3 campaigners, 6 years, 7 schools: Building Tomorrow

Cross-posted from my EchoDitto blog.

How much did your elementary education cost? The clever folks at Building Tomorrow have found a great way to use that simple question to drive an innovative campaign that connects the costs of a primary school education in the United States to the work they do building schools in Uganda.

I first learned about the campaign through a friend’s Tweet, and followed the link thinking that I would learn just how ridiculously expensive education is in our country, and maybe be encouraged to donate money towards schools that need help in the United States. Much to my surprise, after answering two easy questions, I was brought to this page:

Inspired by their simple-yet-effective calculator app, I called up Maggie Kirkpatrick, Assistant Director at Building Tomorrow, to learn more about it.

[...]

Updating your Drupal site using Drush

A few weeks ago, Alan wrote about how to find out if your Drupal and Wordpress sites are up to date. So, what if you find out your Drupal site is horribly out of date - core, modules and all? What then? If you run the script Alan wrote about, or you simply notice the alert in the admin section of your site notifying you that your site has updates available, most of the time you'll want to implement at least some of these updates. Note: The notice for updates is powered by a module called Upgrade Status. It's a good idea to install this module on your Drupal site so you don't let updates go by the wayside. When you see the update notice, click “available updates” and see which updates are necessary. You can also reach this page by going to admin/reports/updates in your browser (for example, www.yoursite.com/admin/reports/updates). [...]

On being a (moderately successful) photographer

Over a year ago, in late October/early November of 2009, I bought my first “real” camera – a Canon 20D. I was nervous, but psyched. I had always been interested in photography, and before this had been using a film camera (gasp), a Nikon N55. The pics I was taking on my Nikon were good enough, but I had quickly tired of having to buy and develop film, and the camera slowly became more useful as a paperweight than anything else.

I had my new camera for a few days, and took hundreds of pictures. Most of them were out of focus (one of the first things I learned was the difference between “out of focus” and “blurry.”). Many were framed badly. I was mostly taking pictures of people, and was using only half of the frame. The tops of peoples heads were only halfway into the photo. I was using the flash. To sum up: I wasn’t really using my new camera to its full capabilities.

Thankfully, a friend/coworker advised me on a few things, namely: don’t use the flash, frame photos so you’re using the whole frame, learn the rule of thirds, read the manual, Google ISO and aperture and read up on them. Basically, learn something, vs. just shooting pictures randomly. We had an informal photo class at the office with a few other coworkers. It slowly became an obsession.

[...]

Austin

Last weekend I went to Austin to visit Cristen, snapped some photos, had a few margaritas, launched a website, ate bbq, went hiking (and got lost), saw a UT football game, and ate and drank at an awesome brewpub.

Did I mention the Legos?

[...]

Making Drupal Happy: When Themes and Modules use the same name

We came across an issue with a site recently, where the name of the custom module file was the same as the name of the theme. So, for example, if the theme name was Bork, the module name was bork.module. This can cause a variety of problems since the two share name space. Problems can include blocks disappearing (both from your site, and from the /admin/build/blocks menu), printing $content returns only 'array,' and more. There are a few ways you can remedy this. We had already created another module file, called bork_helper.module, so the best option seemed to be to merge the contents from bork.module into bork_helper.module, and rename functions accordingly. It's a relatively easy process as it turns out. I first backed up the database (always, always), disabled the module, merged bork.module into bork_helper.module, and did a search and replace for the function names: bork_form_alter became bork_helper_form_alter, and so on. I initially considered doing this from the command line using sed, so: sed -i '' -e "s/bork_form_alter/bork_helper_form_alter/g" * [...]

Today I Learned: PHP handlers & .htaccess

At work, we have an email thread that goes around daily, called “Today I learned.” It is how it sounds – we share things we’ve learned as we build functionality for sites, mostly using Drupal or WordPress. It’s pretty rare for a day to go by without a today I learned email. I enjoy the emails because everyone has pretty varied strengths, and what might seem common knowledge to one person can be eye-opening to another.

The other day, I learned (somewhat the hard way) about PHP handlers within .htaccess. Essentially, your server can be running a very old version of PHP, and you can override this by adding a line in your .htaccess file (where, among other things, you can also require a username/password for access to your site):

AddHandler php5-script .php

This line forces any .php files in that directory to be executed as PHP5 code. If you’re looking to remove the user/pass from your site, it’s probably a good idea to check out your .htaccess file first, to be sure it’s not including something like the above. If it is, chances are the server is running an old version of PHP, and if you remove/rename .htaccess, your site will most likely throw a PHP error. Fun!

[...]

Blogging, Day Three

I’m already getting a little frustrated with the “blog every day” thing I brought upon myself, but in an effort to overcome my own laziness, here I am. I’m taking the easy road, though, and instead of blogging something worthwhile or possibly even interesting, I’m going to tell you about my shoulder.

About a year ago I was playing softball and slid headfirst into home plate. The result was a separated and dislocated shoulder, for which I did not seek medical treatment until the next day. After seeing the doc everything seemed fine I’m sure mostly because of the vicodins, but generally things were fine. I stopped using the sling after a few weeks, and slowly but surely it felt better. My shoulder still hurt, but I figured it was still healing.

[...]