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Month: June 2008

New Parameters for mod_placehere

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On June 26, 2008

In Joomla

I finally had a chance to use the place here module in one of my projects – I think this is actually the first time I used this (or it’s predecessor mod_contentitem) on one if my sites (I wrote this originally as a reply to a request in the Joomla Forum). My customer required a bit of extra functionality for the module which might be of use to somebody else, so it becomes part of the ‘official’ distribution. I will briefly introduce the new parameters, but since the module is by now quite complicated I will start asap with a bit of documentation.

Trim text

Like the name says this will trim down the text to the specified number of characters (so this expects a number as input, alphanumeric input will cause errors). This is a simple substring operation, so it might cut the last word in ha

Not found title, Not found text

If the id you entered in the id field at the top of the parameters does not return an article this title and text will be displayed instead.

Use Meta Description

If this is set to “yes” the module will use the text from the articles’ meta description instead of the intro text (if there is no meta description the intro text will be used as a fallback). The meta description is the short text you enter in the article manager (last entry in the parameter tab) that is supposed to be used by search engines.

Link to Category

If this is set to “yes” the readmore-Links in the module will not point to the single article, but to the blog layout page for the category to which the article belongs. This will only work properly if there is a link to the blog layout page somewhere in a menu (set up a hidden menu if necessary).

Run plugins

This is not new, but has caused a bit of confusion so I mention it here: Usually all plugins that run on the main content would run on the module content as well. This regularly wreaked havoc on page layouts when comment areas where appended to module contents etc, so I disabled plugins by default for the module. If you need to run plugins you need to set “run plugins” to “run plugins” (could I possibly be any clearer? I think not).

Like it? Get it from the download page for the place here module for Joomla 1.5.x

    Ice on Mars

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    On June 20, 2008

    In Science, Space

    Nancy Atkinson at Universe Today (pretty much the best ressource for space news) has an article about a presse conference by the team of the Phoenix Mars lander that gave some great news: They confirmed that a white substance that has been visible in some Phoenix photos is indeed water ice.

    Water is a prerequisite for life. Some people think that at some point there has at least microbacterial life on Mars, and this has just become a little more probable. Just as important, if humans ever want to build a permanent base on Mars it would be a lot easier if they haven’t to bring their own water from earth.

    Here is the original article from the phoenix web site.

      Donations yes, but not to me

      By

      On June 17, 2008

      In Joomla

      A few people asked if there’s a way to send donations, either for the module or for the support. Now, if I want money I name my price up in front, and I do not take money for stuff I put up under the GPL anyway. But if you liked my work you can of course donate to worthy causes. Like it said in the readme-File for the contentitem-module,

      If you feel you must donate any money then donate it to a charity (preferably a childrens fund) in your vicinity or give something to the Joomla Project.

      However I’d very much like to see where and how you used the module, so I appreciate it if you send me a link to let me have a look at your site.

        mod_placehere: articles displayed horizontally ?

        By

        On June 16, 2008

        In Joomla

        There is a small thread in the Joomla! Forum under that title. Now, in theory it is very simple to display articles side by side.

        • Open the module parameter tab in the module manager
        • Enter a value in “Number of items displayed”
        • Set the value for “leading paragraphs” to 0
        • Set the value for “numer of columns” to the same value as “Number of items displayed”
        • You might want to set “width” to a sufficently large value if you set “Output mode” to table (so the width of a column should be the value for width divided by the number of columns)

        However there is a catch, because this will only work when your template has actually enough horizontal room to display the articles side by side, if it hasn’t the result might be a little unpredictable. The template mentioned in the original post was Rocketthemes “Catalyst” and for that I can only point to my post about compatibility with commercial templates.

          The Long Night of the Sciences

          By

          On June 14, 2008

          In Science

          It’s “Lange Nacht der Wissenschaften” – The Long Night of the Sciences – in Berlin and Potsdam; the Universities and Science Institutes in the two cities will open to the public with dozens or even hundred of shows, speeches, discussions and exhibtions, ranging in theme from social sciences over languages, history, geography and medicine to mathematics, chemistry, physics… well go see for the self, you’ll find the complete list of events (in german) if you follow the link above.

          I caught a cold during a motorbike trip and don’t feel quite fit, but I will nip out to catch at least a talk about the history of quantum mechanics and the related exhibition about Max Planck.

          The Long Night of the Sciences is a pretty cool event – the width of topics covered is nothing short of amazing. If you’re in Berlin today you shouldn’t miss this.

            Space Loo or, human interest stories are not actually interesting

            By

            On June 5, 2008

            In Science, Space

            The last few weeks have been extremly exciting for space aficionados. The Phoenix probe made it’s spectacular landing on Mars – spectacular because this spaceship is so heavy that parachutes were not enough to slow it down and NASA had to go for a rocket assisted descent. Spectacular is also a good word to describe the photos from phoenix’ landing shot by the HiRise spacecraft – see here and here (and while you’re at it read also the rest of Emily Lakdawallas blog at the planetary society website). Already Phoenix is returning fantastic images, including a pic of what might very well be ice on the martian surface (Martianchronicles is a great ressource, too). Water, frozen or not, is a prerequisite for life – either for life that has once existed on Mars, or for life (i.e. humans) that wants to permanently settle there.

            STS 124 (Shuttle Discovery) has delivered the other half of the Japanese Kibo Laboratory to the International Space Station – I guess especially Akihiho Hoshide was bursting with pride when the lab opened for business on wednesday.

            On other news we learned new stuff about the shape of our galaxy – apparently the milky way has only two major spiral arms (not four like previously believed), and how tightly the arms of a spiral galaxy are wrapped around their center seems to be in part determined by the mass of their central black hole.

            ESA has some fascinating images of the planet Venus (taken by Venus Express), and of course we still have Messenger, Kaguya, New Horizon etc.

            And yet…..

            And yet all these amazing feats and findings combined do not get as much attention as a broken toilet onboard the ISS. I don’t know if this says more about the media or about their audiences, but apparently the assembled wonders of the solar system are less newsworthy than the fact that some astronauts have to (figuratively) pee into a bottle for a few days. I cannot say how much this bugs me.

            I have a wonderful book about the Apollo moon landings that was published in the 1970s by the now defunct Kosmos Science magazine – without any “did they really do it or was it a hoax”-bullshit the author discussed the technical challenges and the fantastic success of the Apollo programme. Only at the end of the book he reflected a bit on the public reactions to the space programme. He wondered if the attention span of the public had been already overreached, and asked why NASA deemed it necessary to make publicity stunts like a bible reading from a spaceship, when the mere fact that people where flying around the earth in a spaceship was amazing and marvelous all by itself.

            But hey man, at least it was the bible. I mean, there is no god, but the bible is a culturally significant document with an undeniable impact on society. But these days even listening to bible thumping is considered to much of an intellectual effort for the audience – it seems the media prefers quite literaly to serve us shit instead.

              Evolution experiment

              By

              On June 3, 2008

              In Science

              Not much text here, just a link to a text about a very cool evolution experiment with E. coli bacteria (and any commenter who says that microevolution doesn’t prove macroevolution or such nonsense will get kicked in the shins, very hard).

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