Category: Professional

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Drupal upgrading tip

In my experience so far, the most annoying part of upgrading Core is disabling, then re-enabling, all the contrib modules. I’ve timed it more than once, and it’s accounted for more than half of the upgrade time. (Another huge chunk is waiting for files to upload/download/copy. Not much I can do about that. Update: what I can do about that is do all the backup and local unzipping (!) ahead of time.)

I know some people upgrade without disabling, but I’m WAY too paranoid. Apparently the Contrib Toggle module is dangerous/broken. And I have yet to figure out Drush.

On the other hand, I do know my way around an SQL statement and find & replace. So, here’s my new work-around:

SELECT name FROM system WHERE type = 'module' AND status = 1 AND filename LIKE 'sites/all/modules/%'

That gets the names of all the currently active contributed modules. Then I exported it to a CSV, and modified it so that each line read:

UPDATE system SET status='0' WHERE name='modulename';

Saved that as disable-modules.sql, then made a copy of the file, replacing 0 with 1, and named the new file enable-modules.sql.

Then all I had to do was run each file at the correct point in the upgrade sequence. I was pleasantly surprised to discover that it worked.

Things that made this MUCH nicer: not having to disable/enable modules in a specific order; not worrying about inducing the white screen of death; and being able to set up the files ahead of time. Since I have to come in at odd times to do updates, saving time is incredibly nice. 🙂

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miscellaneous blogging

I’ve meant to write about these earlier, but I don’t want to overwhelm with a bunch of posts all at once.

Luminary Procession
This was the second year that there was a night-time procession the night before the Procession of the Species parade (it’s a big deal around here). It was drizzling, but not too bad, so C & I rode our bikes downtown to see what was happening. It was beautiful, with lots of lovely eerie hand-made lit creatures and abstract objects.

Until…the most lovely item I saw the whole evening was an enormous translucent white tree (a TREE sized tree) with a raccoon appearing to emerge from one of the branches. After lots of music & dancing and such, they brought the tree into the center of the crowd. We had run into a couple of friends, and one of them joked that they were going to set it on fire. (Earlier a group of fire-dancers (?) had performed: very cool!)

And then they did.

They set a representation of a tree — with an animal in it — on fire.

Then people started cheering, and I freaked out. Quietly — 15 or 20 years ago I’d have been screaming — but definitely freaking out. I had to turn away, and C held me while I cried a bit.

And that ruined the whole damn thing, in my mind. Really: WTF? Burning a tree with a raccoon in it? If setting something on fire was the point, how about something that ought to have been on fire, like a phoenix? Or something abstract? In any case, it just hit me in precisely the wrong spot, and we biked home together fulminating about how much people suck. (Although the bike trail at night in a light spring rain with just our headlights was beautiful.)

Waiting on a Train
I read the book back in January, and really enjoyed it — C did too; it’s unusual that we read the same non-fiction book and both like it. So I was pretty excited to hear that the author (James McCommons) was coming to speak at Orca Books. (C saw the flier and called me immediately; unfortunately, he couldn’t go.)

It was a tiny group: maybe a half-dozen? Which was disappointing. And further disappointing was his presentation style: reading bullet points in front of half a dozen people, looking away from the audience and at his slides. 🙁

On the other hand, the slides with graphics were cool, especially maps. Whenever he got into a story connected to a factoid, then he came alive, started looking at us, and got engaged. The Q&A was pretty decent, with one guy asking several good questions. Plus the guy sitting in front of me, an older fellow with a snazzy beard and a cane, was IN the book. He’s the head of a rail passenger advocacy group, and was incredibly enthusiastic and knowledgeable. (His wife was delightful as well.) We chatted a bit after; I got to hear about McCommons’ possible next book topic, too. I bought the book, signed, for Mom…I hope she likes it!

Redesign, con’t.
I’m almost done with the latest redesign. This time I feel like I’ve gotten something visually coherent that I enjoy looking at. 🙂 The archive pages are a bit of a mess, and I want to redo the question mark graphic for the formspring posts, but otherwise, I’m happy with it.

The basic shape came from sketching on paper, thinking about what I want the design to do: focus on longer writing, mostly, but still include the other bits. Visually, I was inspired by some new bed sheets that are blue and white with an abstract pattern. Then I saw a bokeh tutorial for GIMP and made a few version in blues. I got one I liked (still need to make a longer version), then browsed around in kuler until I found a color scheme that clicked. Then I browsed around for a little bird graphic and a little pushpin icon. For the HTML, I started with the Starkers theme to keep it as simple as possible; most of the theme work was to include or exclude bits of content based on category. Then, lots of futzing with CSS later, and here we are.

I am still tempted to try completely redoing the structure in HTML5 – header, footer, article, etc. We’ll see. I’m sure it’ll be good practice, at least.

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professionalism?

[warning: incoherence ahead.]

I’m not a librarian. Have never been, don’t intend to be. (As should be clear from my previous library-related posts.) But I’ve been following a discussion about librarian professionalism* with more interest than would be indicated by my librarian fangirlism.

Reading through Deschamps’s piece, I kept applying his reasons to the question of professionalism to my own line of work. I came to much the same conclusion, too. Now I’m just trying to figure out if that’s a good thing, or a bad thing, or if it even matters at all.

Here’s the thing…I’m in a “profession” that is still incredibly ill-defined, without the monopoly of labor that comes from “professionalism.” There’s been talk of such things in a variety of web circles over the last half-decade or so, mostly in reaction to “my nephew can make us a website in FrontPage over the weekend” sorts of things. (No offense to any quality web devs** who are nephews.) Just the nature of what education should even include is still WAY up in the air, so far as I can tell.

I’m of the generation of web folk who jumped in and came up entirely self-taught. Every so often I consider additional web-related education, and I think part of that impulse is the lure of professionalism — the status of the extra degree. But the impulse isn’t strong enough to outweigh all the counter-arguments.

In my experience, the autonomy of an individual employee is largely based on the management philosophies of those they report to and the credibility the employee has earned. (Rothman)

This rang a bell for me. For the individual professional, the total environment is key — and not just when it comes to autonomy. Academic librarians (and school librarians?) seem to have particular needs for the authoriteh (pace Cartman) that comes from degreed professionalism. (Dorothea articulated this particularly well…as usual.)

I think for most employees*** in the web professions, whether you get the place at the table or the autonomy to do your work how you see best, etc. — that all comes down to your corporate culture, or even your individual boss. Whether you are classified as salary or hourly seems arbitrary.

This is the point where my train of thought derails into hand-waving. Should professionalism matter to Information Wranglers****? How much of it is snobbishness? If it does matter, is there anything to do about it? Answers: I got none.

Footnotes:

* Discussion(s):

** This is part of our problem. The “profession” includes developers (front-end & back-end), designers, editors, “managers”, etc., etc. There’s no good word to describe all web workers. I find this particularly personally frustrating as a jack-of-all-trades…somehow it always ends up as “webmaster” with all the ludicrous implications of THAT word!

*** Vs. entrepreneurs…to which this question doesn’t especially apply. Although there may be an interesting discussion to have re professionalism comparison with lawyers & architects. Also, how does all this sociological discussion relate to the trades: plumbers, electricians, and so on? Additional digression, possibly related: I think point #10 is a red herring. Name a famous/great engineer. Yeah, thought so.

**** See The Mystery and Guild of Bookhandlers, Information Wranglers and Data Mongers (hilarious!)

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design reset

For the time being, I’m using somebody else’s theme. Nice & plain, all text, altho I find the font a bit small.

I took the tweet digests out of the RSS feed and off of the homepage. If I find them distracting/annoying, I can’t imagine what anyone else is thinking!

I have some sketches for a new design, but I think I’m going to have to start from scratch. Again.

(Update: WTF? Archives page is broken. Grrrr.)

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play to strength

This is the third time in the last couple of months in which this has come up in my life: “The emphasis, in our schools, college classrooms, and workplaces on “correcting weaknesses” as opposed to encouraging people to play to their strengths is misguided and unproductive.” (11 ideas about which I may be wrong)

Also: The Secret to Being a Great Manager. (other context was a personal conversation.) To quote Ron at a little more length:

There are generally two reasons why I’m not good at some of the things my boss(es) want me to be better at: 1) I don’t like to do those things, and 2) I’m simply not wired to do those things well.

There are, however, some things I am good at. And the best managers I’ve had recognized those things and found ways to help me focus on those things and maximize my output on them. And not let me get dragged down by the things I’m not good at — and will never be.

Yeah, that. In that personal conversation, I realized that the best thing I got out of a years-ago crazy work situation was that otherwise crazy boss helped me get going on things I enjoyed doing, and gave me the encouragement to keep going.

And as I said in the comments, I’m also trying to apply that theory to volunteering and other aspects of my personal life. Really, life is too short to do stuff that you hate AND suck at, at least when there’s a choice.

I feel like there’s a whole bunch I want to add to this, but mostly it just felt more important than a tweet or whatever.

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design notes

what I really want is to have the homepage only have the most recent one w/short list below; to use the excerpts (since I take time to write them dammit); to make the sidebar collapsed/collapsible; to get the recent links (pinboard) back on; to fix the short content/long sidebar problem. oh, and a pony.

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the curmudgeons

Once again it took me a while to figure out who to write about for Ada Lovelace Day. I ended up musing on three women who I came to know through blogging who felt to me like a group of some kind. In my head (and on Twitter) I ended up with the label “curmudgeon.” But seriously, I mean that in a good way; they’re all hella smart and very clear-eyed about the world.

All three have been working in technology for quite a while, and have shifted their skills as the world shifted. I admire that ability to be flexible and to keep learning. All three have written about the wider world beyond the specifics of tech, and very eloquently. I have to say that they don’t necessarily make it look easy, but something about that is reassuring to me: the honesty of life’s struggles is worth showing.

Their blogging — and friendship-at-a-distance — has been a huge influence on me over the last 8 or 9 years. Oddly enough, none of them are blogging very frequently now, at least not at the venues where I originally found them. But they’re all still doing interesting things.

Shelley Powers – Shelley was one of the first bloggers I read regularly, and I got my sea legs in commenting through the interesting discussions on her blog. She’s an outstanding photographer, in addition to being a great experimenter with web technologies and a clear and engaging writer. She gave me my first opportunity to be a tech reviewer on her book Adding Ajax, and it was such a great experience that I’ve done it for four other books. (Actually, that reminds me: I have chapters of the upcoming JavaScript Cookbook to read through!) She’s been a thorn in the side of the HTML5 process, which in general strikes me as a good thing, among other things advocating for SVG & RDF. Shelley hasn’t been blogging much lately, but she’s still on Twitter quite a bit.

Dorothea Salo – I started reading Dorothea’s blog about the same time as Shelley’s. I think she was still a “conversion peasant” at the time, before going to library school. Actually, that’s one of the things I love about Dorothea: she has a way of coining exactly the right quirky word or phrase. See also: grunchy, repository rat, beating things with rocks. She’s had the boldness to go into what looks like a difficult corner of the academic library world, and to make a name for herself in it by saying difficult things that needed to be said. (I imagine she’d call it bullheadedness, but whatever.) Her blog, when she was writing it, took on all comers, and had a strength of voice that I still think fondly of. Watching her “beat things with rocks” has been a source of reassurance when I’ve encountered technical problems. I’ve learned about things that are way out of my usual areas of expertise, plus I’ve internet-met lots of fascinating librarians. On a personal level, she was very supportive when I was going through an incredibly difficult period of my life, and I don’t know if I’ve ever thanked her properly. She gave up her personal blog a while back, but she blogs about technology in research and libraries for ScienceBlogs at The Book of Trogool. She’s also active on Twitter and FriendFeed.

Dori Smith – Dori, like Shelley, has been a strong and consistent advocate for increasing the presence and visibility of women in technology. She’s also a great tech writer and speaker. Plus she’s written several books with her husband — a feat of collaboration that I admire. It’s definitely not easy working with the person you also live with! And Dori is the one of these three that I’ve met in person, which has been awesome. In 2008, we had this incredible long conversation at SXSW 2006, or rather, on the sidewalk in the middle of the night. In 2009, same thing, but in the hall in the middle of the afternoon, the kind of smart, thoughtful, engaged conversation as if we’d been friends for years, and a little bit like a big sister. (Oh, and I still owe a review of JavaScript & Ajax!) Dori still blogs every so often, and can also be found on Twitter.

* In looking up the “curmudgeon = frustrated idealist” idea that I got from Joe Clark (2nd to last paragraph of that post) aeons ago, I found a comment quoting the same on Shelley’s blog. From 2007…referencing a post of mine from 2003. Crazy.

** I just looked up last year’s post…and noticed that I mentioned Shelley, Dorothea & Dori as people I’d been thinking about writing about! I guess if the idea stuck for a whole year, it was definitely worth acting on. I guess that means next year I write about Mom? (Actually, I’m thinking about Webgrrls/Digital Eve.)

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rich text and respect

I originally wrote this as a comment on a Sitepoint blog post, but I can’t figure out if their comment system just ate it, and I put a lot of thought into this, so it’s reposted here for posterity. 🙂

I’m seeing a lot of antagonism towards people who just want to get their words on the web! If you’re just adding an announcement or editing a few words, you don’t want to wait for some agency to do it for you, you want to do it NOW. Additionally, for many people it’s not a sizable part of their job: they are a teacher who also posts to a class website, or a secretary who also maintains part of an intranet, or a volunteer sharing upcoming events.

I’ve been helping non-designer/developer folks put their content on the web (or intranet) for a long time now in a variety of contexts. Seeing a common pain point, like that 3MB file resized in the rich text editor, is a call to develop either site tools or educational tools.

I find that if you take the time to listen, to respect folks as skilled and intelligent in their own fields of expertise, and to explain in plain language, that most people can understand the most important parts.

For example, anybody who’s used Word knows that it does strange formatting things sometimes, so saying “Word is weird, here’s how to work around it” is a pretty decent substitute for “OMG DON’T DO THAT!” (Spocke, I LOVE that TinyMCE includes a “paste from Word” button, even if the cleanup behavior is a little odd sometimes.)

Locking down the options to something manageable is definitely our responsibility as developers. Every site has different needs, and to be honest, in some cases the authors and site visitors want and expect things that we find hideous. (Pink comic sans FTL.) In other cases, all you need are the most basic formatting options. Knowing the site, the author(s) and the audience is important in making those kinds of choices, the same as any other design or development decision.

Would I like to see more consistency and quality in code produced through rich-text editors? Absolutely! Do I think it should be part of HTML5? I honestly don’t know. In the meantime, we’ll have to just keep muddling along.

Postscript: I’m posting/editing this in an RTE, even though I’m perfectly capable of hand-coding. Sometimes you just want to focus on the words, and do the linking or bolding or bullet-pointing as quickly and unobtrusively as possible. If I see something going hideously wrong, then I’ll poke under the hood and fix as necessary.

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less painful than I expected

So I run two full versions of the site, and until I take the time to get Deploy etc working, I periodically have to reset the test version as it gets absurdly out of whack with the live version.

For reasons that are too boring to get into at the moment, I had to do that earlier this week. When I did, I completely spaced on the fact that a few weeks ago I was working on a major overhaul to some of the content types. (See my comments about rate tables in the conversion post from last September.) It took me quite a while to figure out the best way — or at least a better way — to get it set up. I hadn’t yet implemented it on the live site, because I was waiting on someone else’s schedule.

Today, the meeting chime came up saying that I was supposed to show the new setup to that someone.

Oh.

Crap.

Digression: some of you are aware of the ampersand disaster of 1996. (If not, see this post from 2001.) The sense of panic, sinking OMGWTFBBQ, punch-to-the-gut that I felt when I realized was almost exactly the same as when Sandra brought me that label addressed to “S&ra”.

I postponed the meeting and immediately (ok, after taking a little break for toast) set to work. At first, I thought the best call would be to find all the references in the database backup to the node type, nodes, and views and just copy in the SQL. Yes, making a backup is an established part of my reset routine!

But ugh. It wasn’t long at all before I determined that it was just too crazy-messy to even consider, which left me feeling pretty low. (And stupid, good grief the burning stupid.)

Then I realized I’d made custom theme files for the node types in question! That gave me the names of the content fields and some information about the node type settings and how I had used taxonomy. Then I discovered that my habit of letting Firefox remember things I type into fields had left a memory of the names I used, not just for the content fields, but for the multigroups they were bundled into. I did use the SQL backup to figure out what taxonomy vocabulary I’d used and what the terms were, plus the allowed values for a couple of fields. Dreamweaver is actually not too bad for searching ginormous SQL files.

Once I had the content types set, figuring out the Views I needed was fairly obvious. (To me, anyway.) I think I even improved them over my previous attempt. All that remained was copying in a bit of CSS from the backup version of the theme, and in less than 4 hours I had it all back together!

So yay for Drupal. (It’s been a week of “Drupal hates me” vs “Yay for Drupal” — at the moment I think “yay” is winning out.)

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stuff

I think I’m mostly done with the basics of this redesign. What I really want is to to get the blue sidebar to look like it’s tucked under the main column, but the z-index isn’t doing quite what I wanted. 🙁 Plus there’s lots of fiddly bits I could fiddle with if I felt like it. Among other things, I’m futzing around with Typekit. (The goal, btw, is to make the writing the focal point.) But the general feel of it is there.

I also have a redesign mostly ready for the ENA site. I’m excited: it’s not often that I get truly inspired with a design, and this one has come together quite nicely. With both my personal site and the ENA, I’m trying to expand my skillset some: more experimentation with design plus some new techniques. (Rounded corners and box-shadows and fonts, oh my!)

In other nerdiness, Tech Tuesday is ON! I haven’t figured out a program or anything yet, but I have a date and a location. I’m considering adding some content to the site: recruiting a local blogger or two to write about tech (if you’re interested just holler) and/or trying to do some tech writing of my own. There may be something hiding out in my archives that I can rework. The big Drupal post or “ampersands f*ck up everything” seem like the most likely candidates.

I’m finding myself happily (!) in the thick of a bunch of civic involvement stuff — the last ENA general meeting was fantastic, really inspiring; I’m continuing along with the Friends of the Library, and I’ve applied for a spot on the city’s Bicycle & Pedestrian Advisory Committee. There’s some other stuff that I’m mulling around in the back of my mind that hasn’t quite gelled yet, too.

At the same time, I’m almost done with my second read-through/revision of my NaNoWriMo project. The first time I was looking for big stuff; this time I’m being more focused: some copy-editing, some marking big passages as “wtf” or “meh” or “awk”, picking up more inconsistencies, and so on. In general, the first few paragraphs of almost every scene are pretty weak. It just takes me a bit to find my groove, I guess. So there’ll be lots of cutting or expanding. Also, I can definitely spot places where I was padding for word count. 🙂 Plenty of strikethroughs in those sections!

Maybe it’s the impending spring, but right this moment I’m finding myself in a pretty good mood, and I hope everybody out there in the internets is getting a chance to be creative and engaged too!