Technical

After quite a while in the pipe-line, Big Sky went live this week.  An informational site on the courses offered by Paul Boross and his associates, in the world of personal training for the corporate world.  Two sister sites will follow soon hopefully.

I've been using Drupal for a little while.  Now it's time to get serious, and start using the powerful module Views 2.  Here is a great video (it is a little slow to get going, but) showing how to pass arguments (in this case taxonomy terms) into Views 2.

http://gotdrupal.com/videos/drupal-views-arguments

I find the difficult thing about developing in Drupal is finding relevant documentation/discussion, as there is now many different versions of Drupal and it's modules.  The most time spent in development is searching the forums/documentation for the actual information required.  Also using the correct terminology, for the sake of Google, other programing terms might be, passing parameters to views, passing variables to views, taxonomy terms into views.

OS X comes with apache and php installed, but not enabled.  While it's quite easy to get the Apache server up and running, through system preferences -> Sharing ->  check "Web Sharing".  You still have to then enable the php5 module.  This is done by editing the file /etc/apache2/httpd.conf and uncommenting (removing the # from) the line "LoadModule php5_module        libexec/apache2/libphp5.so"

Don't forget to restart apache with "sudo apachectl restart"
 

I was able to get two way syncronising working between iCal and my google calendar!!  Using this tutorial:

http://www.google.com/support/calendar/bin/answer.py?answer=99357

Then I was able to sync my iPhone with iCal.  The only problem is that I can't add events to the google calendar from the calendar application on the iPhone.  To do this, I have to use the google calendar web interface.  Bugger......

This has taken a long time to get working, for something that is pretty simple.  I develop on a Mac, but sometimes I have to work in .NET enviroment.  To do this, we just used to work from a development server.  But then we started to use subversion, sure we could still work from the sever, but we really should be working from localhost. 

Had a problem today with firefox not correctly calculating element dimensions.  The problem was that I had my css defined after the script.  As a result  jQuery was calculating the height, before the CSS had been applied.

Changed the order and the problem was fixed

Now I've moved to jQuery, need to build up a library of components to use.

I have just used nyroModal for the Perfect Pizza site.  I found it very good and powerful, but had to modify it a lot to get the specific behaviour we were looking for.  Took a lot of work.  In saying that, have just incorporated it into NFA site in a matter of minutes!

 That's right, it's all in the title.  OK, client wants a menu in the corporate font, so we need to use flash. 

Bit of a mission in the end, so thought I better post about it.  My first tempt (posted further down the page) was to generate an xml feed using views.  This didn't work as I wasn't able to use custom SQL to populate the view.

With the release of the much improved Mootools 1.2, here are some examples;

a very cool image browser

Get thunderbird/sunbird working with google goodness.......

Zindus synchronises those contacts, while Provider synchronises that calendar!

UPDATE:

Other contact sync option, seems to work well too

http://gcontactsync.mozdev.org/index.html