If I've not been posting much lately, it's been for the following reasons: wanting to get a good external blogging client working (more or less solved; stay tuned!), and a strange sudden loss of ability to place inline images into posts.

For the latter, I use the WYSYWIG and IMCE modules, and the IMCE WYSIWYG Bridge module to tie them together. But a while back, I suddenly lost the ability to put images inline. Sure, everything appeared to work normally, but nothing would show up in the node.

Studying the URLs of the non-appearing images revealed clues to the cause. Crazy business: IMCE was slapping the code width="0" height="0" onto all of the images it touched. I could even see the "0 x 0" dimensions popping up automatically in the IMCE window, without my leave; why?? Needless to say, an image with zero dimensions doesn't show up...

I went nuts looking for a solution within IMCE and other settings, and also in server settings (what else would explain a problem occurring on multiple sites?), all with no luck. Finally, a simple search on the Drupal.org forums turned up this suggestion: Disable ad blockers. Really?? Yep. I disabled extensions in my browser, and IMCE now leaves images unmolested, with natural dimensions intact. Huzzah!

One small oddity: The linked thread suggests Adblock for Chrome as the offender. I figured Adblock must be the culprit in my Safari browser too... but I saw I didn't have it enabled to begin with. Poking around a bit, the homewrecker in my case turned out to be the YouTube5 extension (a HTML5 video player). Huh. Wouldn't have figured that out on my own...

So. If you've got inexplicable problems with IMCE or anything that tosses up a window, try turning off browser extensions before you go nuts poking around on the server or through obscure Drupal settings.

(Above happy face inserted smoothly through the good graces of a restored IMCE.)

Is MarsEdit 3.x now ready to make me the happiest Drupal-based blogger ever? It just might be! (And if this intended excerpt actually gets posted as an excerpt, all the better…) Read on.

Per several previous posts, I'm still trying to get the nifty blogging client MarsEdit to play nicely with my Drupal sites. The deal-breaker in the past: Drupal apparently doesn't provide MarsEdit with a list of available text filters (not MarsEdit's fault, as I understand it). MarsEdit uses the default input format, such as a safe Filtered HTML format – but as a site admin, I typically want something hairy and robust like Full HTML. Hmm, here in this trial version of 3.x, I don't even see a choice for input format. Who knows what's going to happen.

But the worse problem in the past has been this: Whatever I post using MarsEdit initially appears all right on the site, but "breaks" as soon as I further edit it (which is generally necessary, as MarsEdit doesn't support all of the Drupal fields I want to play with. This inability to foresee all of a Drupal site's fields is unavoidable, given the build-it-yourself unique setup of any given Drupal site, and can't be blamed on MarsEdit.) Line breaks disappear upon editing, and the post becomes one big mega-paragraph. That shatters any time-saving benefit of using an external client.

Will the problem remain under this trial version of MarsEdit 3.x? The software instantly recognized all of the sites I'd set up within MarsEdit 2.x (other than the above-mentioned lack of any input format choice); that's one nice thing to see. Now, how will it handle a new post? This post, now on what is a neatly distinct third paragraph within MarsEdit, is set to use Drupal as its System Name setting and Blogger API as its System API setting. And with that, I now click "Send to Blog"...

Post-send edit: Wow, was that a failure. The post Title disappeared, and part of the first paragraph appeared as the Title instead! The rest of the first paragraph – the portion too long for the Title, I assume – just disappeared. Now I have to fix the title by hand and recreate the first paragraph. NOT good. 

That said, here's the happy news: I've edited this post to fix things, and paragraphs did not break! That's a first for me with MarsEdit!

So while checking out the latest and greatest Drupal 7 themes recently, I came across... the Drupalace theme.

"Funny. You'd think I'd remember posting that. And creating it, too."

Huh. Maybe my daily bowl of lead paint chips in milk isn't such a good idea after all.

But then I see that I'm not suffering a memory issue; rather, the creators of the theme are a Russia-based Drupalace. See? There's the site, in all its Cyrillic glory. Like this site, my Eurasian doppleganger's presence features an original character derived from the Drupal logo character (or a not-so-original character, I might say – where have I seen those playing cards before?), though its stogie-chomping persona certainly exudes a more ruffian-like air.

As I'm not up to reading the site's Russian content, I'm unable to say anything more about my evil Slavic twin. Or not evil twin; I know nothing about the site's goals or creators. Sure, I'd prefer to see those folks avoid the duplication of this site's name for their site and theme, and instead create a unique name of their own. (Granting the benefit of the doubt, it's true that Drupalace.com isn't exactly a global houseworld name, and thus possible that the Russian folks simply weren't aware of an existing Drupalace – although that scenario would require that they were so uninterested in the .com domain that they didn't even check its availability.)

Oh well. I'm not going to fuss about it for the moment; it's not as big a shock as the discovery not long ago that a web shop's site was outright stealing my EDAM content and labeling it as the shop's own. (To my surprise, the shop was agreeably quick to take the stolen content down when I requested so.) Just be aware that if you see that DrupalAce and its theme, there's no relationship to the original Drupalace.com.

In any case, to have a bit of fun with my unexpected find, I thought I'd switch this site over to the Russian Drupalace theme for a while. However, that theme is for D7 only, while your true-blue Drupalace.com is still running on D6. That's a work in progress I need to get back to right now. I recently experimented with a D6 to D7 upgrade, only to find that I need to first gain a better understanding of how to get around the upgrade process's unsightly lack of support for bringing D6's image nodes intact into D7. Off to the slave pits. (Ah, Drupal. One thing you never leave me short of is things to do.)

(Edit, several hours later: No luck yet on bringing D6 image nodes into D7. Man, it's a stumper.)

I've previously blogged about using MarsEdit with Drupal – and the unfortunate shortcomings that keep me from using this otherwise great blog editing software for all but a few specific types of Drupal posts.

I've stumbled across a suggested change online, from a writer who seems much happier using the combination. Oddly enough, he has his MarsEdit posting settings specify Movable Type, not Drupal, as the blog software. Hmm, I don't see why that should be or why one would even think to try that… but for fun, I'll try it here.

Will report afterward on what I find…