blogging

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…

Feedburner seems to be working now. You can subscribe to Drupal Ace by RSS feed or subscribe to Drupal Ace by Email, either of which gets handled by Feedburner. 

What was the problem? As I mentioned last time, it was working fine when I set it up a few months ago, but later stopped. First culprit: Somewhere along the way, my setup at admin/build/feedburner lost the correct feed URL. How that happened I don't know, but obviously the wrong feed info makes for a Feedburner extinguisher.  

There was also a problem in the subscription process. I had been using the following Feedburner-provided code for the subscription block, which displayed an email input field and a "subscribe" button:

<form style="border:1px solid #ccc;padding:3px;text-align:center;" action="http://feedburner.google.com/fb/a/mailverify" method="post" target="popupwindow" onsubmit="window.open('http://feedburner.google.com/fb/a/mailverify?uri=DrupalAce', 'popupwindow', 'scrollbars=yes,width=550,height=520');return true"><p>Enter your email address:</p><p><input type="text" style="width:140px" name="email"/></p><input type="hidden" value="DrupalAce" name="uri"/><input type="hidden" name="loc" value="en_US"/><input type="submit" value="Subscribe" /><p>Delivered by <a href="http://feedburner.google.com" target="_blank">FeedBurner</a></p></form>

However, this code was breaking – parts of it just disappearing – very time I made any edit to the block. That means I was forgetting to use the proper input format, right? No; I checked and rechecked until I was silly, and was correctly using an unfiltered HTML format, which has worked fine in many similar tasks.

With one other exception: I had the same problem earlier with Google-provided search code. There, too, the code would break if I edited the block for any reason, despite use of an unfiltered HTML input format.

Why does this happen? I don't know. I expect that with an unfiltered input format, code should go into a block - and stay there - untouched. Yet for the two examples above, re-opening the block for editing would always reveal the code to have been stripped down to something shorter (and broken). Go figure.

Solution? I found shorter code that opens a subscription window, instead of a ready-to-go email input field and "Submit" button. It too does the job – see it in action toward the top of this page! – and doesn't fall apart when I re-open the block.

So. Once again, it's an unsatisfying ending of "I'm not sure what happened, but things are working again". That's not so bad – but if you have any insight into the breaking-block-code matter, please speak up. (Or if you see something else laughably wrong with this site's Feedburner setup.)

This post isn't about Drupal development, or even web dev. It's about web browsing, something we do even more than the previous two activities!

The world of Internet marketing's head guru, Seth Godin, made a short post claiming Ads are the new online tip jar: if you come across great stuff in a blog, Seth recommends, give one of the ubiquitous ads a click to thank the blogger. In his words:

If you like what you're reading, click an ad to say thanks.

"Uh oh", I thought, "that's going to raise a ruckus." And it did.

I have an old, short post about testing blogging client MarsEdit with Drupal. A blogging client is a stand-alone application that posts to your blog or other website; the advantage is that you write and edit in a familiar word processor-like application, without having to log in to your site, navigate to content creation, and work with your site's text editing features. And let's face it: as much as we like our Drupal setups, logging in, creating a new Blog Entry or other node, and manhandling TinyMCE isn't ideal for catching those fleeting epiphanies all lightning-quick.

Continued from the previous quintet of installments: a look at Rajesh Setty's Blogging Starter Checklist, with a particular eye toward applying its advice to blogging on a Drupal site.

http://www.squidoo.com/blogstarter

This time, a change of pace: I'll look back at all the past Checklist suggestions I undertook, implemented, or otherwise subjected myself to, and report on results.

Yes, results! That's what makes the world go round. Results put the spin in the globe, the worm in the tequila, the... uh... the drupe in Drupal...