michael's blog

I just committed the initial development version of a Drupal module I recently created for a client. The module, OG Invite Restrict, allows a site administrator to restrict thier users' ability to invite people to groups to only current users.

Normally, the organic groups' (OG) invite functionality allows users to enter both usernames and email addresses on the invite form. In some cases, a site administrator may want to limit entry to only current users.

The module not only restricts the form to only usernames, it also adds autocomplete to the username field.

Thanks to Ozmosis for sponsoring development of this module.

I just soft-launched OffRoadAtlas.com - a new site that utilizes Drupal and Google Maps to provide users with an easy way to find and share off-road areas for their vehicles.

The site allows its members as well as anonymous users to submit off-road areas to be displayed on the site. When submitting a new area, the user can specify not only the name and description of the site, but they can also submit links associated with the area and they can pinpoint the location of the area using a highly-interactive Google Map embedded in the page.

The site also integrates various social-networking features like buddylists and user points. In addition, users of the site can search for off-road areas by zip code.

I recently attended a lecture by Brion Vibber, chief technology officer of Wikipedia. The Orlando Java User's Group hosted Brion at its monthly meeting and Brion gave a great overview of Wikipedia's technology infrastructure.

No big surprise, Wikipedia runs on a typical LAMP stack. They use tools like Squid and memcached to help manage the traffic, but in the end, it's LAMP. Brion explained that while the main servers for Wikipedia are located in Florida, they also have two donated server farms in Seoul and Amsterdam.

As a web developer, I'm often called upon to translate a designer's mockup into valid XHTML and CSS that will work across a wide range of browsers. Like many developers, Firefox is my browser of choice while Internet Explorer (IE) is avoided at all costs.

I recently came across an issue with a simple XHTML DIV element that wasn't behaving properly when viewed with IE6. The issue with the simple DIV was that I had a 1 pixel border applied to it, but the entire border refused to show up in IE6:

File this one under "holy-cow-I-can't-believe-how-much-time-I-just-spent-figuring-out-how-to-this". What I'm talking about is this: the "posted" information is the information stored in the PHPTemplate's $submitted variable: "posted 2007-08-01 12:32:42 by admin". Normally, this information is displayed right before or right after the node's main content. I recently ran across this problem when I was working on a site with numerous content types - all created with CCK. I was working on theming one of the content types and I couldn't figure out why the $submitted variable wasn't being populated when the node was displayed.