking hard.