19th Street Design is now Greg Willis Industries!
Head on over to the new website for updated information and the new contact form. I'll keep this old website up until the summer of 2012. Make sure you update your links to the new site. Thanks!
Drupal Thinking
Apache Solr Upgrade Wierdness
On my greg-willis.com website I've got the Apache Solr Search Integration module set up and working as my search and 'related content' engine. In my recent upgrade frenzy, I upgraded to the 6.x-1.0-rc1 version and promptly busted it. Since I became busy with projects that actually paid money, I disabled the module and life went on. But I had a break today and figured it out.
The Error:
After I upgraded when I went to admin/settings/apachesolr I received a php error that referenced a missing SolrPhpClient/Apache/Solr/Service.php.
The Solution:
I found the solution on an install page, Step 4 of 9 Installing “Apache Solr Search Integration” Drupal module (surprisingly enough). In terminal, enter:
svn checkout -r6 http://solr-php-client.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/ SolrPhpClient
This will install the needed SolrPhpClient/Apache/Solr/Service.php file. Hope this helps.
Farewell Gallery2
The time has come, the walrus said...
I'm ditching the Gallery2 installation at my greg-willis.com website. I've had my photos in some form of Gallery for about five years. Back then there wasn't any other solution that seemed viable and extensible. And since Gallery was on my own server, I needn't worry about some other company going out of business and taking my photos in the process.
So why the ditch? Two reasons. First, performance. Simply put, Gallery2 was a beast. After I enabled the Gallery module in Drupal 6, my pages took twice as long to load. My sites without Gallery are fast, those with are slow. Now maybe someone with more server tuning skills than mine could improve it, but that's not the point. I've been able to get my Drupal sites acting spryly, but Gallery was a bit too opaque for me to do much with.
But I was willing to take the performance hit as long as it fit in with the plans of my website. I wanted an embedded gallery, and I consider Gallery2 the best experience for that -- for admin and viewer -- out there. Now I've rethought that. Going forward, I'm going to have a more content-rich website. Because I'm going to be more text-heavy, the embedded gallery is no longer a priority. If it weren't for the performance issues I'd probably keep it.
So where are all the pretty pictures going? Flickr, my friend. http://www.flickr.com/photos/gregw66/, to be more specific. Although I have my reservations about giving a company power over my photos, the benefits now outweigh the costs. And since all my photos ultimately reside in Adobe Lightroom, I can always just re-spin my gallery somewhere else.
So farewell, Gallery2. I wish you leaner and faster times ahead.
SWF Tools & Flowplayer Setup
Just finished switching from JW Media Player 4 to Flowplayer 2.1.2 at greg-willis.com. What made me switch? Just a little thing - I couldn't get an image to display before the video played. But user experiences are built on little things, and a large black box is not an inviting click target. I drop my videos in the nodes using the SWF Tools input filter. At some point in the future I should create a separate content type, but that's down the road a bit. The code to show an image before the video plays is super easy:
image="videos/namibia-cc-to-uis.jpg"
That is also the code I had for JW Media Player, but it wasn't working in the setup I have now.
And to note, in the 6.x-2.4 version of SWF Tools there's no default setting for the video canvas width and height, so you need to set it in the embedded video:
width="480" height="390"
Note that the height is the height of the video (360 px) plus the height of the Flowplayer toolbar (30 px)making it 390 px. Not sure if that'll be fixed with the next version or not.
So to embed the video, here's the complete code:
<swf file="videos/namibia-cc-to-uis.flv" image="videos/namibia-cc-to-uis.jpg" width="480" height="390">MySQL Slow Query Log error
In setting up Slow Query Logs on my server, I ran into the following error:
mysqldumpslow
Can't determine basedir from 'my_print_defaults mysqld' -c -c /etc/mysql/my.cnf output: at /usr/bin/mysqldumpslow line 38.It's a bug. Turns out there's an extra
-c in the /usr/bin/mysqldumpslow file. Remove it and it should work.Found that solution here.
Drupalcon Wrapup
Ack! Yes it's been a while since Drupalcon ended and I'm only now doing a wrap-up. Impressions:
- Drupalcon has a much different vibe from the other Drupal-related events I've attended. It's more community-oriented, emphasizing the "we're all in this together" aspect of Drupal
- The Birds of a Feather (BoF) sessions are more important than the regular sessions. The regular ones are great, but if you have to skip one, you can always catch the video later online. BoFs are not recorded. And the BoFs are where you can actually talk and have a conversation with other folks, rather than sitting passively and maybe raising your hand at the end for a question. BoFs rule
- Drink beer. I didn't and I should have. Since Drupalcon was local, I just went home after the sessions. When I attend the next (US) one, I'll head out in the evening and meet more folks.
