Articles

Often when I'm reading blogs or news articles online, I notice small spelling mistakes. They're usually the ones that get through spell checkers... the ones where the writer accidentally spelled a different word (e.g. today I saw "cap" instead of "cape"). Every time I encounter a mistake like this, I want to tell the author about it (I'm just that way about spelling). But, I'm too lazy to find a way to contact the author, and describe the mistake. I wish I could just highlight the text, make the correction, and have it sent to the author. read more »

I've been freelancing full-time for 3 years now (although I started freelancing about 6 years ago), and after all this time, I've finally found a method for planning my project schedule and keeping my commitments in check. read more »

A couple of weeks ago I had a client request to change the search box on their site to have the text "SEARCH" appear inside of the text area on their search form. Some searching led me to a couple of posts on drupal.org about how to go about this, but the way that I chose ended up actually being in the comments on one of those posts. read more »

As part of some of the new features I'm adding to Sphericle, I needed to add a ranking system for user accounts, based on a point system. Specifically, I needed to write a method for my User class (on the Sphericle server, which is a Rails app) that would give me the ranking for a User, based on how many points that User has compared to all the other Users. read more »

A reader asked if there was a way to apply the Photoshop Thumbnail script I wrote to all open documents, so I figured I'd post it up here for everyone to see. read more »

If you have comments activated on your Drupal site, and you allow non-members to leave comments, by default Drupal will append "(not verified)" to the names of people who leave comments and aren't logged in to your site. On many sites (like mine, for instance), people aren't even allowed to register accounts, meaning every comment has that pesky "(not verified)" text with it! I find that unfriendly, so here's how you can change that. read more »

A couple of days ago, I was working on an upcoming website that displays a hundred or so images of an artist's paintings. Each painting on the website will be represented in two sizes: a smaller view, and a "full-size" view. Also, for each painting there is associated information that needs to be displayed (title, size, medium, etc.). I certainly didn't want to do all that work by hand! So I wrote a script... read more »

Yesterday I found this article showing how to add a button to the Yahoo UI Autocomplete Control to make it behave like a combo box (i.e. all of the autocomplete's suggestions are listed in a dropdown when the button is clicked).

I was working on doing exactly this before I found the article, but had run into some buggy behavior in my implementation. I was doing it basically the same way this article suggests, having the button call the Autocomplete's sendQuery() method, passing it an empty string. But the button would only work the first time it was clicked; after that, clicking the button would return no results in the Autocomplete.

What this article pointed out to me is that the input element for the Autocomplete should have focus before you call sendQuery(), to ensure the query results in the dropdown being populated. This behavior certainly seems like a bug to me. read more »

Last month I wrote a post on using Photoshop and Javascript to generate thumbnails. That's useful if you have to process a bunch of images for a website you're making, but what if you want to have a function on your website that accepts image uploads and then dynamically generates thumbnails? There's a lot that goes into that, but today I'm going to provide a basic PHP function (using ImageMagick) that gets the image processing part of the job done. read more »

Because of some recent need I had to do some search engine optimization (SEO) and spam blocking, I've come across some really great Drupal modules that I wanted to mention. A lot of you out there who build Drupal sites may already know about them, but here goes... read more »