Category: Software and Programming

Drupal stuff: customizing themes based on hostname, controlling where blocks (menus, sidebar items) appear, using the path module. I’m looking for ways to customize sections of a Drupal site, giving them their own context and look, in short making the whole thing more heirarchical and less flat.

Here’s a 3 col layout with equalising columns and footer (with links to derived layouts) from this useful page.

Here’s another.

CSS, she is a bitch.

Jeremy Bowers keeps a developer’s journal for something called Iron Lute, which is an attempt to write another outliner in Python/Tk. What’s wrong with Leo? Well, he points out that Leo is really an application of an outliner, not
an outliner itself. That is, it just has a tree widget and a text widget, instead of having a real outliner widget.

Interestingly enough, that precisely why I thought Leo was cool, while other outliner projects (like JOE) just made me shrug: It’s not trying to sell you on the technology, it’s showing you how the technology can solve interesting problems (project management, literate programming). Iron Lute, on the other hand, looks like another case of someone falling in love with the technology (and you have to admit that there are a lot of cool things to fall in love with in Userland’s toolchest).

Still, his technical discussion is interesting to read, and walks through a lot of the issues. Pity he’s making the same mistake (well, "short sighted decision") made in Leo by choosing a GUI toolkit that doesn’t support BiDi. I wonder if there is any cross-platform toolkit that fits the bill.

Update: Jeremy Bowers responds in the comments; he also blogs his comment, with added material.

Vim: Seven habits of effective text editing [ link from someone who found it on decafbad ].