When I create new content, I want to be able to type what page it is to display on and NOT have to create new blocks for each page (which would have gotten very tedious and out of control).  Using views and a custom content type with a node reference field, I was able to do just that.

It would have been easy to reference the NID from the URL using Views arguments, but I have Pathauto enabled and URL aliases for just about everything.

This article has been very helpful in coming up with a workaround.

Here is my quick explanation, in hopes that it might help someone else figure this out:

1. Create a new content type with a node reference field (I used auto complete).
2. Create a few nodes of that content type for testing.
3. Create a new view, and add a filter for nodes of your new content type.
4. In the view, add a relationship to the node reference field that belongs to your new content type.
5. In the view, create an argument with these params:
   -Relationship: The one you just created.
   -Action to take if argument is not present: Provide default argument.
   -Provide default argument options: Node ID from URL
   -Validator options: Select ‘PHP Code’ and add the code from this site (which sets the argument to the current NID, regardless of aliases).
6. Save and test.

A few thoughts for the Drupal/Views novice:

• I’m still not quite certain what relationship is for, other than to offer something to test against in arguments.
• Argument tests against defined parameters (current URL, PHP code, etc.) to decide what content to show.

And a side note, I did this on Drupal 7 with Views 2.

You’ll need the keySharky plugin for Chrome.

Download Grooveshark profile for Hipporemote.

NOTE:  The artwork was thrown together pretty quickly, and you’ll see some missing captions.  Also, the images have not been updated for iPad.

<? // check for UA, convert UA string to lower case
$navigator_user_agent = ( isset( $_SERVER['HTTP_USER_AGENT'] ) ) ? strtolower( $_SERVER['HTTP_USER_AGENT'] ) : '';

// Check browser and select CSS file
if (stristr($navigator_user_agent, "msie 6")){
echo '<link href="css/alternate.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" />';
}

else{
echo "<link href='css/style.css' rel='stylesheet' type='text/css' />";
}
?>

If all went well you should now have a script that selects an alternate CSS file for your IE6 visitors. You can use else-if statements if you would like to add more contingencies. Another upside to this is if you’re using non-valid CSS (like *html for IE) you can shuffle it all away in another file that the W3C validator will never see. Devious!

Make sure you find your user agent string! Some of these are similar and will contain the names of other browsers, so be specific when you use a keyword to search the UA string.

Create a new text file, copy the code into the file, and rename it to .vbs  Don’t forget to change the directories and string fields to suit your needs.  I’m not too big on VB, so I modified another script to get me started, but the search and replace functions are specific to our job (rearranging ‘the’ in the folder name).

Set oFSO = CreateObject("Scripting.FileSystemObject")
Set oFolder = oFSO.GetFolder("z:\Movies")
RenameSubFolders(oFolder)
set oFolder = Nothing
set oFSO = Nothing

Function RenameSubFolders(myFolder)

For each oSubFolder in myFolder.SubFolders
dim pos
pos=InStr(oSubFolder.Name,"The ")
If pos = 1 Then
oSubFolder.Name = Mid(oSubFolder.Name, 5) + ", The"
RenameSubFolders(oSubFolder)
End If
Next

End Function

This script searches for a string in a folder name and places it at the end of the said folder name.  So, for instance, I have a ton of folders named “The (MovieName)”  This script renames them to “(MovieName), The”.  Like I said, I’m old school and use file directories for everything (no I-Tunes, thank you) so alphabetical order is very important.  Rather than taking the hours to rename a bunch of folders, I took an hour to toy around with some Visual Basic.  Totally worth it.

So in the end, I really don’t understand why people don’t use scripts more often, especially for the growing media libraries that most people have on their computers.  I guess it all comes down to I-Tunes and similar applications.

I’ve found some shortcut references for my most-used Adobe programs. If you are planning on becoming a designer, or just want to improve your speed, shortcuts are key (pun intended).

Illustrator
KeyXL (web)

InDesign
Adobe Forums (PDF)

Photoshop
Trevor Morris Photography (PDF)

I finally got Linux running in Windows so I can test on Konqueror. As I suspected, it worked about the same as Safari, another KHTML browser. Anyway, the easiest way I found to get Linux running in Windows can be found here. It’s just a matter of running KMD on a virtual machine. I originally tried to get it to run using Cygwin, which was a waste of time.

Another issue I ran into a while back was testing with IE6 and below.  Having two versions of Explorer on the same OS is nearly impossible.  Microsoft released a VPC image running IE6 for this reason.  It is available here.

And if you haven’t heard yet, a beta version of Safari 3 is available for download.  You can get it here. 

Many of the best AJAX apps activate by using custom triggers that do not qualify as valid HTML. I used to think that all was lost, and that there was a mandatory trade between functionality and usability. This is not so: doctype information may be appended to include your triggers.

For instance, I use a modal window system called LightWindow that has “author” and “caption” triggers to relate data to the script when a user clicks on an image. Neither of these triggers will validate under the XHTML 1.0 DTD. Here’s the code to fix it:

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd"
[
<!ATTLIST a author CDATA #IMPLIED>
<!ATTLIST a caption CDATA #IMPLIED>
]>

This is how it breaks down:

<!ATTLIST element attribute dataType #IMPLIED or #REQUIRED>

Since my elements relate to linked files e.g.(<a href=) that I want to open with LightWindow, I use the element ‘a’ for link. The attribute is what you are using to communicate with your app and is also what is causing your document to not validate. The dataType can likely just be left as CDATA as it handles any kind of data. It is also likely best to leave the type defenition as #IMPLIED or optional for these purposes. A more in-depth article can be found at A List Apart.

Fix invalid symbols by changing them to HTML

If you are using a script in your document that is called using symbols such as the ampersand ‘&’ or equals ‘=’ these will cause the validator to choke. Consider using their HTML forms amp; and #61; (with ampersands in front) respectively. A complete list of symbols and HTML translations is available at the Web Design Group’s site.

For example, a line on my site used to look like this:

<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="combine.php?type=css&files=dlinn.css,lightWindow.css" />

But now looks like this:

Still having problems with CSS?

Yeah, me too. We’ll just have to hang in there until the newer standards (that have existed for years) are adopted or hell freezes over.

I worked on an Apple machine for a year, and I enjoyed the OS. I cant say I enjoyed the machine, a 700mhz G4 that would crash if you looked at it funny. In any case I found myself flicking my cursor to the corner of my monitor even when I was back on my Windows machine.

Meet Switcher, like OSX’s Expose feature but for Windows Vista. This program uses Vista’s built-in desktop rendering system, making it fast and flawlessly integrated. It works great with multiple monitors, and just like Expose and Flip 3D, it continues to render your window content in real time. To make things even better, version 2.0 is set to come out soon.

Input is very configurable. I set switcher to activate on mouse wheel down, though it is possible to use corner activation just like OSX.

Visit Bao’s Blob for Switcher.