Several weeks back I was charged with the task of graphically displaying various sets of statistical data for the project that I have been working on. They were looking for some simple charts and graphs to make sense of the mountains of user stats that the site collects. After researching a few solutions, I decided to go with Open Flash Chart API (OFC). A few things fueled this decision, but mainly it seemed very simple and straight forward, and the previous developer had already taken a stab at the problem using this package. However a problem quickly arose.

You might not think of it while you are plowing through your css, painstakingly making sure everything is pixel perfect, but when you go to print, through your tears, it will certainly cross your mind. Things look differently when displayed on paper, then they do on screen. So, how can I keep my site from looking like a cascading nightmare when printed? Thankfully the solution is simple. Use CSS!

A very quick note on a bug I ran across this morning. I have recently disabled the Apache server that ships with OSX in favor of MAMP (v 1.7.1) to manage my local development environment on OS 10.5.5. As I got started on my workday I noticed that that my localhost was not resolving in the browser. A good sign that Apache is not running. I checked the server status with MAMP which showed that MySQL and Apache were both running. So I attempted to restart the servers, at which time MAMP just gets hung up. Nothing happens. The servers never restart.

As you may know, I am presently working on a rather involved social network. It is currently built on Drupal 5.x, and we are considering moving up to Drupal 6.x. In order to do this we have to asses which of the "crucial" modules have been ported to 6, and the amount of work involved in those that haven't. So this post will have 2 purposes. First, to comment on what I feel are the "foundational" modules for a social networking site using Drupal.

I have been spending the last week or so attempting to make the project that I am working on cross browser compliant. This, of course, basically means babying Microsoft Internet Explorer 6 and 7 (though 8 seems, surprisingly, to recognize standards) into some semblance of compliance. It has been grueling to say the least, as there are in some cases several bugs on a single page, thus their symptoms have become hard to trace.

Last week while reading the Chronicle I noticed The Devil Makes Three (DM3) would be playing on Thursday. I've been feeling a bit swamped lately with the job, as we have been cramming for a Sept. 1st deadline, so I decided to go to the show to clear my head. My friend Aaron introduced me to DM3 a couple of years ago after hearing them open for another band. I have listened to their music extensively ever since, but never had a chance to see them live.

Well as I am sure you realize, by looking at this site, that I am once again present on the virtual communication network that we call the internet. Over the last several months I have been wrestling with an "adverse computer situation," namely not having one that was worth anything more than a door stop (and a poor one at that). I had been working with a first generation MacBook CoreDuo, when suddenly it stopped working after a strange stint of shutting off at random times.

As you may know I have the Flickr module enabled on this site. I use it to host images from my Flickr photostream instead of uploading them directly to this server. This module also provides functionality to display the Flickr pool that you can see at the far right. It's a handy module if you use Flickr, and it works fairly well. However, there is one qualm I have with the Flickr module, each image is displayed as a link that will take you off-site to the Flickr page.

As I have spent a little more time adding some features to this site I stumbled upon a small bug with the Flickr module. The issue arose as follows. I installed and enabled the Flickr module version 6.x-1.0-alpha1, and did all of the necessary configuration. Enabled the filter and assigned to the desired input format. Then created a simple test page to verify that the filter does indeed work, and it does. So on to the Flickr block.