Techiness
I'll clump web design talk and gadget talk here, I guess.
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Blagowub Admins: Install a Comment Notifier
I’m commenting a fair amount more on the blogs I read, and one of my growing peeves at this point is when there’s no email comment notifier on a blog. WordPress makes this easy. Drupal makes this easy. Livejournal’s been doing this forever. Of course. Really and truly, I’m not going to check anyone’s post twice a day for the next week to see if there are other interesting comments or replies to mine. Judging by the way commenting conversation has changed on this blog since putting a comment notifier in place, I’d say few other people inclined to read more than a few blogs are, either. I browse the…
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Ghost Characters Sheets: Simple JavaScript is Magick
I’ve written before about writing a character sheet manager for Geist characters, but there have been some upheavals within the Camarilla (now the Midnight Dance, a non-profit separate from White Wolf) that have the project on hold. For one, their developers may be doing it themselves, and they’re competent. For another, even if they don’t, they may be exposing a handy API that I can tie into. Lastly, I’m busy finishing a novel at the moment. That said, Greg offers Midnight Dance/Camarilla prestige (like, um, club brownie points; with enough of them, you can get more XP for your characters) if we submit ghost non-player characters to him. It’s not…
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Phenom II X4 945 and Lian Li PC-A05NB Cooling Problems
So back when I got my new computer recently, I picked up a Phenom II X4 945 chip (quad core, hence the “X4”) and a Lian Li PC-A05NB case. The case is a mini-tower that can fit ATX or microATX (my board is a micro). I’ve left in the stock fans and heatsink. The case is weird, because the air flow is the opposite of most conventional cases (back to front): (Image from Lian Li.) The stock fans don’t move much air, and when you toss in power cables and a power supply, it’s (apparently) time for trouble. My idle temperatures are around 44 C, and 50-60% load (running Minecraft…
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Drupal Theming: Setup a Local Version!
I’m a firm believer in the idea that a code recompile and quick test (whether that be through automated unit testing, a page refresh, whatever) shouldn’t take more than about 5-10 seconds, or your workflow is going to be lousy with distractions. I’m working on theming a Drupal site for a non-profit, and I’m struggling to find a way to optimize my theming experience for the final couple of hours of work I’ll probably need to put in. I don’t have a local copy of the database, so I’m working remotely, and like any good developer, I’m in source control–in this case, SVN (bleh). I’ve written about my SVN troubles…
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Excluding Hits from Google Analytics
If you want to exclude your own visits to your site from Google Analytics on a per-computer or per-session basis, searching will land you on Google’s help page: How do I exclude internal traffic from reports?. Problem is, the code there doesn’t work with Google’s new-ish asynchronous tracking code. There is no “pageTracker” object any longer, so that’ll throw a nice little error. The replacement for “pageTracker” is to push the custom variable onto the _gaq object, per the new standards. To get this working, make a new, simple HTML page, just including the basics to make the page validate. Include your standard-issue Google tracking code in the head, like…