Article: Weird bold text rendering error when scrolling in Firefox
While working on a site I'm developing, I noticed a strange problem where the text in a certain paragraph bolded when the page scrolled (see right). The bolding was clearly a rendering error, since the bold did not extend to the end of lines and would disappear temporarily when another application opened or saved a file (only to reappear when the page was scrolled in the browser again). My Setup: Firefox 7.0.1 on Ubuntu 11:10 (32 bit) :: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux i686; rv:7.0.1) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/7.0.1 The Solution: In the limited time I had, I wasn't able to find...
Article: Add Discussion started date to Jomsocial Groups Page
I've been using JomSocial on a lot of Joomla sites to replace the functionality formerly handled by forum extensions. The Groups feature allows users to have more control and ownership over the on-site conversations. On of the key short-comings of the default JomSocial template is that the date is not printed on a new discussion (something done by all forum software). Adding this to the template for JomSocial 2.2 is fairly striaght-forward: Replace this text in /components/com_community/templates/default/groups.discussionlist.php (around line 43):
Article: Unwanted Bottom Scroll Bar on Joomla Site
I was having a problem with a client's Joomla website showing a horizontal scrollbar on every page. The main width of all other template divs was correct for the broswer, but the body was being extended right beyond the visiual space. The culprit in the code was "overflow:visible" in the element styling on the <body> and a couple of divs like this:
Article: Use Ubuntu and iFuse to Delete iPhone Calendars
I try to write tech tips whenever I do something technical, even with my personal technology, especially when I couldn't find a single source on the Internet with the solution I needed. Last night, I ran into just such a case with my wife's iPhone 3G. She inherited a jailbroken one (this method will supposedly work with a non-jailbroken one too) and it came with several calendars from the pervious owner. Famously, iPhone's core calendar app doesn't allow you to delete calendars unless you do so as part of iTunes sync. I used the following method to remove the calendars with her iPhone and my MSI netbook running Ubuntu 10.10:
Article: We are all Khaled Said
Demonstrators on 1.28.11 in Cairo. Photo: Ramy Raoof [CCA 2.0 G]. Chris Walker, a new friend I met while presenting at PRMI, sent me an insightful article on the face of the Egyptian protests from the New York Times. The articles profiles the rise of Egyptian young-professional Khaled Said's martyrdom from a
Article: Down-and-dirty Hack to Display Moodle Content in Joomla
Surprisingly, although there are many people integrating Joomla and Moodle, there are no (that I found) extensions for Joomla to display Moodle course content. I especially wanted a Joomla module to show the enrolled courses for a user shared between the both software platforms through jFusion. I developed a "down-and-dirty" solution...
Article: Hack Joomla Cookie Domain for Moodle Cross-Login
When using jFusion to integrate Joomla and Moodle userbases (Joomla as master, Moodle as slave), I have often run into issues with the session cookie not being stored correctly. I've had the same issue with phpBB3 and MediaWiki integrations as well. Part of the issue is how Joomla creates cookies. In order to work in all cases, it's best if Joomla uses the cookie domain ".mysite.com" in all cases -- the domain most other software expects when recognizing session cookies. Below are instructions on hacking Joomla to make this work. NOTICE: hacking Joomla's core files is not recommended for those who cannot troubleshoot any errors or who...
Article: Ben Rubin's Data Visualization Art
My interest in the field of data visualization is growing. Maybe it's my pattern-loving brain that can't get enough of amazing graphs that show a billizion bits of data or my belief in systems as a way to move forward in complexity. What ever it is, I really like some of the trends in data going on right now. I ran across Ben Rubin's work with data. Take a look at the following two videos of the Listening Post piece that displays data collected from Internet chats: Displaying "I am" statements, the most common beginning phrase on the Net: {youtube}dD36IajCz6A{/youtube} And a short video showing some of the other presentations (search youtube for many more...
Article: Hide a Site Except for Your IP
Since my web development projects are usually small-scale, I do them on live web servers. When information isn't sensitive, it's often enough just to use a place marker page named index.htm in the root directory. Depending on the configuration of your server, the TLD (three or four file type letters -- .htm, .html, etc) will determine which page is served as the index for a site or directory. This means if you're working on software accessed through index.php, it can be hidden by placing an index.htm file in the directory if Apache (or whatever web server) is configured to show .htm before .php (if not try "default.htm", "index.html", "index.shtml", etc.). Sometimes you need a more secure solution. You can direct all traffic asking for a file or...
Article: One Mis-Managed Soldier
Twenty-two-year-old Pfc. Bradley Manning has spent the last several weeks behind bars in Kuwait and Virgina. If you don't know his name by now, he's the Army intelligence analyst suspected of sneaking some 90,000 secret war memos to Wikileaks (not to mention a troubling 30 minute video of a US helicopter attack). The first-of-its kind leak has generated more than a little controversy. Pundits and policy-wonks are thrilling themselves with arguments on the morality of spilling secrets and the politics of national security in the Wiki-age. Meanwhile the government alternates between tones meant to inflame the passions of patriotism or inspire dread in any who would follow Manning's alleged example. The security experts are far from quiet, too, as they...
Article: Moodle with TinyMCE and TinyBrowser
One of the huge issues with Moodle is the primitive in-built HTML WYSIWYG editor. Not only does it write wretched code, it also has a very short list of white-listed browsers and doesn't work in Chrome and Safari. Thankfully, some Moodle users have been working on integrating the uber-popular TinyMCE 3 editor into moodle. A lot of fixes exist, but the one I found that worked with my install of Moodle 1.9.9 was this one by Jon Daley. This solution uses John Stabinger's integration based on the CLAMP version of Moodle 1.9.8. To use it:
Article: Publishing code in articles with JCE
JCE is a great editor for Joomla 1.5.x. One key thing it's missing: built-in support for publishing code for file hacks and mods. But the good news is, there are plugins that can do the job. I recommend RJ_Insertcode for TinyMCE3 and JCE: http://www.ryanjuckett.com/projects/plugins/19-rjinsertcode A couple of tips: Open the README.txt file in the zip you download. It has a couple of Joomla settings that must be set in order to allow the plugin to do it's job securely without interference from Joomla. These settings prevent low-level users from accessing features they shouldn't. The code may display too wide and break your template. In many...
Article: Convert Moodle DB from latin1 to utf8
In the past, I've used Fantastico to install Moodle and other scripts via CpanelX with my favorite hosting company. Lately I've been discovering that, though convenient, this isn't the safest or best way to install scripts. One big issue is that the character set and encoding of the database (DB) can be way off. For example, since version 1.7, Moodle should always be installed as a UTF-8 database. However, the Fantastico configured by my host sets it to Latin1. Lately, as I've been upgrading to Moodle 1.9.9, I've converted the databases using the following method: NOTE: This method ONLY works for databases where Moodle has been saving content as UTF-8 in a differently encoded DB. If...
Article: How Social is Changing Search and Business
There's a "must-read" on Technorati today: Greg Jarboe's Flap of Butterfly's Wings in Social Media Sets off Hurricane in Search for Business. In the piece Jarboe details how social is changing the way people interact with products and the data it creates online, and that is changing the entire stream of interactions and revenue that begins with search engine queries. No longer can companies control the information about their products and services online. This means practices of engagement in social media are essential. Particularly, I like this revealing section:
Article: Just installed BlogPing for Joomla
I'll be trying out Daniel Eliasson's BlogPing plugin for Joomla over the next few days. It sends a ping to popular blog search and aggregation sites (in fact you can add the URL of any site that offers this service) anytime there is new content in a particular section of your site. I used a truncated version of the list here: http://blogsearch.google.com/ping/RPC2http://api.feedster.com/pinghttp://api.my.yahoo.com/RPC2http://api.my.yahoo.com/rss/pinghttp://ping.feedburner.comhttp://rpc.blogrolling.com/pinger/http://rpc.newsgator.com/http://rpc.pingomatic.com