… but not by much, at the weekend I ploughed the meadows with my motorcycle after a bee got caught in my helmet and I proceeded straight where the street made a turn. However this is not among the reasons for a lack of updates in the last week.
The main reason is simply that I’m quite busy with paid work – good for me since it keeps the money rolling in, but I don’t have that much time for fun things.
Another reason is that this was supposed to be largely a site about Joomla programming and as of late I got a little disenchanted with Joomla. My labor of love for these past three years – the holocaust ressource site shoa.de – runs on Joomla, or rather most of the time it doesn’t run. Joomla causes an inexplicably high load on the server (which in turn regularly collapses), user login regularly fails and a structure that allows only for sections and categories has proven to be unsuitable for our purposes, we need subcategories. And don’t even get me started on the trouble the 3rd Party-Components give us. Pretty soon I will have to rebuild the site and this time I will use another software, which inevitably means that my focus will shift away from Joomla – shoa.de has, after all, been the main reason I got involved with Joomla in the first place.
However I will continue to support and (even though it doesn’t look like it at the moment) to develop the content item module, since it seems by now a lot of people depend on it. I generally don’t let people down if I can possibly avoid it.
I received a report about a strange bug in the alpha for the content item module for 1.5. The bug description is as follows:
1. I have created a module (contentitem item type) which is displaying one specific article and “Read more” link. It works fine.
2. I have linked that same article to a menu item. And then link in your module changes. And I get 404 error.
I have so far been unable to reproduce this, but experience teaches that you can test only so many configurations yourself. So I’m curios, has anybody else observed this kind of behaviour?
I’m currently – temporarily – blind on one side, not because there is anything wrong with my eyes per se but because the left eye is swollen shut (i.e. the tissue around the eye is swollen). I’m now both on antihistamins and antibiotics because the doctor couldn’t tell if this is an allergic reaction or an infection. Where is Gregory House when you need him (”Damn, the patient has a verruca on the left big toe! Everybody knows when a patient with plantar warts eats horseradish they will excrete an enzyme that makes his Hypothalamus swell until it exerts pressure on the optic nerve” – “But Dr. House, the patient has not eaten any horseradish” – “Well then, go feed him some”) ?
This is a nuisance, no big deal, but it means more delay on programming work since I can’t properly read the screen. Sorry about that.
Busy busy busy… apart from the usual business there are some projects that have to be pulled through in quite a hurry. Berlin DJ Zuckermann needs a new site by the end of the month plus a somewhat embarrassed staff member from the Centrum Judaicum (New Synagogue Berlin – Centrum Judaicum Foundation) called to ask if I could do a small page for a new exhibition of theirs by the end of next week, which is a bit of short notice so to speak. So I won’t have much time for private stuff (only that I will still take the weekend off to visit the summer camp of the bike club Kuhle Wampe). But there are some things that shall not go unmentioned:
- Shuttle Endeavour has landed safely. There was a bit of worry about the heat shield that had been damaged in the launch but the damage had been investigated and NASA decided that repairs weren’t necessary. Obviously they were right. Go to the shuttle mission pages at nasa.gov and look at some images – the Shuttle is a magnificent craft and I’m sorry that it will soon be decomissioned.
- I finished Fifty Degrees Below by Kim Stanley Robinson, the Sequel to Forty Signs of Rain, and I still haven’t warmed up (global warming pun is accidental) to the series, partly because I still think it focuses to much on the private life of the characters but mostly because it reads more and more like a news report and less like science fiction. But please don’t let me detain you from reading it – both books are actually quite good, it’s more that at the moment I could rather do with something more escapist.
- If you’re into german science fiction: Jacob informs us that the second edition of the magazine Pandora is soon to hit the stores – he is one of the editors there, which gives him the opportuntiy to hang out with cool people like John Clute. Dang, I shouldn’t have given up on my writing career.
Now I going to burn some midnight oil to get some things off the desk. If you came to look for progress on the content item module for Joomla 1.5 I would urge you to download it and play around (not on production sites). I do not have much time to do testing on my own so I would be grateful for any comments.
I promised that I would have a version of the content item module for Joomla 1.5 to test by the end of the week and here I am (I’m aware that in some parts of the world the new week actually starts on sunday but I will cheerfully ignore the fact).
This seemed to install fine and mostly work on Joomla 1.5 RC1, but pleased by advised that this is for testing only. So if you want to help me then play around with the thing and send me some feedback, but please please don’t use it in a production site, especially since in the next and hopefully more stable version filenames will change to reflect name changes in Joomla (content items are now called articles). Actually if somebody has an idea for a good and descriptive name I would be grateful.
So, this is the Alpha-Release of the content item module for Joomla 1.5 RC1. This will not work with previous versions: mod_contentitem1.zip. (By now there is a link to a download page in the sidebar).
Please send feedback by email or comment on this post.
And now please excuse me, I still have miles to go before I sleep.
I started this blog a week ago or so and by now I’m getting about 150 visitors a day, almost exclusivly from the Joomla Forum, so I assume somebody is watching what I’m doing 
I’m currently rummaging around in the innards of Joomla 1.5 – despite many Betas I haven’t had the time to get familiar with the new API, so currently I sometimes have trouble to find my way around. A lot of things have been vastly improved, and some other things got at least a lot more complicated from a programming POV, so in some ways 1.5 is a completely different beast than 1.0.xx.
The good news is that work on the Content Item Module for 1.5 is making some progress – things are working in principle, even if the actual code is for now a bit garish. I guess I will release an alpha version by the end of the week (unless those nasty paying customers use all of my time..). So bear with me, just a little bit longer.
I was going to write a new version of the content item module that should have featured better code and a simple templating system. However it looks like nobody was troubled by mediocre code quality or missing features but that some people urgently need a version for Joomla 1.5, so I’ll scratch the new release for 1.0.xx and concentrate on a release for 1.5. This will still take a couple of days and will propably come with a reduced set of features (I think I’ll have to leave out the “merge” function in the first release), but at least you can be assured that I will work I’m working on it.
I really didn’t mean to do this. There are so many blogs already, there seemed to be no point in adding another one.
It’s not that I don’t like to write – I’m as vain as the next man, and seeing your thoughts in writing makes them look more important (which undoubtly is the reason why blogs are so popular). It’s just that the stuff I write is usually tailored to specific audiences – speeches at science fiction cons, manuals for software I wrote or adapted, occasional ghostwriting, stuff like that. I’m used to do things for a purpose, and writing for an undefined audience seemed purposeless.
Only I’m a web programmer, and occasionally I have to build sites in wordpress. And by now I have to adapt or write software for wordpress, and I need a place to test the stuff I wrote. So this is the purpose of the blog: testing facility, code bloat ground zero, room for improvement, whatever. And since I have to maintain the software anyway I just as well may write the occasional blog post.
English is not my mother tongue, and I guess it shows. However bad english is a sort of lingua franca among people people who do web stuff (programmers, would-be programmers, users, designers, you name it), and I expect that most people who’ll drop by will do so in search of some web stuff, namely for some code I wrote for the Joomla CMS. To add a further purpose to this blog I’ll add a FAQ for that module (you’ll find the beginning of it in the side bar).
I really didn’t mean to do this, there are so many blogs already. Yet here I am, and already I’m fighting the temptation to go all verbose on you. Count yourself lucky that I can’t wait to get my first post published.
End of first message
