No sense reinventing the wheel, is there? Here, we will attempt to catalog the things we discover work well in managing the site. We hope it gets REALLY full of stuff!
Now, you are always responsible for making sure you are not violating law when you are doing this, but this is an easy way to capture embedded flash videos so they can be stored, preserved, and utilized. It requires only a Windows PC, and free browser software.
1) Download and install the web browser Opera, available here.
2) Open My Computer (that is, an Explorer window), and navigate to your primary system hard drive (usually C:), then to Documents and Settings, then to your personality area (look for your login account name). We'll shortcut that as "C:\Documents and Settings\<login>\". Then navigate deeper, to Local Settings\Application Data\Opera\Opera\profile\cache4. This is the place where temporary files are placed during browsing with Opera.
3) In that Explorer window, click View -> Details.
4) Click/select the "Size" column header so that the largest files are at the top (usually this requires two single clicks).
5) In Opera, navigate the web to the video you wish to capture, and play it to start loading it into the cache.
6) In Explorer, repeatedly click View -> Refresh, watching a new and cryptically-named caching item get created and then get bigger and bigger, until it stops changing in size.
7) Click and Drag that cache file to your Desktop, or anyplace else convenient.
8) Change the name of the Desktop copy to something that pleases you, but ending in ".flv" (for "Flash Video").
9) Upload that file to YouTube, and try it.
You can also play that video in a flash player on your won machine. I recommend FLV Player 2.0, available here.
Drupal automatically splits off a leading part of an article to use as a front page teaser, and although you can control the nominal size of teasers by navigating to Administer -> Content management -> Post Settings, it doesn't really matter, because sooner or later you will run into a teaser that just doesn't work right.
Let me explain a bit about the teaser split that Drupal performs: when you post a content item, Drupal looks at the text, including all the hidden HTML tags, and tries to find a spot where it can break the content into two pieces, nominally at the character count setting established in Post Settings. That can be a little complicated, especially if the item has lots of complex HTML. In making the break, items with nothing but simple text will show more of their text in the teaser than items with lots of links in the opening lines, for example. Conversely, an <iframe> tag which drags in 256MB from a outside web source may end up appearing totally in the teaser, which really is the opposite effect you want.
There is a trick, however, to force Drupal to set your teaser right where you want it.
When editing a page, drop into Source mode, and insert "<!--break-->" where you want the teaser to end. Drupal will obey your manually entered break point, and not create its own.
Make sure you don't interrupt any tag open/close pairs when doing that, however. Annoying. Really. If your teaser breaks with a tag left open -- font color or size, or a <div> tag, for example -- your teaser may totally fry the appearance of the home page by causing the viewer's browser to interpret mismatched tags.
For most items, keeping the item formatting simple keeps you out of trouble. For the ones which don't format the way you want, consider putting the forced break in. For the really messed up ones, go into Source mode in the editor, copy the entire item, and paste it into NotePad++. Then you can set the language type to HTML, and let NotePad++ show you the HTML pairings.
Tips on adding content from existing e-mail and preserving existing formatting:
Using the Windows COPY and then PASTE features from a rich-text Outlook email into an article or page on this website seems to work well. The hyperlinks are usually preserved, though I recommend checking them all before Publishing to make sure the links you have received are current. There is usually some garbage that needs to be cleared out in Source and the spacing often needs to be adjusted.
The best way I have found to check my file and clean up errant code is to save my Article or Page and open it up in a second window to scroll through side-by-side with my edit node.
Caution, Mac users - I haven't had good luck attemping this from Mac Mail. Please comment if you have found a way to work around this using Mac.
Also, best luck creating and editing within Firefox browser (over Safari and Google Chrome).
Sandy Abercrombie prepared the attached Word file, describing how to create a fan page on Facebook.
| Attachment | Size |
|---|---|
| Facebook_fan_page.doc | 305.5 KB |
If you want to include an image in a document, it needs to exist on the internet already.
I found two ways to do source images for the Drupal site:
1) Click on the Image Button and paste in the URL. If it is a site that you do not manage, this is not ideal because it is not reliable.
2) For internal purposes, the best way I have found is to load images on to SmartCommunicator or another image library that is a reliable storage place. Use image editors before loading them up if you want to make any changes, though they can be resized once loaded.
Also, when trying do download images from an email, I have noticed that they are not always downloadable, only copyable. My best luck with images has been with my Mac where they are almost always downloadable, but if not I can take a quick and editable screenshot using SHIFT+COMMAND+4.
Please comment if you find any other useful ways to make images reliably available for the ORP site, or if you know of any issues with the ways I have listed here.
Now, this really isn't going to address attribution and copyright issues -- you know about that, anyway.
The Quotes module is nice, but I wanted to put more STUFF into the quote displays, not just a quote and an author. After tinkering, I discovered that it is perfectly OK to put HTML into the quote edit field, so I created a set of css definitions, collected a set of quotes, wrote a Perl script to format them for me, and a template for creating those files specifically to match the ORP environment.
Feel free to use them. You'll need to install Perl (free), and use the Perl Package Manager to grab the IO and String packages (if they don't load with the basic installation), but that's not too tough. The script that produces the files has a few recognizable constants that you might have to change, but that should be fairly apparent if you look. As delivered below, the script expects to find the files "Revised59.txt" (the quotes, in a tab-separated format produced by Excel) and "QuoteFileTemplate.html" (containing a specification of what data to put into what file). It also expects to find a set of pictures in a parallel folder referenced as "../Pictures", and finally a local folder "Quotes" (into which it will place the resulting files).
To get started, download the .zip file and expand it where you find convenient. After you install Perl, double-click on the script and it should operate successfully. If not, open a command prompt window and run it from there to see any errors that appear.
The pictures should be uploaded, using your file manager or SSH client, to "~/sites/default/files/quotepics" (the "~" stands for your home folder on the website). You can certainly put them elsewhere, if you like, but then change the template file to reflect that location change.
Now, the QuoteFileTemplate.HTML file is a little obtuse, but it will make a little more sense after this:
As an example, the template line
SQ Template $$QuoteNum $$Author$$Image1$$Image2 **BURP**
is interpretted this way: If the quote number has changed, and there is any content in the author, image1, or image2 fields, then output "**BURP** to the file identified as "SQ".
Oh, just play with it. Or ask me for help. Hey, it's free, and there are hundreds of quotes already compiled for you.
To upload the quotes like I have on the ORP and CCRP sites:
*** Soon I will add an "NewItem" column to the process, so that adding quotes to the database will not require as much work. Keep watching.
Tom Harrison