// Archive

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January 2009 (1) | February 2009 (13) | March 2009 (4) | April 2009 (3) | May 2009 (3) | August 2009 (1) | October 2009 (3) | December 2009 (1) | January 2010 (1) | February 2010 (1)

NGINX rewrite rules for PATH_INFO and SCRIPT_NAME

We use nginx as our web server on all our servers here at Em Space as it does a great job of serving web sites with very little overhead, essential on low memory virtual servers.

Blogging and rebranding

It's been pretty hectic the last couple of months, but definitely in a good way! And finally we've got a blog site to tell you all about it in a rapture inducing spray of text.

Contributing back to front

There was a point where I realised that if I wanted to have a non-disfunctional business, I had to stop looking at my recent posts tracker every 10 minutes. Since then, I've felt a little frustrated. Even though other Em Spacers contribute to Drupal, it's not the same as doing it yourself.

iPhone safari limitations helping in forums

I've started helping in the Drupal forums again, it should really be a good use of train time, but it's not working too well.

Exporting data from MYOB with AppleScript

We wanted to display MYOB Account Edge data in our support site on the corresponding company page. Ideally you'd like to get the database, but there are no stable database driver options for Account Edge.

I found some examples on the US MYOB site which got me started with both the MYOB script library as well as AppleScript (crap, I'd prefer VBA over this, but it works).

How to convert a date string in Excel to a unix timestamp

Want to convert a date (string) to a timestamp in Excel or Numbers? Here's how.

The Most Important Years in History, and Why

6400 B.C. - The Wheel is invented by a Sumerian Stonesmith. He failed to patent his invention, costing him and his descendents trillions of goats (the currency of the time).

2000 B.C. - Anatolia, Greece and Persia start trading using coins as a representation of the value of their goods.

500 B.C. - Pythagoras has a theory about right angled triangles.

Drupal Mini Conference

The most decadent way to indulge your nerd parts!

Importing MYOB tab delimited files into MySQL

So, you're wanting to import some MYOB tab-delimited files into your MySQL database, possibly to mess around with on your drupal site? Give this a try.

Fairfax Australia using Drupal

When Lullabot came to Australia last year to do training in Melbourne, we had a good smattering of corporate attendance. On one table we had a developer from the ABC, THE public broadcaster in Australia, sitting next to a developer from Fairfax, which controls much of the corporate media here. It was quite exciting to consider that the biggest media organizations were exploring Drupal internally.

Today Leigh Morresi alerted me to the technology website of SMH - sure enough it's running Drupal 6! This is a really good sign, and goes along with a general increase in Drupal noise in more than a few sectors down-under.

How Technology Helps us to Dump People.

Breaking up is a nasty business. It is hard, and there is no accepted way of doing it.

Still, for whatever reason, you are seen as cowardly unless you speak to the person face to face.

From the dawn of time, cave paintings, hieroglyphics, smoke signals, tablet inscriptions and more recently, letters, have been a no-no.

Installing OSX Leopard 10.5.6 on a Dell Mini 9

There are plenty of blog posts out on the interwebs detailing this topic, but after having to sidestep 3 different tutorials and delve deep into the osx86 forums a few times to get my hack mini to where it is now... Lets just say I'll be happy if this saves just one person the frustration and mental anguish I have experienced the last few days.

Installing SSL on Ubuntu with nginx

This article explains how to get your website secured with a signed certificate on a Ubuntu server running nginx.

Bendigo Bank Beaumaris Community Site

Em Space, in conjunction with the Beaumaris Bendigo Bank, has soft-launched the Beaumaris Community. We're really pleased with the result.

A Meander Through Design with Comic Characters

Stev Fioretti of Comic Characters is a clown. A very good one. I booked him for my son's Mr Men party, and he had the kids mesmerised.

Drupal training in Australia

I'm really stoked to announce Em Space's new Drupal training services in Australia. The developer course is priced and ready to go. https://secure.emspace.com.au/drupal-training/dev (Australia you say? Even if you are not Australian, are you a Drupal celebrity who'd like to visit us? Even if you are the Rob Schneider of Drupal celebrities... I'm looking for good-natured Drupal folk who want to come on a working holiday.) So anyway, what was I saying about our training ...

If you lose your iPhone, check your Sent box!

After putting my iPhone in the washing machine on the weekend and then turning it on 2 days later to find it still working, I'm feeling lucky this week. Same with this lady; she's got to be feeling quite pleased with herself for inadvertently solving this iPhone mystery. http://tiny.cc/3KdGO Maybe well loved iPhones secretly arrange to be re-united with their owners?

Great paper website designs

Paper website designs provide an interesting point of difference in a digitally designed world.

Drupal-friendly room for Hire

We've been in our city office for a few months now. One of the big benefits is the location, and the ability to bring together teams in one place, for development, Drupal meetups, training or just for project brain-storming or client meetings. We are now offering our best room for hire to other companies, especially in the open source or Drupal space.

jQuery Glue Code setup

This article describes how to set up a custom JavaScript file in your theme in preparation for writing simple jQuery "glue code".

What is Glue Code

There is a fairly common practice in Drupal site development called writing "glue code". The idea is that, when developing a site, there will be a number of simple custom behaviors or workflow steps that you need to configure. Most of the time there is a module to achieve individual requirements, but the risk is that you can end up with a lot of extra code of dubious performance or quality akin to the Open Buffet Syndrome.

Australian Policy Online Live

Described as the Mothership of all Australian policy information, Australian Policy Online came to us from our success with the creative economy policy site CCI.

Introducing the Em Cube, erm, Square

As a part of our rebranding, Ok Interupt's mad genius Michael Bojkowski came up with the Em Cube, a nifty little design device that encapsulated our desire to provide the space for our client's imagination to soar.

Blood, sweat and mlids: rendering menus in Drupal 6

Drupal 6 menu system is a big improvement over Drupal 5. Of course, it's new, and like any major rewrite it will take a few iterations to reach its peak.

I struggled recently with the menu system in a website upgrade from Drupal 5. And again rending fiddly table of contents for a site that uses the book module. What I really miss, as with Drupal 5 before it, are some really nice API functions for building, manipulating and rendering menu structures that are defined in the menu_links table.

So, this tutorial explains how to tackle the Drupal 6 menu system to generate the HTML for a subset of a menu. If you are familiar with nice_menus, that module has some helper functions for similar things.

Drupal Camp 09

DATELINE: 10:30 16:05:09 Melbourne, Australia, The World. The air is redolent with the scent of warming brain cells, zinging silently as they carve out new paths inside some of the finest Drupal brains in the country...

Drupal à la carte

Em Space can now be booked to come to your office anywhere in Australia and train your team in Drupal. We provide the following equipment:
  • A server that provides the training/development environment
  • Ad hoc wireless/wired network
  • Optionally, setting up your website on the server
  • Projector
  • (For up to 2 trainees without laptops,) netbooks pre-configured with the tools you'll need to learn Drupal development
  • One complimentary Drupal book for every trainee

Come join us and learn Drupal with the Lullabots

Lullabot is conducting a Drupal Fundamentals workshop, on-line, at the wonderfully Oz-friendly time of 11am EST Monday morning, starting this Monday 12th October. Why not share the experience at Em Space?

Em Space's top Drupal 6 modules (that aren't always in the limelight)

Every development house and their dogs seem to have a 'TOP 10 DRUPAL MODULES - Absolute definitive version!!' blog post somewhere at the minute, and they all tend to be fairly similar - 'Views, CCK, Image' etc...

We have decided to go a different route, and do our own summary of drupal modules (and combinations) that we use all the time, which you may not have used before.

Administer Users - the sledgehammer permission

Do you give out the Administer Users permission on your Drupal websites? Did you know it's just as dangerous as Administer Permissions, as dangerous as giving access to User 1?

Imagine: you're about to go live. The client calls up, he wants to create users for everyone in the office. Even though the client is not a 100% trusted user (since no-one is), there is an easy solution for this: Administer Users.

Indeed, unless you implement some contributed modules, this is THE solution provided by Drupal core... Wait, read on!

Carbon Down retrospective

Earlier this year, Em Space implemented Drupal for the Beta version of the Compass website for the Victorian Employers Chamber of Commerce and Industry (VECCI).

This is a brief wrap-up of the site (not a lengthy case-study), plus some feedback about the positive role that Lullabot played in the project.

Using MENU_LOCAL_TASK tabs to link around the site

I'm sure many of you have been asked this by your clients:
"Can we add a link up the top there to create a new (listing/page/article)?"

Hide email addresses from spambots

This function takes any string and converts it into an ASCII encoded character. I wrote this function recently to help prevent email harvesting spambots from collecting email addresses from a client's site.

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