Blogs

Just in case anyone else wants a printer-friendly version before Tuesday's conference. Thank you PosteRazor for helping me split up this big image into multiple pages!

Yes, I've got the iPhone app, but I wanted a paper copy to have on the plane ride too. :)

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DIWD 2011 Printable Schedule

I was recently talked into continuing to use my Discover card by one of their sales associates. I haven't found a great resource online yet that lists the national chain stores that do not accept the Discover credit card, so I thought I'd make a list myself. Perhaps others will comment and add more to this list in order to make a resource for others who are searching Google for a list such as this.

I was lucky enough to be able to give another presentation at this year's excellent DrupalCamp Nashville, sponsored by Music City Networks, 7 Sudos, Tropo, The Tennessean, and a number of other splendid companies. This year, I decided to present on the Austin Peay State University mobile website that I've been building for the past few months along with the help of interns Jason Bell, Brian Barbour, APSU staff Rollow Welch, Terry Damron, Bill Persinger, and Ryan Forsythe.

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building-mobile-drupal-site.pdf

FleetThought is now building conference sites for interested businesses. Do you run a local conference and need to implement a conference site to bring together presenters, organizers, and attendees? Building a conference website by yourself is extremely difficult and there are a lot of moving parts. We've built multiple conference sites and actively participated in more than 10 regional and local conferences for libraries, non-profits, and programming-related conferences. Benefit from our experience and let us assist you with setting up your conference site!

Although CCK automatically does some basic validation on your fields that you add to your Drupal content types, there are some cases where you'd like to do some additional validation for your site. One use case that I ran into recently was a basic text field that was being used to house hyperlinks for one of my websites. The text field had already been in place and working perfectly for months. Rather than do something drastic like replacing the field altogether with a field provided by the "Link" module, I decided to do a hook_form_alter to add in my own custom validation function.

An important part of keeping a Drupal site up and running smoothly is to keep your modules up-to-date. Although this is most important in relation to security releases for your modules, it's also important to upgrade to new versions of modules in order to take advantage of new features.  The new version of the Webform module (version 3.x), for example, includes integration with the Mollom SPAM-blocking service/module. If you have a site that's still running Webform 2.x, you aren't able to use Mollom's ability to protect your forms.

This month I had the opportunity to present the WebJunction webinar, Serving the Young Adult Population: It's Not Just About Video Games with Maurice Coleman (T is for Training). In the webinar we discuss marketing to teens outside of the library with booktalks in your schools and programs at teen-centric businesses; creating a teen-friendly atmosphere in your library; programming ideas; developing empathy within your staff for your teen patrons; and creating a teen patron code of conduct policy.

I was recently trying to figure out exactly how long my users' sessions were lasting on an existing Drupal site that I had built. Generally it seemed like users were remaining logged in for an extremely lengthy period of time. I did some research and finally discovered that this setting is actually configured in the default settings.php file that ships with Drupal. There's a line in the settings file that initially reads:

ini_set('session.cookie_lifetime',  2000000);

I'm a huge fan of the Webform module (and building Drupal forms in general), and I just today noticed a feature I hadn't previously taken advantage of. This is the ability to programmatically add what are called "pre-built" option lists that can be used in your webforms.