The Views module in Drupal is both useful and confusing. The basic idea is that Views will allow you to provide a styled list of some content. This content can be pages, stories, blog posts, comments, users, RSS feeds items, nodes and even some other kinds of data. You can think of it kind of like those generic examples of PHP and MySQL that pull out a bunch of records from a table and just give you a list. Except that it doesn't rely on just MySQL. And it doesn't just give you a list. And it does validation. And you don't really have to write any code.

The Views interface in Drupal 6 (under Administer >> Site Building >> Views) is pretty complicated. I don't understand all of it yet, so I decided to work through an example of something that I needed here on Late Night PC. There's a view included called "archive" which shows up at example.com/archive/yyyymm. This is pretty close to the way I was doing my archives under Wordpress. My archives page URLs had the form latenightpc.com/blog/archives/yyyy/mm. So I basically wanted the archive view with these changes:

1. Move the URL from archive to blog/archives
2. Change the parameter from yyyymm to yyyy/mm
3. Filter the view to show only blog posts instead of all content

I have a website that I use for stuff but not stuff on the public web. I use it for serving my calendars and private web applications. I use Apache's built in authentication to keep it from being crawled and to keep casual visitors from wandering in. I have a domain name assigned to it from dyndns.org for convenience. The ddclient script runs on one of my boxes and updates the ip address over there whenever mine changes. The system works very well. Most of the time. Somehow one weekend the domain name was left pointing at my old ip address for a while when I was out of town. Who ever had that IP address sure was serving up a lot of nasty stuff. Now Google thinks all that nasty stuff is on my private domain.

I'm going to fix it. I use Google Webmaster Tools for other stuff and I see there's a URL removal tool in there. To use the tool you have to verify that you own the domain - a reasonable request. The thing is the URLs I want to remove are on a domain that I don't want Google to crawl and the way Google verifies that you own the domain is by retrieving a specific URL from the domain. What a dilemma.

CakePHP uses the Prototype Javascript library for its ajax helper class but I've come to prefer jQuery. Prototype is a fine library too but I've just gotten used to jQuery.

A web application I'm working on needed a ttw html editor so I grabbed TinyMCE and copied in some of the example code and everything seemed to work fine at first glance. Unfortunately TinyMCE has an issue with jQuery's $(document).ready function and it also has an issue with saving via ajax in CakePHP.

There's a helpful page on the Bakery that outlines some issues you'll run into trying to get CakePHP & Prototype working with TinyMCE but it's a little out of date now (I'm using CakePHP 1.2RC1, TinyMCE 3.09 and jQuery 1.2.6 at the moment). I'll go through examples that illustrate how I solved the two problems I ran in to but I'm not going to explain everything you need to do ajax submissions with CakePHP.

CakePHP is a really nice MVC framework I've been using for a project I'm working on. I've been using one of the 1.2 betas for what seems like forever but I just now saw they've got a Release Candidate out as of a couple days ago. The MVC pattern fits a whole lot of applications or acts as glue for a lot of web apps where the main goals don't fit MVC. I find that CakePHP is fantastic for getting a lot of the monotonous code out of your way so you can focus your efforts on the important stuff.

The SVG Open is shaping up fast. The call for papers has been out there for a while now but if you're quick you can still present a paper or run a workshop but the deadline to submit for papers and courses is April 18 and that'll be here before you know it. The SVG Open is the conference for people doing SVG.

On Pavlov.net talking about some improvements in memory handling on Firefox 3:
It isn’t reasonable to expect all those authors to write code to manually break the cycles themselves.

This reminded me immediately of an MSDN article that took a decidedly different stance on pretty much the same problem in Internet Explorer:

Here's a quick tip for PHP error reporting and display in development.

When a project is in the early stages of development you want to see all the error information you can. You probably want E_STRICT on especially when you're starting from scratch, to help avoid relying on deprecated behaviour. The E_STRICT flag is only available as of PHP 5 and is not included in E_ALL until PHP 5.2 (there's a little disagreement on php.net between the definition of E_ALL in this table and the earlier note about error_reporting on the same page).

In an early development project you also don't want to have to keep tailing log files to see the error messages. That's a pretty sure way to miss errors. So you want to set the display_errors flag on. You also want to control this on a per-project basis, since some projects will have legacy bugs that you're not fixing right now and those can be left spouting errors to logs until someday in the future when you decide to fix them.

At the risk of turning this into an Apache fan blog, I have to mention the handy directive I found today. Many webmasters run in to mod_rewrite at one time or another and every one of them will have at least a little trouble with it. I just came across the RewriteLog Directive and corresponding RewriteLogLevel Directive. You're not going to be able to turn these on with shared hosting, they can't be used in .htaccess. To set up a debugging log for mod_rewrite, you need to add them to your httpd.conf somewhere. In my case I'm working on a server at home so I added

Motivation

Now that I've got an LDAP server up and running I'm trying to get my personal web server set up so it has a blanket authentication for my personal applications, static content and development stuff. The web applications I'm talking about aren't meant to be exposed to the public at large, they're not what you find here on Late Night PC Service or any of my other sites. These are things like PHP Calendar, Task Freak, SugarCRM, a bunch of development versions of apps I'm working on and some static content that might be a single html file or an image.

I currently have a server that's accessible through DynDNS and I use basic HTTP authentication on it. The server runs Apache HTTPD 2.2 and has whatever modules I want on it. My next server is roughly the same but I want to make things a little more secure and a little simpler (at the same time no less). So my idea was to move to LDAP as the Authentication Provider and Digest as the Authentication Type.

I can think of three things I really want from my email: it should be easy to use, fast, and private. SquirrelMail gets me pretty close to those goals. It just got better today with the release of version 1.4.10. Somewhere between the last version I last installed and this one they've added support for multiple identities - that is to say that you can have more than one return address.