CustomerCentrix

I am not ready to dump all of the commercial apps that I have on my machine, but it is amazing how much software is available for free.

Here is a list that I found recently.

The upgrade did not work for us. I am sure that there was something along the way that we did wrong, but after much fussing, I decided to move the older version to another location and try with a brand new install.

Can't get past step 1; that's not a good start. Blame it on Firefox? IE allows us to accept the license agreement and move ahead. All is green on step 2 except the Writable Session Save Path. Another black mark, but if we give the Sugar folks the benefit of the doubt, then we can say that this probably works on other more common installation setups.

The choices for dealing with this are to change the Sugar code so that it bypasses this check or tinker with the PHP setup so that the check is passed. I had this problem before on previous versions tinkered with the underlying code to skip that check. This worked before, so I will try again. This isn't what I would normally choose or advise, but the check seems to be wrong since the directory is valid and I already checked permissions to make sure that it was writable.

According to Comscore Networks and this article, Google is still the top with an increasing share over the previous month. Yahoo lost a little but stayed a strong number 2.

Google 37.3%
Yahoo 29.7%
MSN 15.8%
Time Warner 9.6%
Ask Jeeves 6%

I didn't realize that Time Warner had a search engine, but now I see that this is really AOL. Who owns who there?

Is this a bit of "new math"? The article states that:

Google Inc. remained the search-engine leader in August, accounting for close to 1 in 4 searches on the Web, a Web metrics firm said Monday.

In a previous posting, I gave details about a frustrating but presumed successful upgrade to MySQL. Now, I am not sure that it was - at least as far as Plesk is concerned. I am not sure what triggered this after it worked for a couple of weeks, but the Plesk control panel is no longer accessible. MySQL and all other applications seem to be working without any problems. A server restart has no effect, and 1and1's support is unhelpful at best. At this point, the most likely problem seems to be MySQL. Not that it isn't working, but that Plesk won't start properly because of some db access issue.

While searching the internet trying to find answers to a few questions, I have found an item to share:

Basics of the Linux directory tree

Automating the backup of our Linux machines would seemingly be something that is trivial. 1and1 provides ample FTP space for this purpose, so you would think that there would be instructions or a script or something that would set this up easily.

Setting up a script to run took a bit of time, but mainly just because the commands were relatively new to me. Of course, most are similar to DOS, but there are enough differences that it takes some trial and error to get something working. I compromised in skipping the automatic naming of files with a date in their file names, instead opting for the simpler file1, file2, file3 to keep track of several versions. They are date stamped, so you don't really lose anything, except perhaps a little elegance in the script.

The task is to create a block that contains a menu built automatically from a hierarchical taxonomy. Breadcrumb trail would be nice, but is optional. The menu module or blocks will do this, but as a mostly manual process of building a set of links into a hierarchy that looks and works like other menus in Drupal. This seems to be the quickest and easiest way for relatively static taxonomy or one where you want categories commingled with items from forums or aggregator or other areas of Drupal.

But my plan for this site is to create a taxonomy, and I would like to have the menu automatically built for this. There appears to be several candidates in the contributed modules list on the Drupal site.

Our current choice of online rich text editors (see also) is called TinyMCE. Installing in not difficult, but takes a little more effort than many of the other drupal modules. As of September, 2005, the current version of the Drupal TinyMCE WYSIWYG (integration module) is 4.6.0 and of the editor itself is 2.0RC3. The drupal module is really just some extra code that is necessary to plug the editor into Drupal. You need both pieces.

Copy the module code like with other modules to the modules subdirectory and run the mysql code. The copy the editor code into the modules/tinymce subdirectory. Note! This will give you an odd looking modules/tinymce/tinymce directory structure. Another note! While not that big by today's standards at a little less than 1MB, the TinyMCE editor download is significantly larger than the entire drupal installation.

I found another easy fix to an odd problem. The search box didn't work at all on this site. There was no error message or indication of any problem, just nothing returned for search results. It felt a little strange to be searching on the Drupal site for the term "search", but this quickly led me to find that cron must be set up and working correctly for this to function. This basically means that the page

http://mydrupalsite.com/cron.php

must be called on a regular basis to build the search indexes (as well as a variety of other asynch operations, like RSS subscription processing). In Plesk and other linux installs this means that you must set up a cron tab or scheduled job that fires off at regularly scheduled intervals, hourly seems a reasonable choice for most uses.

The problem is that the breadcrumb (the part in the header that reads "Top » Catalog » Polo Shirts » NK00011847XUM1" or similar) link to Top takes the user to what we usually think of as Home and also loses the user login. So, fix the logon issue and change the word Top to Home. My initial thought was that in our case, Top and Catalog are identical, so both should be combined into Home. Top is the default page and Catalog is the default for the store subdirectory. I think if we use the store subdirectory as Home, then the login (session) issue will be solved as well.

FYI, changing a local copy of a file will not affect the behavior of that file on the server :-P