CivicActions

Drupal 6 Themes by Ric Shreeves on Packt Publishing is a great resource for newbie Drupal themers. Themers who are not from a programming background will find it especially useful since it starts with the basics and builds up to more complex yet powerful techniques such as hook_form_alter().

DrupalSouth was a great success. As New Zealand's first nation-wide Drupal event, many weren't sure what to expect. However it seems that most expectations were exceeded; presentations were useful and interesting, ad-hoc unconference time was valuable, food was on time and tasty, beer was drunk and appreciated and most importantly, a good time was had by all!

There are some great photos on flickr, a long list of tweets on Twitter, and some write-ups by Michael Dance and Brenda "Shiny" Wallace. These are all syndicated onto the DrupalSouth homepage.

For most common requirements -- especially multi-lingual sites -- the Location package is not a good solution for locative data in Drupal 6. The Location package does not handle i18n well and has l10n problems without simple or general solutions with translation sets. The recommendation for most cases where locative data is stored in Drupal 6, is to and migrate the data to taxonomy vocabularies and CCK fields. Both of these options have general solutions for most common i18n issues which make it more flexible for a variety of possible i18n requirements.

Perhaps I am too critical or my expectations are too high. In any case I was disappointed with Building Powerful and Robust Websites with Drupal 6. It may be somewhat useful for Drupal beginners seeking an introduction, general guidance or even basic help, but it lacks the detail and usefulness beginners are likely to need to get tasks done early on. I would expect most Drupal beginners to require more complete and comprehensive resources than what this book provides.

The book appears to have been written under the assumption that it will be read from front to back. But the reality is, at least from my experience, that most technical books are used in a fairly random order for reference when help on a specific problem or topic is sought. The sentences are often long, winding and more detailed or complex than necessary. This makes it difficult to scan for keywords, search for context or comprehend in a hurry. Many details encourage bad practices or are misleading. Most of these issues are minor, however the frequency of them is concerning. Shorthand PHP tags and bad code style occur in a number of places <? print $something; ?>.

Air New Zealand's in-flight entertainment system runs Linux. Unfortunately the layer of software that Air NZ has deployed on top of Linux is buggy and I noticed at least twice in one 3-hour flight that it crashed, causing Linux to reboot. (This is what led me to discover the systems run Linux.)

Watching Linux boot on the seat-back console screen was fun. And it was nice to see Tux the Penguin about the airline.

CivicActions endeavors that our websites be usable. Usable implies accessible, since a user with special needs can not use an inaccessible site. In this article I discuss techniques that every web developer, themer and front-end html coder should have in their toolkit. These are the low-hanging fruit, the simple and inexpensive techniques, that make a big difference for internet users with restricted access, from user with low bandwidth internet connections, to users with poor eyesight. We're not just talking about the Googlebot and spiders here.

What is accessiblity?

Google search provides many definitions of accessibility. Perhaps the best and most complete for the context of web development is from McGill University's website. Emphasis is mine:

accessibility: the ability to view web pages on different browsers and multiple platforms; especially concerns individuals with disabilities — that they have access to and be able to use information and data in a manner comparable to individuals without disabilities…

UPDATE: Buddhika Amila Sampath created the Light Fantastic theme, not Joshua Brauer. Joshua is the maintainer.

I recently searched on Themebot for a great contributed Drupal flexible-width theme for DrupalSouth.net.nz and found Light Fantastic. Joshua Brauer maintains the awesome Light Fantastic theme, which was created by Buddhika Amila Sampath as part of the Google Summer of Code 2007.

Screenshot of Light Fantastic on the DrupalSouth website:

See a larger image.

Google has announced their web browser Chrome. Many are excited while others remain skeptical. Currently I'm both; but a recent discovery has swayed me towards skeptical. Here's why.

IE6 Death March has led the way in the movement to stop support for IE6. Help your web developers help you to save money, conserve their sanity, build better websites and make the internet a better place. With so many other great browsers available, IE6 is just not worth the effort anymore.

If you think you really need to support IE6, I have two things to say to you;

With applications moving to the web, the desktop web browser is becoming more and more the center of users' attention. Consider for a moment what percentage of time you spend in Firefox or other web browsers compared to other programs or applications that run in your desktop – or use RescueTime (Yet Another Web App) to find out precisely!