webschuur.com

Because I decided to try Remember the milk again for my Getting Things Done thingies, I had to import all my stuff from vitalist.com.
In order to do so, I hacked together a dirty Ruby script.

It may help someone who is trying to achieve the same.

Nice tip for all the Drupal hackers out there: snipplr code snippets for Drupal. It also has an RSS feed. Obviously, as with any unknown source, one should never ever use these snippets (except when you know PHP well).

Oh, and there is a nice jQuery feed too.

update: after some stupid editing of mine, I brought the points down to six. thanks to Bert for telling me I am fool.

More and more often I have to cope with designers in the process of creating Drupal sites. That is a good sign: Drupal matures, so it gets used in more multitalented, professional environments. Not just a pimpled student in the attic who knows some Photoshop and some Javascript and learns some PHP, but project cycles with multidiscplinary teams involved.

The biggest bottleneck, in all this, however, I find, is the wrongly skilled designer.

A good practice. A notorious problem when working with Drupal. An impossibility when moulding Joomla! 1.x into your customers wishes: how to override defaults without forking off (within a tight planning and budget).

Every single CMS, Framework or development toolkit, in some way, allows you to start off, with what the makers think you need. And then allows you to change that into your own wishes. I have written before on this subject, and drew a CMS landscape. That landscape draws one thing: the flexibility. How far a tools can be stretched, so to say.

Ajax is no longer hot, its a commodity. Rich javascript is found all over the place. This is a bad thing. Or at least something we should be worried about. We, being people who care about usability.

Not because javascript is bad, not because of the fact that many javascript is written extremely bad. But because it gives developers an excuse not to work on usability.

Being a Javascript Lover

I am a javascript lover. Back in the days I put javascript in every site I built. You know, the stuff that would alert(‘Your browser is too old’). But ever since then I have held my sepsis for use of it too. Javascript is not evil, nor is it 42. It is merely a tool: use it right, and it is good. Use it wrong and it turns evil.

‘Drupal considered dangerous’ has been echoing trough the RSS feeds for the last days. More often then not, the word Ruby has been mentioned. To kill some FUD before it is even spread, I wrote a short intro on what Ruby and Ruby on Rails are, and how they stand newt to Drupal.

But there is more. Sure, Drupal can be considered dangerous, so should Perl, and Java be, and the same can be said about Wordpress, phpBB etceteras.

To state the obvious: For every problem there is a perfect solution. And not the other way around: For every perfect solution there is a problem. What I am saying is: Don’t consider Drupal the perfect solution for each problem. Don’t think That Ruby on Rails equals forty two.

To illustrate that, I put several solutions for your website in a diagram. This diagram is valid for most, but certainly not all website-development-projects; complete websites, not small improvements to existing sites. On the y-axis we see the amount of effort (development Time, development budget) needed to get a website up. On the x-axis we see the amount of flexibility we want to have. Every “solution” has an area in which it can be deployed, this is marked by an ellipse around the logo of the solution.