Aranfoolcaytar

I just made a little extension for Drupal that makes nicer quotes than the ones generated by the BBCode module. This one takes the IPB layout (including, incidentally, the corresponding IPB images, which is why I won't make the module publically available yet) for quotes and formats quotes according to that.

The design is also better than the standard BBCode in a few ways - for example, it checks (supposedly) for broken tags, so that an extra closing tag or an unclosed tag at the end will be left unparsed.

What follows is yet another post about an obscure project of mine you likely have never heard of - that's what comes from being part of so many different isolated communities.

This one concerns Nationstates. To the point, the game has a voting mechanism which determines what comes closest to "points" in the game - by "endorsing" another nation, it is possible to vote for a "delegate" which will then have administrative power of the sub-community.

Traditionally, the delimiter "<--break-->" has been used in posts in Drupal to mark the point where the teaser should cut off - ie after which the user must click on "read more" to see the rest.

It has come to my attention that this has recently been replaced with a pseudo-tag, namely <break>

So after about a year of procrastinating, I finally got around to actually writing, compiling and running my first program with C++ ("Hello World", what else?). I kept meaning to learn this so I could finally be a "real" programmer - PHP is unsurprisingly slow and awkward for anything not concerned with displaying web pages, and is also not highly regarded among programmers. Java is little better in that sense.

So yes, I finally have a program that needs neither an interpreter nor a virtual machine to run. I got that far in FORTRAN, but, well.

My visitor log shows me the referring pages, of course, and since I neither have a big audience of periodic readers nor other popular bloggers who link to me, most of these are Google searches.

With the color module finally working, I have been changing this blog's theme regularly.

This time it's green. I think I should have done this before - blue is cool, but somehow green is much friendlier.

But now, I want to know: Which color would you like best? The choice will be adopted next week and will last for a week.

Due to technical limitations, I can only offer a few choices. So it's still up to me what the exact tone of "red" will look like.

However, you are allowed to choose two.

... and Drupal.

Well, I installed the gsitemap module, which is so far only released for 4.7.x, but whose CVS repository already has a 5.x-compatible version... with a bit of meddling required.

Finally, I've been able to submit a sitemap and verification page for Google (that "google495953..." thing), and also look at the request logs to see what exactly Google requests from my site:

These are:

This is the fourth point on my wish list for Drupal additions. This is the first one that is not intended as a module, but an improvement to the core itself.

This is the third point on my Drupal module wish list. You can look at the first two, nodeBB and book_arrange.

This is the second point on my wish list for Drupal modules (see the first one, nodeBB). This one is less about architecture and more about user interfaces - snazzy ones, using AJAX, jQueries and the like.

People who have spent any time authoring a book in Drupal know that what is generally advertised as a powerful feature is a heck of a pain to work with.