By Nitin on March 6, 2010
Feeds Image Grabber (FIG) was released on 3rd March, and currently supports the following features:
- Automatically downloads and attaches image to the node created by Feeds module.
- Configurable XPath of the desired image location on the webpage of the feed item on per feed basis (using element’s id or CSS class).
- Support for FileField Paths module.
- Configurable maximum image size.
- Configurable minimum and maximum image resolutions.
In this post, I will briefly demonstrate how to configure the settings for FIG to efficiently grab images for feed items.
Continue reading “Drupal: Tutorial for Feeds Image Grabber”
Posted in Drupal | Tagged Drupal, feeds, fig, imagegrabber, tutorial
By Nitin on March 3, 2010
Facebook-style Links (FBSL) provides the ability for users to attach and submit links along with their Facebook-style Statuses. Combined with Facebook-style Statuses (FBSS), the FBSL module provides an attach link form that loads via AHAH. Users can then attach a link with an (optional) thumbnail, title and description to their status. In the nutshell, it imitates the link attachment feature on Facebook.
Screenshot of FBSL on LondonFuse.ca
Posted in Drupal, Projects | Tagged Drupal, fbsl, fbss, module
By Nitin on March 3, 2010
Feeds Image Grabber (FIG) is the successor project for FeedAPI ImageGrabber to support the Feeds module. FIG parses the Item URL of each feed-item, downloads the appropriate image from the post and maps it to an image field in the node created by Feeds module for that feed-item.
[Google Reader (with thumbnails) can be imitated on a Drupal site by using Feeds, Feeds Image Grabber, FileField, ImageField, ImageCache, ImageAPI and Views module].
Continue reading “Drupal: Feeds Image Grabber”
Posted in Drupal, Projects | Tagged Drupal, feeds, imagegrabber, module
By Nitin on February 20, 2010
I often come across this question from my friends and peers and most of the time I deflect it by saying “it lets you create your website easily, why don’t you look up on Wikipedia?”. Few days ago, one of my friends pointed me that most of the articles start with “Drupal is a Content Management System(CMS) …” which becomes pretty much confusing when one has no idea about what a CMS is. In this post, I have tried to explain what a CMS is and why we need it and how Drupal stands out among various other available CMSs.
Let us say you need to create a webpage for your website. Ideally, it would mean you create HTML content that will be delivered to someone who requests it through their web browser. Eventually you grow big and decide to add 100 more pages to your website and therefore create 100 more HTML pages. But then you realize that there is a lot of duplicate content. The footer which contains the copyright information is essentially the same on all pages, therefore if you ever need to edit it then it would mean to edit these 101 pages. This will be a lot of redundant work.
Continue reading ““What is Drupal?”, for newbies”
Posted in Drupal | Tagged Drupal, mysql, php
By Nitin on January 30, 2010
When you need to dump a SVN repository, all you have to do is
But wait, then you need to have access to the server on which your SVN repository is hosted. Often, that is not the case and you have to contact the company which hosts your repository to do it for you. I have a repository hosted at CVSdude and I needed to dump it. As I am on the Developer Edition plan, I do not enjoy the privileges to backup my repositories from my admin panel. I could have mailed the guys at cvsdude, who according to me are quite supportive and quick to respond, but that would have taken longer than what I am going to describe next.
SVN provides a unique utility, svnsync which is a Subversion remote repository mirroring tool. Put simply, it allows you to replay the revisions of one repository into another one. Now, we can create an empty repository on our local system, synchronize it with the remote repository and then dump the local repository. Follow the following 4 step process to have a dump of your repository:
Continue reading “Dumping a remote SVN repository without admin access”
Posted in Nitin's Blog | Tagged cvsdude, script, svn, tutorial
By Nitin on January 24, 2010
Who knows more about the citizens in their own country, Kim Jong-Il or Google?
Google tracks everything, your searches, web movement which arises from your search, what places you went last summer (or are planning to go, thanks to Google maps). Google not only knows about you but also understands you much better than your own girlfriend. If that freaks you out, I’d say you are in your right mind. But now you can avoid it to a certain extent by using GoogleSharing.
GoogleSharing is an extension for Firefox, which will anonymize your requests to Google products which do not require you to log in but where your activities can be tracked by Google. Google keep tracks of you through cookies. If you attempt to strip off your cookies from your HTTP request, Google might tag you as spam bot and will force you to type in a CAPTCHA for your every request.
Continue reading “GoogleSharing: Remain Anonymous from Google”
Posted in Nitin's Blog | Tagged extension, firefox, google, http