In the next couple of days I will again be doing iterative releases of an offline version of the Drupal Handbook. A long time ago I was creating them for Drupal 4.xx and 5.xx. Suddenly there was fierce competition from those close to Drupal.org. So I thought that eventually offline versions would be the norm. Unfortunately two things happened. First Drupal.org started a project where they traded print HTML pages of the handbook for OPML. They never quite got to the point of automating the process of converting OPML to XML and then to a format that supports the easy creation of compressed HTML files. Printer-friendly pages are the basis for creating good windows help files. Later on down the road all the sites that suddenly were producing offline documentation faded into the ether. Drupal.org never adopted any server routines for creation of any type of offline docs either.

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bertboerland posted a photo:

A nice list at drupaljam.nl/sponsors

So, the longer it goes, the more I find out about the WWW.

It is truly a wondrous machine. Do you remember learning about the human’s quest for the perpetuum mobile? What? You haven’t? Look it up. It’s worth your time.

See? I just made you move without using any of my energy. The internet moves all day long. And most likely not out of its own volition. It is being moved by thousands, even millions of people all day long. It never sleeps, it never eats.

But humans create the content, so it doesn’t move by itself. Well, yes, if it were only one human who made all it move, it weren’t a perpetuum mobile. With half the world online, aren’t we more like one gigantic organism, like ants?

Instead of communicating by hormones, we communicate by bits and bytes. Even when I sleep, somebody looks at my facebook stuff, and, maybe, leaves a comment.

I fully stand by those commas above, by the way. Don’t ask me to give you the rules, but I know those commas go there. If you can credibly prove me wrong, you get a cookie.

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First post on Weslata (that’s the name of the site for now but surely it will be changed). I have chosen Drupal as the website’s content manager. Found it to be very easy and in tune with the website idea that we came up with.

I am now testing Drupal, MySQL, PHP and Apache on a local computer. I have run into some problems configuring the webserver and PHP but now they are resolved.

I am now going to setup MySQL and then install Drupal using WAMP Server. Looking forward to my first site with Drupal.

DevelopmentSeed posted a photo:

In his TED talk on open + government data, Tim Berners-Lee showed afghanistanelectiondata.org/data - built on Managing News and Drupal - as an example of what is being done with data that's opened up.

Check it out (3:11): www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/tim_berners_lee_the_year_open_....

OMG – I just had such a massive panic because I thought that I had lost the site appearance, all my css work. I thought it was somehow never goibg to work again.

I uploaded the updated acquia-prosper theme , which was fine. But the site went back to being grey colours and not all the colours I had chosen for it and spent DAYS adding into the css file. But it was ok coz I had a back up and I just uploaded the css file from before.

But then it didn’t work. Itwas still grey.

So I restarted the computer and swore at it and that didn’t work. Then I did it again and again and again and that didn’t work. And then I went into firebug for a look at it and I saw that my css file was being recognised but that it was being superseded by a new file called gray.css. So I went and had a look for this and in the updated theme there is a folder called design packs where there is a css file for gray and one for blue. And these are above the css file for the general theme.

I’m not going to use these as I have the look of my site all sorted so I just deleted the whole folder from my site. And now everything looks as it should do again – PHEW!

I will be hosting a Drupal iDEAL Codesprint on the Drupaljam in Amsterdam.
Please add a comment there, email me (ber -- webschuur - com) or contact me in whatever other way if you want to join, more information or anything else.

iDeal is a Dutch, online payment system, widly adopted, but hard to implement.

In Drupal there are many iDeal implementations for übercart, but none are very solid and none are easy to implement; some are even plain insecure.

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So, it’s still worth your while taking a short course to get started – or else, you could spend months of frustration. Not to mention the potential pitfalls you need to avoid, such as legal troubles, if you don’t understand what you are doing.

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I’m re-blogging Evan Boldt’s message to the SU team:

_                                                                     _

SpreadUbuntu is participating in the new Ubuntu branding project. We want to start some discussion about the new layouts, design, and logo.

Please take a look at this wiki page: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/MarketingTeam/Projects/SpreadUbuntu/Brand

Some things to discuss:

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1. Cooperative Behaviour Spreads Through a Group, But So Does Cheating (Not Exactly Rocket Science) -- Fowler and Christakis suggest that people tend to mimic the actions of those they played with. They could be directly imitating the actions of other players, or they could be looking out for cues that tell them the 'right' or 'normal' way of behaving. Whether it's specific actions or social norms that are spreading, the result is the same - a ripple effect that causes groups of people to act in similar ways. People copy the modeled behaviour that they see. This is why, when you start a new social site, you should seed it with people who behave the way that you wish newcomers to behave.
2. Tulip -- open source 3D visualisation software of large graphs, homepage here.

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STEP 1 :

First you have to create a module. Create a folder into /sites/all/modules. Give the folder name your module name. Create a module file into the folder. Give the module a name. I have used “contactus.module”. In contactus.module file write the following lines. If you give different module name then the function name should be function yourmodulename_form_alter(&$form, $form_state).

#title    = Title of the input field.

#type     = Type of the input field (e.g. ‘textfield’ or ‘textarea’ etc.  )

#required = If the field is required then value will be true.

Unset function will disable the particular field. Here, in the example I unset copy field. You can re-order all the fields as per need. Just you have to the $ order array. For more information see http://api.drupal.org/api/function/hook_form_alter.

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??Zeropoint???????

1. ????????????????http://users.tpg.com.au/j_birch/plugins/superfish/#download????????1.4.8

2. ????js????/sites/all/theme/zeropoint/js??css??zeropoint/css??????zeropoint/image??

?????superfish.js??79?menuClasss: ’sf-js-enabled’???’sf-menu’???????CSS??????????????????????????Fusion Core?????template.php??????superfish???primary link?class????????sf-menu???????????????????????????????sf-menu?CSS???????Medu???????????!important???????????

3.??zeropoint.info???????css?js???????superfish.js??????????????????????

stylesheets[all][] = css/superfish.css
scripts[] = js/jquery.bgiframe.min.js
scripts[] = js/hoverIntent.js
scripts[] = js/supposition.js
scripts[] = js/supersubs.js
scripts[] = js/superfish.js

4. ?????????js/script.js

Drupal.behaviors.superfish = function (context) {
$(“#superfish ul.menu”).superfish({
hoverClass:  ’sfHover’,
delay:       250,
animation:   {opacity:’show’,height:’show’},
speed:       ‘fast’,
autoArrows:  true,
dropShadows: false,
disableHI:   true
}).supposition();
};

?????????????zeropoint.info?

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bertboerland posted a photo:

1 in cms, 1 in oss cms

www.xmarks.com/site/drupal.org

My professor Vin Crosbie, who runs the site Digital Deliverance, turned me onto this open-source semantic solutions by the good people at OpenCalais. OpenCalais’s collaborators have created several tools, from a simple standalone API to tagging applications for Drupal and WordPress. This service reads textual and structural information from three different types of files (txt, HTML, and XML), renders meta-information on those files and offers possible topics based on keyword matches from OpenCalais’s massive database.

I’m considering OpenCalais as a sorting tool for Parallactic Drift. Believe me, hard coding keywords and conditionals to match specific topics is difficult, but it allows me to create a script that sorts news items down to specific events. While I would lose this level of specificity with OpenCalais, the API seems to have evolved from its initial functions to include more advanced vector calculations for reading word placement within text. The API even diagrams sentences’ grammatical structure to figure out what a sentence says! Just type a word into their demo viewer.

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bdcthomas posted a photo:

Given this account is currently trumping my photography website in Google I probably ought to add a link here to redirect people.

So once more that's something like Ben Thomas Photographic at www.bdcthomas.com

Click the following to learn more about Benjamin Thomas - bdcthomas.

More shots from the type that can be seen here are available on Facebook for those that might be in them (you may need to be logged in).

Except Flickr 'nofollow' every link now, don't they? Blast.