Update and my projects

Mar 25, 2010
by Ivan

In January I started in a full-time position at Incite Marketing as a Web Developer. Incite is a local marketing firm with more than 10 years in the field and while my job involves working with a CMS, I had to switch to Expression Engine so I won't be doing much work in Drupal, hence you won't see me posting about it too often. The reason is because I'm spending my extra time working on my Android projects.

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New blog, same content, now on Drupal

Oct 19, 2009
by Ivan

The old blog in Wordpress is now gone and I will be using Drupal from now on for my blog. The main reason of this is because I work with Drupal, it's also more flexible and overall I feel more comfortable working on it.

So far, besides the change on the platform there are not so many changes, but let's list them:

Design

Even cleaner, brighter and more attractive. I like to keep it simple, I love blue tones and my personal blog is the perfect excuse to use them.

The Work section also sports some nice selectors and some jQuery AJAX godness.

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Plan, administrate and test your Drupal site

Oct 02, 2009
by Ivan
Drupal 6We all know Drupal has some usability problems (or a lot). It's not friendly when you first install it and adding modules and themes can be confusing at the beginning. But wait! Adding stuff to Drupal is so easy, just download the zip file upload to the server and enable the module/theme. And here is exactly when we start having problems. At one side, going module shopping is easy and repetitive fun but on the other side we often forget that downloading 20 extra modules can make our site run slow and even make it crash. Not to mention that some modules are not meant to be compatible with others. And first of all, don't be scared of buying a book that teaches you how to administrate Drupal, it's definitely worth if you are going to be in charge of the content.

Plan your site before start building it

Even though this is important for any kind of project, because of Drupal ease of installation and setup users tend to "try" modules and forget that little tab called "Uninstall". Even so, some modules won't completely uninstall or can just break other parts. Not all modules are perfectly made.
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.htaccess hotlink protection

Jan 16, 2009
by Ivan
Protecting your site from hotlinks can be really useful to prevent other sites stealing bandwidth, but it's also comes handy when you want to protect files from private areas. The first 2 lines are responsible from redirecting all the traffic from www.yoursite.com to yoursite.com and the third and fourth line is for preventing hotlinks, in this case PDFs and SVGs.
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Setting up a site on Drupal

Jan 05, 2009
by Ivan
People who's used to set up multiple web software in PHP and MySQL like forums, blogs, cms, etc. often don't check what are the requirements or instructions for setting up a site. Here is a list of what I get done right after installing a site in Drupal.

Cron - A Drupal site without crontab correctly set up can still work, and in most cases it will since you don't have any module depending on Cron to work. But if you use a module like Simplenews (for email newsletters) it will definitely need cron. Regardless of what module needs it, it's highly recommended to set up Cron. You can find more information on how to set up cron on the Drupal handbook.

Remove TXT files from root - It's never good to show the world which Drupal version are you running, that's why removing .txt files from the root will hide it. Actually you need to remove all txt files but robots.txt

Remove unused themes - I Drupal 5 I usually remove all folders under /themes but /themes/engines. In Drupal 6 I leave /themes/engines and /themes/garland since it's used for the update page.

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Building a web application layout 1

Jul 18, 2008
by Ivan
In a way to build an entire layout for a web application we need to know what exactly we need. In this case I'm going to use a 90% width with a top menu, left menu and a right handed help box used to explain what the current section does. It's always useful to draw a mockup of the layout we want to achieve. Since this is a kind of simple layout we don't really need it, but I still did it.
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New design

Jul 17, 2008
by Ivan
After many attempts to change the design of my blog I ended up using an old idea I had. This design is simple and clean trying to focus on the content and my portfolio. I will try to continue giving small tips and tricks for web developers I hope once a week at least. Right now, I've been working on the redesign of Wellofhealth.ca and so far is going good. I never had a chance to work with Telus shared hosting and I have to admit: It sucks!
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