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The personal homepage of Michael Morisy, technology journalist.

Topic “Drupal”

Scary Red Text

Submitted by michael morisy on Wed, 2010-02-17 15:03

Scary Red TextScary Red Text
Occasionally, logging in to check site comments, I get scary red text like this. It gives me a sick little thrill, realizing how complicated and interconnected everything is, that I can reach in and break stuff on this site, even accidentally, like opening up a mechanical watch and seeing all the gears and springs quietly clicking and whirring along.

Complexity is a beautiful and frightening thing.

Organic path creation

Submitted by michael morisy on Tue, 2010-01-12 03:11

I've been working on a (secret-ish!) side project recently that hopes to index a lot of profiles, and allow people to browse through and compare those profiles as convenient.

One thing I'm struggling with at this early stage is the taxonomy architecture. For example, one taxonomy will probably end up being based on geography. My first impulse was to structure the taxonomy like this:
USA
-Northeast
--New England
---Massachusetts
----Greater Boston Area
-----Somerville
-Southeast
--Etc, etc, etc.

I have since been informed that this is insane, or at least a moderately bad idea, particularly in Drupal. So my next idea might be equally insane: Just allow everything to be free tagged with vague prompts and a catch-all parent taxonomy, or perhaps assign some root taxonomies (location, genre, medium) with free tagging.

Drupal: Facebook Connect or not to connect ...

Submitted by michael morisy on Wed, 2009-11-04 21:11

Editor's Note: In the interest of sanity and others' edification, I thought it might be nice to start logging my travails developing Spare Change News in Drupal. I probably won't post all the updates to Instant History (the main blog), but the major ones will show up there, with everything cross-posted to the new Drupal Developer blog (It's all really just one blog with different categories, but shh ...).

So far, one of the biggest challenges I've run into with Spare Change is getting staff to actually log in and post content. The most common excuse? "I can't remember my user name and password." It's a sentiment I'm sympathetic to, having written about user hatred of password rules. But what's a site admin to do?

Continued>>

Out damn spot!

Submitted by michael morisy on Sat, 2009-07-18 11:47

By day, I primarily wear the "journalist" hat, but lately I've gotten involved with Spare Change News as a volunteer on the Development Committee. I'm sure I'll be writing more about them in the future, but suffice to say Spare Change is a street newspaper that's designed to be an accessible form of self-employment for homeless or formerly homeless individuals.

I was asked to help re-design their website:
1994 called, they want their tables back.

So I'm working on the re-design which is going swimmingly and forcing me to work a bit more on Instant Design, but while I've found an excellent Drupal drop-down menu tutorial, I can't get rid of the damn unordered list bullet stylings, despite using the style: blank; tag or whatever it is.

The result is not pretty:
SpotSpot

And that's why you're getting this wonky design rant rather than a post on SEO for journalists, like I've been planning for weeks.

Updated: I removed some spelling errors and a few rather unnecessary snarky remarks.

How would you build your iGoogle homepage without Google?

Submitted by michael morisy on Fri, 2009-06-12 20:11

For years, I've been telling people I want to get away from Google, but I keep finding myself using more and more Google products: Gmail, GoogleTalk, Gchat, Google Analytics, Google Docs, Picasa ... The list goes on and on. Oh yeah, and Google search.

But while Google's certainly convenient, I'm not really comfortable with having all my data in one company's hands, even if their motto is "Don't be evil." So I've started building my own iGoogle-like dashboard right on my very own site, using Drupal. It's been surprisingly easy, and with about 2 hours work, I could embed my RememberTheMilk to do list, package tracking, my upcoming stories for the week, check Facebook, and more:

iGoogleA Google-free iGoogle

And it's all within an interface I have complete control over, can back up easily, and can modify to the smallest detail. Drupal even makes it easy to sort things into neat columns.

Full disclosure: I'm kinda cheating a little bit, because I'm still using Google Gadgets for my webpage, but at least it's a step in the right direction, and much of that functionality wouldn't be hard to reproduce piecemeal in a 100% Google-free way.

So, what would you put in your own custom Google-free iGoogle page?

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