Thingy Ma Jig

Page Title 2 for Drupal 6

Nick — Fri, 02 May 2008 18:02:12 +0100

I've just released Page Title 2 for Drupal 6. Page Title 2 is still marked as Alpha (as a project) however its in use on a number of my sites and appears to work.

I'd appeciate people's feedback regarding this module. Its a GREAT way to improve your websites SEO!

My iPhone Theme

Nick — Wed, 30 Apr 2008 16:16:46 +0100

I treated myself to a nice new iPhone last week and am LOVING it!

My phone is jailbroken and unlocked now (using PwnageTool). This means I can run all kinda of funky apps and games. I decided recently to design my own theme to make my phone feel more like "mine". Here are some screenshots. I'm working with a friend on how to release this theme along with some he has done too…

Getting Lighttpd working with AWStats

Nick — Mon, 21 Apr 2008 15:18:47 +0100

Following my previous post about configuring Lighttpd on this VPS Webserver to replace Apache I bring you a guide to configuring AWStats under Lighttpd. This process is differs to Apache as control of directories and aliasing is handled differently. There can also be complications if you have previously enabled the Drupal LUA Magnet script on your site for clean URL handling!

How to batch rename files

Nick — Sat, 19 Apr 2008 22:31:04 +0100

This afternoon I needed to rename a bunch of files from one form to another in a command shell… Well technically I didn't need to do it in a shell - but, as sure as there is a hole in my ass, I wasn't gonna go through renaming them all manually!

They needed to go from, for example, add.png to add_32.png. After a little research into commands like printf, awk, bison and so on - I suddenly realized that 'cut' held the key!

for i in *; do j=`echo $i | cut -d . -f 1`; j=$j"_32.png"; mv $i $j; done

Powered by Lighttpd

Nick — Wed, 16 Apr 2008 15:26:53 +0100

This blog is now no longer powered by Apache (the feature filled but slightly bloated beast), instead I have decided to give Lighttpd (pronounced Lighty) a whirl.

What convinced me? Ages ago I read an article by Dries Buytaert comparing webserver configurations. It was shocked to see that Lighttpd appeared to be able to serve almost twice as many pages per second as Apache. There is also the advantage that a static file will only cost you substantially less memory to serve in Lighty than it will in Apache due to Apache bundling ALL the mods into every process.

So what is Lighttpd? The inventors describe it perfectly…

Get a free Mini Mac

Nick — Tue, 15 Apr 2008 20:30:34 +0100

I dont normally do these kinds of deals - but I wanted to sign up for LoveFilm anyway and in this case it helped my mate get 1 referral closer to getting a free Mini Mac. I quite fancy a free Mini Mac too so I'm gonna give it a go!

Basically the deal is you register with the site (via my referral link) and then sign up for one of their affiliate services such as LoveFilm (a really cool UK DVD Rental Service). That then counts as 1 referral for myself. All you then need to do is get 10 mates to register in the same way and then you too get a free Mini Mac!

Node Quick Find

Nick — Sun, 06 Apr 2008 01:22:05 +0100

I've just committed another module - Node Quick Find. That brings my projects to a nice round 10!

This module is a pretty basic one though. It simply provides a block which has an autocomplete field. This field is linked to the Node Title field. You start typing the Node Title and it will start suggesting possible nodes you might be interested in - sort of like a primitive search box.

It features primitive configuration, allowing an administrator to easil configure the title of the prompt, the size and the types of nodes returned in the autocomplete list (eg, you may want to limit the list to blogs only).

Accessing the Fragment from PHP - is it possible?

Nick — Sat, 22 Mar 2008 08:06:38 +0000

peashoter has raised a good point in an issue report for GlobalRedirect. What happens to a URL which has a fragment in it - such as:

http://www.example.com/node/100#comments

I have done a google and cant find any answer to this. It appears that the fragment is not passed to PHP. This makes it a LOT harder to fix!

Every blog needs a facebook page!

Nick — Mon, 17 Mar 2008 22:38:27 +0000

Every blog worth its weight needs a Facebook page!

http://www.facebook.com/pages/Thingy-Ma-Jig...../22760952880

Lets see how many fans I get! This is also a test in a way. I wanna see if Facebook could provice any kind of useful traffic.

Drupal and SEO: A comparison

Nick — Mon, 04 Feb 2008 23:20:37 +0000

I've recently been noticing a trend in how other websites are handling Clean URLs and it isn't good! Most websites don't appear to have the same luxury we have with Drupal (a concrete URL Alias system provided by the Path module). Although the URL Aliases can sometimes be a bit of a burden on larger sites, as the table can easily enter the tens or evey hundreds of thousands of entries, it provides (if used correctly) a very effective 1:1 relationship.

What is JFGI?

Nick — Mon, 21 Jan 2008 12:14:06 +0000

I am a BIG fan of the Bash.org IRC Quote Database and on of todays quotes was a particularly good one.

A2B2 launch shared hosting service

Nick — Mon, 07 Jan 2008 16:09:55 +0000

I currently host this Drupal blog using a VPS with a company called A2B2 (they have a new website coming soon) and in the past 12 months have been nothing but impressed by them… so impressed, in fact, that I've given out many personal recommendations and I've even recommended a friend who has transferred all his main sites over!

To add to their arsenal, A2B2 launched a sister company a few months back called CheapVPS.co.uk which aims at a slightly lower-end market to that targeted by A2B2. Basically A2B2 use slightly higher-end hardware whereas CheapVPS offer lower prices - but on marginally less-capable hardware.

On top of A2B2's VPS server & CheapVPS offering a more budget VPS, A2B2 have now launched A2B2XS - a Shared Hosting service. They currently offer 1Gb space + 25Gb Bandwidth for under £20 per year - that's less than £1.70 a month!

Photshop Tennis - Round 3 complete

Nick — Wed, 02 Jan 2008 17:03:13 +0000

Just over 2 weeks since we started, my friend, Janak, and I have just finished our 3^rd round of Drupal Wallpaper Photoshop Tennis.

If you haven't heard about this yet, the principal is to take a theme or idea and keep bouncing designs back and forth and at the end, a winner is decided.

Read more to see all the wallpaper previews until now.

Call to arms (for Windows Drupal Developers)!

Nick — Tue, 01 Jan 2008 18:26:16 +0000

It has come to my attention, thanks to Hass, that GlobalRedirect apears to have issues when running under Windows web server, IIS. Unfortunately, I do not use IIS but I am aware that a few members of the community do.

Free K850i Themes

Nick — Mon, 31 Dec 2007 02:15:23 +0000

Any regulars to this site will know that...

I have recently got a Sony Ericsson K850i!
I REALLY like free things!

So logically I want to customize mine to make it a little different from everyone else's K850i... Bring on Themes4UrMobilePhone.com!

Drupal Wallpaper - Photoshop Tennis

Nick — Mon, 17 Dec 2007 17:08:42 +0000

After Matt Farnia posted about the utter lack of Drupal Wallpapers, my friend and I decided to have a Photoshop Tennis contest.

How much memory am I using?

Nick — Thu, 08 Nov 2007 13:57:10 +0000

Following on from my previous post about how to check how many apache processes are running - I recently wanted to find out exactly how much memory my applications where using… So I did a little research and found a few new and useful commands!

K850i Flash Problem - dark photo

Nick — Fri, 26 Oct 2007 23:40:17 +0100

Is anyone else getting dark photo's when they use the flash on the K850i? I'm sitting here taking exactly the same photo over and over and getting different results. It seems th brightness of the flash varies (it's actually a visibly bigger and brighter flash sometimes)…

I don't understand it - surely this is the kind of bug that gets exposed during a testing phase?

The price of sucess - too many users!

Nick — Thu, 25 Oct 2007 15:46:34 +0100

Recently at work we had been having issues with spiking server load. One of the potential suspects was the Apache configuration as it was allowing 256 MaxClients. Combine that with Drupal eating RAM for breakfast (say a minimum of 12Mb per page) and you have a recipe for disaster - too many visitors cause a RAM shortage, lots of swapping and eventually a server meltdown. After speaking the Rackspace Technical Support Team, one of the guys there (Daniel) wrote a VERY useful script for us to run on the server to monitor Apache usage.

My Sony Ericsson k850i

Nick — Tue, 23 Oct 2007 23:08:08 +0100

Well it arrived last week and so far I've been nothing but impressed - 10/10!

I've also fairly recently moved home and thus my old commute to Canon Street is no more! I now (if I walk) get to go past tourist attractions such as St Pauls, Blackfriars Bridge and down towards Waterloo (where the internationally famous London Eye stands tall). During this walk I took some photos with my 'old' k800i and was reasonably impressed with them (factoring in that it is primarily a phone). After getting my new k850i I decided to walk the route again and take some more shots - a like-for-like comparison!

I'm getting a new k850i!

Nick — Wed, 10 Oct 2007 11:17:49 +0100

I just got off the phone with the O2 Upgrades team. I suggested that I was interested in either the Nokia N95 OR the Sony Ericsson k850i. I was informed that neither the N95 or k850i could not be done for free on the budget/contract I was asking for so I asked to be put through to the retention team. After being on hold for a few minutes the call was retrieved from the abyss that was the call waiting queue and I got a good offer…

Hidden Drupal development functions

Nick — Tue, 02 Oct 2007 11:07:47 +0100

I was browsing around the Devel Module the other day and I noticed a few functions that are not mentioned in any documentation that I've seen but make life even easier, as if Devel doesn't make it easy enough! Almost everyone that's used Devel will be familiar with dprint_r (A debug version of the popular print_r function in PHP). Well who has used these ones?

dpr – Shortcut for dprint_r.
dvr – Similar to dpr, but uses var_dump instead of print_r.
dpm – Similar to dpr but print_r's a variable as a message using drupal_set_message.
dvm – Similar to dpm but uses var_dump instead of print_r.

Getting the most out of Fedora Core 4

Nick — Fri, 28 Sep 2007 16:27:50 +0100

I recently looked into which versions of software I was running and was a little concerned to see how backward Fedora Core 4 was in some areas. I did a little Googling around and found a website (http://remi.collet.free.fr/) which is predominately written in French (but has a few English translations) which provides a new repository for Fedora Core 4's Yum Installer Package which provides far more recent RPM's for the likes of PHP and MySQL... So I installed it!

I got me a Wii

Nick — Tue, 04 Sep 2007 12:37:25 +0100

Its been a while since a I posted and mostly thats because I've been moving home and without internet... So whats new? Well I bought myself a Nintendo Wii on Sunday as I've been toying with the idea for a while. My initial thoughts on it are: IT'S SO MUCH FUN!

The only downside I have found so far is that it wont play DVD Films... It has a DVD drive - but they just haven't made it play films... Why? I have no idea!

How to weigh terms alphabetically

Nick — Tue, 07 Aug 2007 11:59:23 +0100

Following on from my Numbering Rows in MySQL article, today I needed to populate the weight column of the term_data table for about a hundred terms so that they incremented in alphabetical order. This was, on the face of it, a very tedious task; click edit, select weight from drop-down, submit, 'goto 1'.

As I said in my Numbering Rows in MySQL article, I don't like tedious - but I do like over-complicated methods which actually make my life more interesting and less tedious... Enter a nifty MySQL script!

Force a PDF to download

Nick — Mon, 06 Aug 2007 17:39:16 +0100

I recently needed to force a PDF to download using Apache. The default behaviour for most browsers is to try to open the PDF inside the browser itself. This is fine for a small PDF or for powerful machines - but a large PDF on even a modest machine can often lock the browser up. This needed fixing!

After 20 minutes of perusing the Apache documents, I happened across the FilesMatch option which takes Regular Expressions. Regular Expressions are cool things which pattern match; you give it a rather complicated (yet logical) pattern and it matches it for you. Initially I used something like this...

Free Nokia N95 Themes

Nick — Fri, 03 Aug 2007 10:05:05 +0100

Are you in need of free Nokia N95 themes? I think I might have found just the site for you. Themes4urMobilePhone.com has just released a new section dedicated for Nokia N95 Themes - and they're all FREE!

A while ago I write a blog article about Free Nokia N73 Themes and it has proven very popular. I'm personally thinking about getting an N95 and this is definately going to be the site I use to customise it!

Cubalaya integrates with Drupal

Nick — Sat, 28 Jul 2007 19:21:16 +0100

Not many people have heard of Cubalaya. I know I hadn't a few months back when they contacted me about potential advertising on my site. Now Cubalaya isn't a shop - its not like Amazon or even eBay. Its more like Kelkoo or Pricerunner - its a Price Comparison Site really. Well now you can easily integrate this PPC (Pay Per Click) advertiser onto your site and provide your own category sensitive products.

New Blog: Beginners guide to photography

Nick — Sat, 21 Jul 2007 21:42:02 +0100

Ever wanted to start taking good photo's? Ever wondered what the ISO setting, Exposure Time or that little symbol of a flower on your camera meant? This great new photography blog has just opened to help out new photographers with these kinds of questions. It is run by my Girlfriend who recently just got a Canon EOS 400D and wanted to learn how to use the camera.

Back from Holiday!

Nick — Wed, 11 Jul 2007 11:09:08 +0100

Well I've been back from holiday for a few days now and am still wishing I was in Scotland. It's SUCH a nice place!

If you need some convincing on whether or not the scenery is worth it, check out our Flickr Scottish Holiday group.

Below are a selection of snaps from the holiday