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].
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”
When you need to dump a SVN repository, all you have to do is
1 | svnadmin dump REPOS_PATH |
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”
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”
Although the third party bookmarking and sharing tools are quite useful to analyze the sharing trends on your blog, they do slow down the whole process of sharing. Also, as mentioned in my Sharing and Bookmarking Tools post, I was not comfortable with the small icons available with Bookmarkify and Socialable. WP ShareThisPost is a small custom wordpress plugin which provides large icons along with the flexibility to add your favorite sharing and bookmarking sites (if not included by default).
WP ShareThisPost includes the following sharing and bookmarking sites, by default:
Most of the bloggers ignore various security loop-holes in their WordPress installation, thinking that the chances of Crackers intruding their small and unpopular websites are slim. Never even think of this. No one is going to check your page rank or Alexa rank before hacking your site, so better secure it now than to regret later. There are a lot of wordpress plugins that will do the job for most users. But if you are a freak like me, keep reading to know how to secure your blog without installing any wordpress plugin.
Here is a list of methods that will enhance the security of your blog:
Continue reading “WordPress: Security check for your Blog”