Web Developers

If you're a freelance web worker, then you may have run into this scenario before:

Prospective Client: I think I'd like to work with you! What's your hourly rate?
You: Great! My hourly rate is $X.
Prospective Client: Oh, that's a bit more than we can afford. Would you consider doing the project for a flat fee?
You: ...

If you've ever seen a PHP error like "Fatal error: Allowed memory size of xxx bytes exhausted..." on one of your websites, then you might need to increase the memory limit for PHP on your web server. Depending on your web host, this may or may not be possible. If you have a Dreamhost VPS, then luckily it is! Here's how you do it.

Yesterday I wrote about Day 1 of Drupal Camp Austin 2010, and today I'll finish up with my highlights from Day 2, which I actually got a lot more out of! Read more about Drupal Camp Austin 2010, Day 2: A Review

This past weekend, I attended Drupal Camp Austin, a two-day conference at the AT&T Center that hosted a lot of really great presentations on various Drupal and general web topics. It was my first conference, and a good experience. I've always been a little anti-conferences, but this weekend may have changed that stance. Here is some of what I most enjoyed from the first day, and some links to resources that I found out about from the conference.

Sometimes you just want to break up your Drupal menus into sub-menus, but with headers that aren't links themselves. For example, say you want a menu like the one pictured here, and you'd like to implement it as one menu tree within Drupal. "Looking & Telling" and "Making" need to be menu items, but they aren't actually links to pages; they're just there to group menu items in a nice way. There is the Special Menu Items module to do it, but it does currently have some bugs, and there is actually a simple, theme-based way to achieve the same thing. Here's how.

A couple of days ago, an HourPatch customer emailed me with a bug he'd found. When he created a time entry on a Saturday night, that entry would "jump" a week ahead on the schedule. I was able to fix it pretty quickly, and it turned out the problem related to time zone conversions, so I thought I'd share a little of what I learned when fixing that bug. Read more about Handling Time Zone Conversions in Rails

Have you seen this new site Interhoods? It uses Dribbble and GitHub profiles and mashes them up with a map to give you an idea of who the web designers and developers are in your neighborhood, and city. Right now they only offer the service for people in San Francisco, Chicago, and New York. I think they should add Austin next. Read more about How to Get to Know the Austin Web / Tech Creative Community

The other night I had an idea: Create a web service that uses Twitter to poll the upcoming elections. I'd love to see if something like this could give accurate predictions for election results. And, it would be a transparent (although not anonymous) polling system. Here's how it works: Read more about Goodbye Gallup: Twitter-Based Election Polls

Today I want to cover how to use those built-in drag and drop tables (the ones where you can sort the rows however you want) in Drupal, in the context of setting a weight field in a custom module. There was a pretty good article about this by Computer Minds, but I found some parts of their approach buggy, and not what I prefer, stylistically. So, consider this article my improvements upon their work.