Hi, I'm Tim Millwood. I am a Web Developer from Abergavenny, UK, and work for Mark Boulton Design, specializing in Drupal. This is my blog!

Media queries & Drupal

Submitted by timmillwood on Thu, 07/22/2010 - 12:03

Media queries are getting more and more popular in web design to allow your web site to change depending on the screen resolution, or screen orientation.

It is very simple to add media queries to your Drupal theme.

To define a CSS file in your Drupal theme's info file you would usually write declarations such as

stylesheets[all][] = style.css

or
stylesheets[screen][] = style.css

etc.

To use media queries you can write declarations such as

stylesheets[screen and (max-width: 600px)][] = screen-600.css

or
 

Are you looking for a freelancer?

Submitted by timmillwood on Fri, 04/30/2010 - 14:26

There has been a lot of press regarding how many Drupal jobs are currently available. Many people have been commenting on the lack of experienced Drupal developers. Well, I am here to help.

As many people maybe aware I work full time for Mark Boulton Design, as a key member of their development team. Although in my spare time I have around 10 hours a week to take on freelance projects.

Simple Twitter Anywhere Drupal integration

Submitted by timmillwood on Thu, 04/15/2010 - 14:48

Yesterday Twitter announced their Anywhere API (http://dev.twitter.com/anywhere/begin). So I quickly added it to a custom module.

Here's how...

function module_name_init(){
  drupal_set_html_head('<script src="http://platform.twitter.com/anywhere.js?id=YourTwitterAPIKey&v=1" type="text/javascript"></script>');
  $js = "twttr.anywhere(function(twitter) {";
  $js .=	"twitter.hovercards();";
  $js .=	"twitter.linkifyUsers();";
  $js .= "});";
  drupal_add_js($js, 'inline');
}

Drippic - A Twitpic clone built in Drupal

Submitted by timmillwood on Mon, 04/12/2010 - 18:13

Last week I had the crazy idea that I could build my own version of Twitpic with Drupal. It turns out that I can.

In under 300 lines of code I wrote the Drippic module that allows posting of photos from Tweetie for iPhone.

Here’s what is does:-
Allow posting of photos (and a tweet) via a post request.
Photos saved as an ImageField and tweets saved as the title of a node.
Allow commenting on photos, posting the comment back to Twitter.
User generated, and verified with Twitter when posting a photo or comment.
Short URLs created using the Shorten module.

"The Cloud" Part 2 - Cloud hosting

Submitted by timmillwood on Wed, 03/10/2010 - 09:46

Yesterday I discussed the idea of having too much faith in “The Cloud”, I covered this by looking at cloud services such as Flickr and YouTube. However I did not touch on hosting your web site on a cloud service.

Many web hosting companies are now offering some sort of cloud hosting service, the problem is, because the term cloud is so wooly these cloud hosting services differ greatly.

Are we putting too much faith in “The Cloud”?

Submitted by timmillwood on Tue, 03/09/2010 - 10:21

In the last few years “Cloud Computing” has become the buzz word on the Internet, and everyone is offering “Cloud Services”. But what is “The Cloud” and are we putting too much faith in it?

According to Wikipedia, “Cloud computing is a way of computing, via the Internet, that broadly shares computer resources instead of using software or storage on a local PC”

Drupal Association election application

Submitted by timmillwood on Sat, 01/30/2010 - 00:01

This time last year Dries announced the elections for the Drupal Association. I was so close to applying, but didn't feel I was in the right position at the time. This year it is a different story, I am therefore preparing early and working on my application for the Drupal Association General Assembly even before the elections have been announced.

Mark Boulton Design studio site now using Drupal

Submitted by timmillwood on Fri, 01/29/2010 - 18:08

We've just launched the new Mark Boulton Design studio site using Drupal.

Mark Boulton Design

http://www.markboultondesign.com

How to setup a server and install Drupal

Submitted by timmillwood on Sun, 12/13/2009 - 18:34

This blog post will guide you through how to setup your own web server, with a lovely fresh copy of Drupal on it. The first thing you will need is somewhere to host your web server, I have chosen VPS.net. Their servers start from as little as £15.

Step one - purchasing and provisioning a server

Multi-site Drupal installations

Submitted by timmillwood on Thu, 11/05/2009 - 09:34

One of the great things about Drupal is that you can run more that one site off one installation. This saves disk space and load on your server, it also saves maintenance time. With only one installation to manage and update the time spent administering your site drops greatly.

So, how do you setup a multi-site? well, it’s very easy.

  1. Firstly install Drupal as you would normally. Download it into your web root, copy the settings.php file, add a files directory, setup a database. etc. The domain name for this site for example would be http://www.example.com.