CustomerCentrix

Here is a great little tool - technically a Firefox extension, it is really a nicely integrated blogging editor.  Something that could (and probably does) exist as a standalone tool but ties into the browser well.  I am using it now to add a posting to our company Drupal-driven site, and it also works for all of the most popular blogging products.  It pops into the bottom of your Firefox browser and provides basic WYSIWYG markup features.  I dislike HTML editors as javascript-based tools that download from the server because they are often full of quirks/bugs and sluggish in performance even with today's computing power.  This one is a free download that I might not have seen or tried if it hadn't been a Firefox extension.

The story is the simplest type of content to start with, and I try to avoid using an online html editor for a number of reasons. But, realistically most people want to use some html markup. The internet after all wouldn't be what it is without links, images, colors and other stuff that might be functional or just fun and prettier than basic text. For users who just want a few of these, learning how to do a link and images with html and the Drupal plain text edit box works.

Links are created with an anchor tag that brackets the text something like this:

<a href="http://www.yahoo.com/">my link to yahoo</a>

Seems like a simple thing, but there are too many options that don't seem to easy enough. I was looking for a way to show a couple of link lists for a particular tag or group of tags. Basically a replacement for the built-in links and categories included with Wordpress. Sorting alphabetically would be nice.

First try was the one by Alexander Malov (version 1.4). I have curl installed, but it gave an error, so I moved on to try others.

Next is Tom Gilbert's version 1.1 which works fine. This one just doesn't have the functionality that I would like, and also requires a password, which seems a bit of a nuisance. There is no way to select a particular tag or subset of tags and the links are displayed in what looks to be save order, making it good for showing recent links but otherwise not what I want.

I spent a little more time with the Zimbra toolkit recently. It still looks impressive, but unfortunately there appears to be a good bit of work involved with just figuring out how to make it work.

For some upcoming new improvements to LearnCentrix, I have been analyzing javascript widgets and tools. I am always interested in new technology, currently such things as AJAX, JSON and the newest techniques for CSS and DHTML. The specific issues that we need to resolve in the next few months are:

Asynchronous loading of an html/javascript tree - we currently use a tree component to load a course, which is like an outline of web pages and other learning objects. This tree typically contains a couple hundred items, but occasionally it has 300-500 or more We are expanding on how this works, so it must accommodate potentially many thousands of items. Since the response time is currently pretty slow on the initial load when you get above 300 or so items, we need to move to a model where only the nodes closest to the root are loaded initially and the rest are loaded as needed (when requested by the user).

Here are some good reference materials for WordPress. This is the software that I am using for our Campbell family website.

This tool is a nice idea. You fill out a form with colors, metadata and such and it cranks out a nice looking theme complete with images. A couple of complaints at first glance are that the html is table driven and somewhat complicated and the results don't work quite right in FireFox. Of course, the table layout is fairly common, and part of the idea is that you don't need to mess with the underlying html.

The other problem which is more a user/usability issue is that you have to be able to select a combination of colors that works well together.

Here is a nice example of a Drupal site along with some reference materials.

It is a mishmash of personal, technical, politics and such from the author, but is well organized and puts to good use the features of Drupal.

His current site theme was created by Creative Bits who also has some reference materials that are more along the lines of web design.

The challenge today was to cause the external links from the aggregator to open a new window rather than replace the current window. The current geek wisdom as I understand it is that this should not be done, because all browsers have this capability and users may not want this forced on them. On the other hand, some web designers and most sales/marketing types bristle at the thought of somebody leaving their site whether intentional or not.

Philosophy aside, that is the technical task at hand, and it is easily accomplished by inserting a target="_blank" attribute in the link. That is, it is easy if you know where to put it ;-)