It looks like I accidentally killed the template I used for this blog. Since this layout is hardly more ugly and confusing than my usual blog layout and since I don’t wan’t to spend time with cosmetics I think I’ll leave it at that (for the time being, I’m planning for a re-design in the near future). (Okay, so I put it back, sort of. Sue me)
Oops, I broke the blog
Back from vacation
So I’m in Germany again…. I will probably write a few posts about my holiday, but what I can say right now that it convinced me again of the advantages of a European Union. To be able to travel hence and forth through five countries without having search for your passport at every border, that’s really something (I know this dates me but I can remember times when things haven’t been that easy).
And there where mountains:
I like mountains.
I’m on vacation
Hi Joomla users, if I haven’t given you all the support you deserve than it was because Ive worked to much and didn’t have time for anything else. Now me and my motorbike are visiting the Alps (oh, to see mountains again! – there are no mountains in Brandenburg) and when I’m back (which will be by end of the month) I think I’ll have enough energy to do all the things I promised for the module. See you in 15 days !
Sticky: Joomla Downloads
Some people have complained that this site is hard to navigate, and it is (I will redecorate when and if I have time). Since you have come most likely to download the contentitem/placehere – module for Joomla I make a sticky post to the respective download pages.
Joomla 1.0.x- mod_contentitem
http://diebesteallerzeiten.de/blog/joomla-content-item-module/
Joomla 1.5.x mod_placehere (a.k.a mod contentitem for Joomla 1.5)
http://diebesteallerzeiten.de/blog/module-15/
Both pages offer links to current versions (scroll down to the last download link) and previous versions (not recommenend).
You find some info on how to use the 1.5 module here.
XS 400 DOHC for sale
One of the bikes has to go, so I’m selling my little Yamaha XS 400 plus spare parts. It’s not likely that any prospective buyer will be an english speaker, so the description will be in german. Photos below the fold.
Zu verkaufen ist eine 1984 Yamaha XS 400 12E (DOHC) mit 20KW und 56 500 km. Das Motorrad ist verkauft. HU ist in einem Monat fällig. Das Motorrad ist optisch unansehnlich und technisch brauchbar. Ich habe das Ding drei Jahre gefahren, die Anzahl der Vorbesitzer ist nicht feststellbar.
Die Bremsleitungen sind Stahlflex. Der Tank ist entrostet und innenversiegelt, aber aus Kostengründen mit der Sprühdose lackiert. Hinterreifen und Kette (Kettensatz) sind ca 4000km gelaufen, der Vorderreifen ist ca 7000km gelaufen. Die montierte Auspuffanlage hat Rost.
An Austattung gibt es dazu zwei Denfeld-Koffer (nur ein Schlüssel) und ein Yamaha-Topcase (und natürlich der passende Gepäck/Kofferträger).
An Ersatzteilen gibt es dazu eine (soweit ich beurteilen kann) mängelfreie, gebrauchte Original-Auspuffanlage, eine Gabel, Instrumente, Federbein und Kleinteile (Zündspulen, Spiegel, Verkleidungsteile etc).
Wegen der Koffer und der vielen Ersatzteile setze ich XXX Euro als Verhandlungsbasis an.
Das Motorrad ist jetzt zu Verkauf bei Ebay. Die Instrumententafel (Ersatzteil) ist verkauft.
(Für Bilder auf “more” klicken).
Crap Movies and a bit of module progress
I missed the so-called “remake” of The Day the Earth stood Still when it hit a cinema near me. Now that I’ve seen the wretched thing my brain hurts. As far as I can tell the only thing the remake and the original have in common is that both have a guy named Klaatu – apart from that the new movie could as well (and should rather) be called Hyper-Advanced Genocidal Alien Nanobots Want to Kill Everybody – not quite as catchy, but a lot more accurate. In a word, crap (and, admitting to a guilty pleasure, I say that as a Keanu Reeves fan).
In other news, I fixed a few bugs in the place here module, and I’m working on a way to force an Itemid on module links (so you can assign templates and modules to articles linked in the module). It seems to work, but I currently do not understand why it works, so I guess I will test for side effects before I release this.
I still haven’t a clue about the “JHTML Icon not supported” bug that some users have reported, I cannot reproduce that so it’s unlikely I will be able to fix that.
Ding Dong the bitch is dead
Some 60 years ago Adolf Hitler committed the single good deed in his life, by ending it – ,on the 30th of April in 1945 he shot himself in the head. Of course that was at least twelve years to late but still, well done Adolf.
If you want to celebrate this most excellent death and you happen to be in the Berlin Area you can do it by visiting the Admiralspalast and watching their production of The Producers, Mel Brooks Nazi-themed Broadway musical.
Incidentally, I helped a little along with their blog, which is well worth reading (german only) – Peter, the blogmaster, collected a lot of (digital) curiosities, like this compilation of Hitler-faced teapots. So I have to concede a small victory to the Nazis, since I now think I will never have tea again.
Jusos.de – new and improved
The “Jusos” (while Jusos stands for “Junge Sozialistinnen” - “Young Socialists” most Jusos are actually not-quite-so-young Social Democrats) are the youth organization of Germanys Social Democratic Party. Freelancing for Panorama 3000 I did the frontend development for the new version of their website.
Working on a pretty tight schedule we decided to publish the nearly feature-complete version of the page and to straighten out the remaining kinks (mostly accessibilty issues and some invalid HTML) in the background, but I’m already quite pleased with the result (but I would be, wouldn’t I).
We switched the backend from Typo [1] to Drupal , which is less clunky and does not require anybody to learn an otherwise useless scripting language [2]. Clientside scripting was used rather parsimoniously – a flickr badge, pulling a JSON feed from the associated blog, some accordion type of thing – but even so I was glad for Jquerys helpful selector engine.
But the best thing about it (since money can provide only that much motivation) is that, despite all the pressure and everything, it was fun – that was such a brilliant team working on this project (you would be amazed how much ingenuity it takes to make a website look as simple as this) and lots of wit and laughter and too much, too often asian food at lunchtime.
Oh well then. Tomorrow I’ll take a day off and go motorbiking – I feel I deserve it.
Actually that’s not an error
Some settings of the placehere module are somewhat esoteric and produce unexpected results (unexpected by you, not by me), not because there is something wrong with the module but because of Joomlas strange and idiosyncratic ways when it comes to organising the way pages are displayed. I won’t go into any detail but will shortly explain an option that will cause problems unless you know what you are doing, and you do not know what you are doing because I haven’t provided any documentation.
I’m talking about the setting “link to category” in the module settings. If this is activated, and you have linked titles or display readmore-links will not link to the article pages but to the category page (blog layout page) of the category for this article. That is, it will do if you have a menu link for the category page. If not the setting will screw up the links, even more so if you’re using SEF-Urls. This is not an error with the module code (if anything it is a design flaw in Joomla), it’s expected behaviour (expected by me, not by you) and doesn’t require fixing or workarounds. Simply switch of this option if you do not have a category blog page and the module will work fine.
Help me track down this error
Apparently a few users of the mod_placehere module get this error message:
* JHTMLicon not supported. File not found
I cannot reproduce this (using Joomla 1.5.9 on Windows Vista/Apache 2/PHP 5 and mod_placehere version 1.2.2), but I do not simply want to ignore the issue, so if you get this error on your site please contact me with version information of your software.