mark's blog

For the past 16 months, I've been working almost exclusively with Drupal to build websites, and I've got pretty good with it. However, I'm always conscious of the old adage that "When the only tool you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail", so in the interests of expanding my toolbox, I'm taking a look at Ruby on Rails.

As a web developer, one of the jobs I enjoy least is making sure that the sites I build are going to look good to all our visitors, not just to me. Like most developers, I develop my website for Firefox, then check it's OK in other popular browsers. Given our relatively low visitor volumes (at least so far) and limited time available for testing, in practice, this means testing Internet Explorer 6 and 7, and hoping that Opera, Chrome and Safari are as standards-compliant as Firefox (which is a fairly safe assumption).

Back in January I treated myself to a new mobile phone. Of course I looked at the iPhone, but there were three big drawbacks:

1. the price
2. they're getting kinda common (1 million sold in the UK!)
3. you can't use it as a 3G modem

OK, this one was entirely my own fault, but it's a useful cautionary tale to anyone running any version of Ubuntu.

I've used a nice bit of CSS to style all the buttons throughout our web site, but it all falls down a bit on the file upload button. For reasons best known only to the various browser developers, this button only has limited styling capability, if indeed any at all.

There are a few solutions out there, but they are all pretty messy in terms of adding a lot of cruft to your site code. I was looking for something a bit more elegant, and which would fit neatly in with the architecture of my Drupal-based site.

I've just got myself a fancy new mouse (OK - not really all that fancy, but I like it). There's just one small hitch - it's much more sensitive than the touchpad on my laptop, so whenever I switch between the two, I have to fire up control panel, choose the mouse panel, choose the right tab, slide the slider, click the "OK" button, and it all just seems not worth all the effort.

For my sins, I am currently using Windows Vista as the OS on my main PC, and am using the build-in mail client, Windows Mail, basically a rebranded Outlook Express. It's pretty basic, but I don't need much from my email client. However, today I found a need to view the HTML source of HTML emails.

One of the things we're really eager to get going on Save A Million Shots is the idea of video conversation threads. The trouble is, commenting is a fundamentally different activity from posting.

If you're posting an article, you're putting in a reasonable amount of time and effort (probably!), which could include making a video file, saving it to your computer somewhere, and uploading it when you write your post

All the hard work over the past four months has now gone live at Save A Million Shots. It's still in beta (like all good web applications!), so there'll be some more polishing and data quality work over the next few weeks, but we're getting quite a lot of traffic already. Stop on by and have a look!

Drupal includes the jQuery framework by default, which gives you easy access to a bunch of neat javascript eye-candy. I've been meaning to look into this properly for a while now, but I have at least figured out how to resolve a fairly common Drupal requirement - displaying submit buttons as text links.