Thingy Ma Jig

Abessive For Drupal 6

16 September 2008
websites Drupal design announcement

My first theme, Abessive, gets a new release today for Drupal 6. Turns out to be a pretty easy upgrade!

In case nobody caught onto what Abessive was the first time; it is an (almost) image free theme with flexible 1, 2 or 3 column layout (depending on where/if you place any blocks). Each block/section has rounded corners and slight top & bottom gradient which is achieved using only CSS techniques involving margins, padding and background colours. This makes the theme very lightweight and elegant at the same time.

Using Tar and SSH to improve SCP Speeds

03 September 2008
linux How to geek

I am currently in the process of migrating several dozen sites between two servers. I tried using scp command to copy the sites over however scp is a very slow command when transferring many small files.

I did a little research on how to use tar over an ssh connection and realised that you could specify the stdout on tar.

Vim and Drupal Modules

18 August 2008
vim programming linux geek Drupal

I just finished upgrading a server to Ubuntu 8.04 which came with Vim 7.1 rather than 6.3 on the older server. It seems 7.1 does things slightly differently to 6.3.

In 6.3 I could create ~/.vim/filetype.vim and in there define a line as follows:

au BufRead,BufNewFile *.module,*.install,*.theme setf php

However in 7.1, it looks like a line similar to this has to go into ~/.vimrc instead…

Removing trailing spaces with vim

16 July 2008
vim linux Drupal

After recently reading about how great VIM is for the three hundredth and fifty second time (I kept count), I decided to take a look.

It really is quite cool! I've also decided to try to log any cool tips I learn about it. Here is the first which I found after running the coder module on one of my modules (Page Title 2) and it threw hundreds of errors about too many trailing spaces on empty lines.

Generate random string in MySQL

10 July 2008
security programming mysql How to geek

Have you ever wanted to generate a random string in MySQL, say for assigning a random password to a list of users? Well here is a useful tip!

Synergy for OSX Leopard

07 July 2008
technology software mac How to geek

I recently setup my PC in the living room with my TV so I could play games and watch streamed video from the net (eg, BBC's iPlayer). Unfortunately this always meant having a keyboard and mouse attached.

Then came along Synergy.

Global Redirect Update

03 July 2008
SEO programming geek Drupal

One of my most popular Drupal modules - Global Redirect - has just had an update from 1.2 to 1.3. This update includes several fixes for the following:

My First Drupal Theme

12 June 2008
websites Drupal design

I have just finished commiting my very first theme to the drupal community! I'm not a designer by nature - I prefer to be deep in the code. Thats why I commited this theme - it contains very little design (in terms of Photoshop work). This design is, pretty much, image free! On top of that - its SEO friendly too!

I say 'Pretty much' because it is still using 3 core image files for the bullet points. But what I'm pleased about is the curved CSS-only corners with a slight gradient on them AND the fact that if you remove content from a column, the content fills out over it automatically.

American Boy Remix

27 May 2008
music free cool

My mate and Kasha have done a REALLY nice remix of the fairly recent song American Boy by Estelle. You can hear it on KashaMusic.co.uk…

Page Title 2 for Drupal 6

02 May 2008
SEO programming Drupal

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!