Category: Personal

One’s personal journey, projects, experiences, wonders, aspirations and thoughts.

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Things to adopt from other drupal themes

Been swapping themes on this website, and note some good practices that I’d like to adopt for my default site.

  1. vertically aligned search box in the top menu: alternate / lincoln’s revenge does it well
  2. clean layouts like a printed page: chameleon does this well
  3. blockquote techniques – the left bar at the indentation of the quote is good
  4. different type face for headline titles – say using Georgia to distinguish headline from body text
  5. lines to separate content blocks
  6. different block style for “sticky” blocks
  7. distinct menu headers like the type used by gworks
  8. simple clean design like pushbutton (is there a phptemplate version?) – like the large clear fonts and colours… the menu columns are nicely distinguished
  9. the squiggle dividers from Tokyo / Persian is a nice touch
  10. how do I make dropdown menus work?
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Web Updates – Drupal patching, CSS layouts

I am planning to do a few things:

  1. installing a taxanomy access control module
    I did some research on the subject by first visiting http://drupal.org/ and went straight to the drupal module downloads. Read a bit on the taxonomy access module and find that this would require me to patch the existing core taxonomy.module – now I am no expert on unix patching and my linux host only provides me a cpanel access… so I cannot do patching without a shell access to the host. Also read that patching also is a bit of a minefield, so scratch that thought. Let’s wait for another solution to come up.
  2. installing a web links module
    The weblinks.module for 4.6 has been reworked and the directory module has been removed. This is done in anticipation of a “links bundle” which is supposedly better built.
  3. re-designing the layouts using CSS
    There are a few links on the www which are very useful references in this regard. But I think I shall post them on a separate page.
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Tinkering with the site layouts through CSS, again

My wandering mind will not ever allow me to be happy with a single layout structure.

I was moderately happy with the previous layout which I named “Tokyo” but that had its limitations in relation to dealing with large size images.

Ok, back a bit.

I just activated the image gallery module in this website. The image gallery will allow authorised users to upload images into a directory, and display them on this website. Unfortunately, the previous right column menu layout was not able to cater for large size images as the image would either run over the menu, or push the menu beyond the limited width. So I had to find another suitable layout.

Hence I am currently tinkering with the “Bluemarine” layout and codenaming it “Bluelagoon” for now. This layout uses tables – which I would like to see if I can do away with.

So let’s see how things progresses. Over and out.

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going crpg after a long hiatus

It has been a while since I last really played any form of computer games, be in on the PS2, or on the PC. The last one I really enjoyed was Champions of Norrath and its sequel Return to Arms – both for the PS2. These games were given an 8.5 (great) and 7.8, respectively by Gamespot. Sony doing a great job on RPG games of late.

I was just browsing Happy Puppy to see of what are the upcoming interesting games, and chanced upon Fable: The Lost Chapters for the PC & XBox. This is an RPG with a twist in that the character you play can be moulded into as much of a do-gooder or a devil’s idle hand. It has been given an 8.7 (out of 10) score with an “M – Mature” ESRB rating.

Interesting. Might just try it out soon… but if only I have more time on my hands.

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