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Month: August 2008

Del Martin dies at age 87

By

On August 28, 2008

In Stuff

I am, as I believe the phrase runs, “supportive of the LGBT community”, which in practical terms (I’m really not much of a thinker) means that I will probably punch you in the face if you make anti-gay remarks in my vicinity. As important as freedom of speech is, sometimes it has to stand back to basic human decency and, in turn, sometimes decency is best expressed via a slap in the face.

Being, as it were, supportive of the LGBT community it makes me sad to read that Del Martin died last Wednesday at age 87. As early as the mid fifties Martin came out and lived openly as a lesbian, which makes her one of the bravest people I ever heard of, and she helped founding Daughters of Bilitis, the first US lesbian rights organization. Her numerous accomplishments are listed in this obituary by the National  Center for Lesbian Rights; her picture went around  the world a few months ago when she was finally allowed to marry Phillis Lyon, her sweetheart of 55 years.

Think about this number: 55 years. Most people would kill each other before they’d spend that much together, and they still had enough love to get married.

My best wishes go to Del Martins widow. May it be some consolation that she died only after the world had improved in a matter that was important to her and that she had fought for all her life. I assume this is the best a human being can hope for.

I guess I will think of her when I visit the wedding party of a woman I’ve known since my school days and who has now married her girl friend (unthinkable back then, and possible now only because of brave people like Del Martin).

If you’re looking for a way to commemorate her life in your own home you could pick up a science ficion novel by Ursula LeGuin, because these are books written by a strong woman that have at their core  almost every time a committed relationship between two people; or you could pop “If these Walls Could Talk 2” into your DVD player and pay special attention to the “1961” segment, or you could just sit back for a moment and think about if there isn’t some thing you could do to make this world a little better, too.

    Class suffix, ordering, version number

    By

    On August 14, 2008

    In Joomla, Programming

    The module came with a bug in its template files, so the Module Class Suffix parameter was applied to the individual content items and not to the module. This is fixed now. So the module will have the class of mod_placehere, plus whatever you enter as a suffix; ‘leading’ items – the articles that span the full width even when the content is sent in columns – will have the class mod_placehere_leading; all others items will have the class of mod_placehere_following.

    I added a new ordering parameter “exact”, which will display articles in the exact order you enter the ids. This can be set only in the primary ordering (since the ordering can not possibly get more exact than the exact order. Or something).

    And finally I added a readme-file that will hold a changelog and a version number. Since this is the first time I use a version number I simply put version 1.0 in there, despite the fact that the module has been around for quite a while. I will stick to the usual scheme of x.x.x – major.minor.bugfix.

      The First Year

      By

      On August 8, 2008

      In Stuff

      About one year ago I wrote the first post for this blog. Since then I wrote 117 posts that received 568 comments by 259 different visitors, and the statistic software counted ~ 65 000 visitors all in all (an average of 178 per day). So obviously I’m not an A-List Blogger (whatever that means) but it’s not that bad either. So thank you for visiting me, if there’s anything I can do for you don’t hesitate to ask (obviously that does not necessarily mean I’ll do it, but I will at least answer).

        “Place Here” Module User Guide Part II

        By

        On August 8, 2008

        In Manual

        (This is a duplicate post so I don’t have to rewrite stuff that was already there)

        Leading Paragraphs

        • The module can set articles in columns. However leading paragraphs span all columns ( so if you have three columns each col will span 1/3 of the width of the module position, but the leading paragraphs will span the full width of the module position)

        Columns

        • see previous paragraph

        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).

          “Place Here” Module User Guide Part I

          By

          On August 8, 2008

          In Manual

          The not particularly clever named “Place Here Module” is an extension for the Joomla 1.5.x series that is designed to display Joomla articles in module positions (if you run Joomla 1.0.x you are looking for mod_contentitem).  As of yet there is no user manual, so I will cover the options for the module in a few blog posts (nothing fancy, I’ll simply enumerate the options from top down and give a short explanation).

          Here we go.

          Type

          • Possible values: Section, Category, Article
          • The module displays either complete Section, Categories or idividual Articles

          ID

          • Possible values: The numeric ID of a Section, Category, Article, or a comma separated list of IDs
          • You will find the IDs in table views of the Article/Section/Category managers (last column in the tables)

          Number of items displayed

          • Possible values: a numeric value
          • Zero ( 0 ) means an umlimited numer of items (as many as there a items in the selected
          • The module will display the entered number of items, even if there are more items in the selected section/category

          Primary Ordering

          • I have to admit I didn’t think much about the ordering options, I simply ripped this from another module and have never even tested it
          • Order by category (or section) : if your articles are from different categories or section they will be ordered by the ids of the category or section
          • The other options are pretty self-explanatory

          Secondary Ordering

          • When the primary ordering is ambigous (multiple items fullfill the same ordering criteria) secondary ordering kicks in ( I think)

          Show / Hide yxz…

          • works like in the article manager
          • this setting depends a little on the template you use; the module comes with multiple template, and if the template you use does not include code to for example show the title the “show title” setting will do nothing

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