Likemind blog on web development

Developing with Drupal, Facebook and WordPress.

Creating clickable maps with Drupal

Sunday, June 28th, 2009

I’ve recently worked on a couple of requirements for clickable maps which I think would be of potential interest. As visual aids, maps can be very attractive but they present some technical challenges to the developer.

read more about creating clickable maps

Websnapr Field: a web thumbnail module for Drupal

Wednesday, March 11th, 2009

Websnapr Field is a little module I’ve written which uses the Websnapr service to generate web page thumbnails in a page. If you have a field which is a URL pointing to an external site, you can choose to display it as a snapshot of the page pointed to.

(more…)

Web designers: 10 tips to make developers love you

Wednesday, December 31st, 2008

As a web developer, I frequently have reason to curse web graphic designers. That’s not because I don’t appreciate their talents. I love working on great looking designs and I have a lot of respect for those who can create them. But designers don’t always understand the limitations of technology, and how their decisions can make life hard (or easy) for developers. So here’s 10 tips for how to create and document designs in a way that will earn you much developer love.

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Release 0.7 of the Side Content plugin

Sunday, November 30th, 2008

Release 0.7 of the WordPress Side Content plugin from Likemind Web Services is all about shortcodes. Plugins often provide shortcodes as a safe and simple means for you to insert dynamic content into your posts.

Read more about release 0.7 of the Side Content plugin

A Simple Source Viewer to help with SEO

Sunday, November 9th, 2008

I’ve been involved for a while in teaching the basics of SEO to local business people here in North Devon. Recently, while revising my course notes I decided that to help my trainees get a better grasp of on-site SEO it would be useful to be able to show them the HTML source of pages, colour-coded in such a way that the important elements for SEO purposes would be more obvious

Read more about the Sourcery source viewer ...

Correcting weird characters in MySQL

Wednesday, November 5th, 2008

While working on web development projects I often need to copy the contents of one database to another. Consequently I’ve seen the problem described on Alex Kings’s blog a few times, and been able to deal with it using the technique he suggests.

Today however I saw the same symptoms - apostrophes and some other characters translated to weird glyphs in a database that had been saved and restored apparently using UTF-8 coding throughout. How can that happen, I wondered?

See how to correct weird characters in MySQL databases...

News: tips for Drupal site owners and administrators

Friday, October 3rd, 2008

If you are have a Drupal site but are not especially technically-minded, it can be hard to find straightforward, concise advice about making the best use of your site.

For that reason I’m starting a new email newsletter that will contain simple tips about Drupal aimed at site owners. Each week there’ll be new ideas for you to improve the experience of your site for visitors, search engines and yourself.

Tips will include recommendations on modules, settings and marketing for your site.

Sign up for the Likemind email newsletter now.

News: tips for WordPress site owners and administrators

Friday, October 3rd, 2008

If you are have a WordPress site but are not especially technically-minded, it can be hard to find straightforward, concise advice about making the best use of your site.

For that reason I’m starting a new email newsletter that will contain simple tips about WordPress aimed at site owners. Each week there’ll be new ideas for you to improve the experience of your site for visitors, search engines and yourself.

Tips will include recommendations on plugins, settings and marketing for your site.

Sign up for the Likemind email newsletter now.

Setting up MediaWiki

Monday, September 15th, 2008

Over the weekend I created Limerickipedia as a bit of a joke and an exercise in working with MediaWiki. To get it running I had to overcome a number of obstacles so i thought I’d write them up briefly here. (more…)

Creating a Drupal node image gallery

Friday, September 5th, 2008

A common requirement is to have a Flash-based image gallery associated with a particular content type, so users can upload images using a CCK image field and have them displayed as a gallery, with each node of the type having its own separate one. Here’s an example of the sort of thing, one I created for a project last year.

In this article I’ll show how to make such a gallery, using the excellent Art Flash Gallery with Drupal. It is not to be a detailed tutorial: I’ll just describe the essential steps involved. When I get time I may provide more of the specifics.
Read on about creating an image gallery in Drupal ...