It seems that on Friday, my hosting provider, EuroVPS decided to perform another upgrade. This time they added PHP 5 support and upgraded the PLESK control panel to version 8. As with their previous IP address change, things didn’t go so well, at least on my end.
Seems they’ve disabled custom php.ini support, but added limited support for clean URLs in Windows IIS. I had to change my URL structure to accommodate this, so any Search Engine Indexing will be incorrect now.
Playing around with DotNetNuke again today for work and the CSS implementation leaves a lot to be desired. For some reason (open source? – multiple contributors?) the CSS has hundreds of redundant definitions and the code base itself adds unnecessary or at least unwanted IDs or CLASS tags to everything.
Rather than have a single FONT-FAMILY declaration, it was declared on almost every style. Instead of BORDER, BORDER-RIGHT, BORDER-LEFT, BORDER-TOP, and BORDER-BOTTOM are used. It’s really insane. Almost every element of content gets assigned with CLASS=”Normal” and put inside a DIV with a uniqe ID ending with ModuleContent.
All of this rambling led to a cool way to assign CSS properties to certain elements based on Wild Card characters. This only works with Firefox, but if you’re trying get Firefox to display something differently than IE, it can be a big help.
/* all DIV tags with an ID ending in ModuleContent */
div[id$=’ModuleContent’] {
border:2px #000 solid;
}
/* all A tags whose HREF attribute ends in .pdf */
a[href$=’.pdf’] {
border:2px #000 solid;
}
Works great for debugging browser differences as well. Anyway, back to cleaning up the DotNetNuke default.css file. I’ve already got it pared down to 14k (from the original 18k).
I’m usually not a big fan of movie websites. I can’t stand all the crappy interactive Flash features and nonsense. I usually opt for the Apple.com trailers page and that’s it. Sometimes I’ll grab a desktop image if it’s a movie I especially like, but very rarely do I dig around inside.
Some books improve with age–the age of the reader, that is. Such is certainly the case with Philip Pullman’s heroic, at times heart-wrenching novel, The Golden Compass, a story ostensibly for children but one perhaps even better appreciated by adults. The protagonist of this complex fantasy is young Lyra Belacqua, a precocious orphan growing up within the precincts of Oxford University. But it quickly becomes clear that Lyra’s Oxford is not precisely like our own–nor is her world. For one thing, people there each have a personal dæmon, the manifestation of their soul in animal form. For another, hers is a universe in which science, theology, and magic are closely allied:
Not that Lyra spends much time worrying about it; what she likes best is “clambering over the College roofs with Roger the kitchen boy who was her particular friend, to spit plum stones on the heads of passing Scholars or to hoot like owls outside a window where a tutorial was going on, or racing through the narrow streets, or stealing apples from the market, or waging war.” But Lyra’s carefree existence changes forever when she and her dæmon, Pantalaimon, first prevent an assassination attempt against her uncle, the powerful Lord Asriel, and then overhear a secret discussion about a mysterious entity known as Dust. Soon she and Pan are swept up in a dangerous game involving disappearing children, a beautiful woman with a golden monkey dæmon, a trip to the far north, and a set of allies ranging from “gyptians” to witches to an armor-clad polar bear.
In The Golden Compass, Philip Pullman has written a masterpiece that transcends genre. It is a children’s book that will appeal to adults, a fantasy novel that will charm even the most hardened realist. Best of all, the author doesn’t speak down to his audience, nor does he pull his punches; there is genuine terror in this book, and heartbreak, betrayal, and loss. There is also love, loyalty, and an abiding morality that infuses the story but never overwhelms it. This is one of those rare novels that one wishes would never end.
The comparisons to Harry Potter are out there and having never read the Harry Potter books, I won’t choose a side either way. Regardless, I was fascinated with the book and managed to read the second book, The Subtle Knife, in between reading all my other books for that same class. I then had to wait for the final book in the series to be published, but when The Amber Spyglass was released, I read it within the first week.
Having said all of that, I guess you could say I’m predisposed to like the movie website. I think it does a great job of explaining dæmons and the Alethiometer (a magical/scientific device that only Lyra can use). The working replica of the Alethiometer itself can waste hours of your time if you were to read every bit of info available. As you can see above, the site will generate a personal dæmon for you. Why mine is a spider, I’m not sure. I’m like spiders as much as Indiana Jones likes snakes. I can’t wait to see a trailer for this movie and I’m sure I’ll be there later this year when it’s released to check it out.
The decision was made at work to start moving content to a Content Management Systems. IT wants to move to mostly Microsoft products, so we chose DotNetNuke as the CMS platform.
I wasn’t overly excited. Much more info is already available for PHP systems like Drupal (or even WordPress), not to mention the size of their development community.
Anyway, DNN 4.5 seems to be a nice release. Much easier to install and I think I’m getting the hang of it. Thanks to Microsoft’s lack of standards support, a total CSS layout is out of the question. DNN likes to drop and add columns depending on where you’re at in the system and it requires a full page for the Inline Editor.
I did manage to generate a nice layout using a one row, three column table to hold my layout divs. This allows DNN to drop and add the columns without messing the formatting up.
Computerworld published an article entitled “Top 10 Firefox Extensions to Avoid” and of course I had to read it. Some of their choices were odd, most I agreed with and one made me write this post.
This falls into the category of extensions that seem pointless. What we have here is a browser-based tool for writing blog posts. But don’t most blogs already have a browser-based editor that works just fine?
Perhaps there’s a blogging system out there that needs this kind of helper app, but we’re not familiar with it. Until we come upon such a beast, we’d rather skip the overhead of an extension and stick to our blogging software’s built-in editor.
Don’t get us wrong, ScribeFire is a nice piece of software. We just don’t see a need for it at this time. If you do happen to be using blogging software without a decent editor, ScribeFire would be a fine addition to your extension toolbox.
Yes, WordPress and other blog engines have build in editors, if they didn’t, they wouldn’t be very useful, now would they? I think they’re missing the point with ScribeFire. The nice think about this extension is I can post to my blog without having to go there. I can keep all my tabs open in Firefox, click back and forth between them, copy and paste, and all the while, the ScribeFire window stays in place below. It makes it terribly easy to reference what you’re writing about. If I used the WordPress editor, I would have to click back and forth between tabs or have multiple windows open to do the same thing.
Sorry ComputerWorld, but you missed the mark on that one.
