Blogs

Drupal builds in access rules to control who can and cannot access a site and in the Admin section of Drupal, you can see a nice list of the rules in place on the site, like below.

What it doesn't offer is a way to annote the rules to tell you why you added the rule. For instance, in six months it might be nice to have a note to tell me that the rule banning users from IP address 91.214.45.% was put in place because I was getting a ton of comment spam from there.

access rules table screenshot

Lately spammers have found my contact form and have been having a field day with it. In 24 hours from yesterday morning until this morning I got 127 ads for cialis, cheap cigarettes, and a host of other junk. It doesn't look like they were able to use the form to spam others from my site (thank you Drupal!) but it's more than a little annoying.more...

One issue I've struggled with while trying to find my way around Drupal's Form API is that there appeared to be no easy way of putting input elements into a table. The solution is to create new form elements using the elements hook, the process of which has been modularized into the Form Table module.more...

The Telegraph is reporting results of an Oxford University study which found that playing Tetris shortly after a traumatic event may help to reduce symptoms of more...

Initial work on the Drupal version of the WHO-5 Well-Being Index has been completed and I've published a working beta version of the module on the module's Drupal project page.

While this is a working release, the module is not in a finished state yet. Plans for the near future include:more...

My HCI (Human-Computer Interface) course is done and the fictitious catering company site I developed for it has been graded. 100%!

While the focus of the project, for the course requirements at least, wasn't to develop a fully functional site, I was able to get a lot of the site actually working.more...

The World Community Grid recently celebrated its fourth anniversary. For those unfamiliar with the Grid, the project allows users to download a client application for their computer. That application then takes advantage of the idle cycles of the user's computer (when the computer's on but not doing anything) to perform analysis of the data from a host of medical and humanitarian projects. Essentially, the Grid wires up lots of consumer-grade computers to perform the work of rare and costly super-computers. It's a perfect example of the efficacy of the "Long Tail" theory.

To celebrate their fourth anniversary the Grid put out a video called 'I Dedicate', which highlights some of the reasons people participate in the World Community Grid and some of the accomplishments the Grid has made in the past four years. Here are just a few of the accomplishments:

• Provided the 'Help Conquer Cancer' project with 2900 years of computational power
• The 'Fight AIDS at Home' project was able to complete 5 years of research in just 6 months

What's your computer doing when it's not doing anything?

Yesterday I headed into the city for the DC Doc Sprint. We had some difficulties because the library had assigned us a room which didn't have wi-fi, but we migrated up to lobby of the Black Studies section and got going there.more...

I'm working on two projects at the moment. The first is the development of a module which will administer, store, and report on outcomes of an administration of the WHO-5 Well Being Index. I'm still deciding on the feature list, but briefly I want it to:more...

Based on a question in the forums, I went looking for a module to handle content spotlighting, selecting a single item (specifically a user) to be displayed separately in a Featured Content block and rotating the selected item on a cron basis (e.g., weekly).  To my surprise, there doesn't seem to be one. more...