Drupal states on it’s site that it doesn’t support PHP 5.3. And, if you attempt to install drupal on a server running PHP 5.3 you get a lovely series of errors along the lines of “Function ereg() is deprecated in…” and so on. This was a bit troublesome consider my development environment is XAMPP and it happens to be using version 5.3. Luckily, there’s a way to “hack” the drupal version 6.x to get it to work. Read more …
01.06.2010
Drupal and PHP 5.3
01.06.2010
“Expires” Headers
One of those annoying little quirks you run into when checking the relative loading speed of your site. Expire headers will let your browser know if the current file is up-to-date or if it needs to be re-downloaded. If the file hasn’t changed there’s no sense in downloading the file again, thus, saving a little time in the loading of the page. This could apply to your CSS, images, movies and other media. Read more …
12.21.2009
The value of labels
Maybe it’s just me, but there’s something troublesome about clicking on the text “Remember me” when attempting to log into a website only to discover that someone hasn’t taken the time to associate the text to the checkbox with a label tag. Granted, it doesn’t really harm the functionality of the site, but it does cause me to stop and fume for a moment over having to actually click on the tiny little checkbox instead.
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11.30.2009
Reality of a beautiful email
Designing and developing a marketing email or a newsletter is a challenge. A lot of designers don’t realize that email clients that run on your machine go beyond what you might call “unfriendly”. In fact, it’s safe to say that as far as HTML content is concerned, they are stuck in the 80’s. Webmail clients aren’t much better. AOL Webmail, GMail, Yahoo and all of their siblings have to safeguard the end-user’s security so they keep a tight grip on the content being displayed when the email is opened. Just keep a few basics in mind and you should be able to deliver some high-quality emails that will actually be seen and read by your subscribers.
10.29.2009
Wordpress as a CMS
I was reading this article on net tuts and it makes a good point, in a way. There are a lot of CMS software packages out there. I’ve used a few of them. Joomla, Magento, Mambo, Silverstripe and maybe some more that I don’t even recall.
I’d say Joomla, Mambo and Magento are way to complicated for the average person just looking for a site they can frequently update with either new pages or new posts. Silverstripe is pretty simple but the install is a little weird and I really don’t like the template system, reminds me of Magento actually. Which I, also, did not care for. Wordpress is blog software, yes, but it has static pages, lots of plugins and an easy to use template system. You can set up a nice stylesheet for the users to take advantage of, some stylized head tags, a couple of font families and some colors and hopefully the users won’t start adding in their own styles in the HTML of their posts 
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