How I wish they were accessible to anonymous users!

I shouldn’t, but I take pride in the fact that for each of the five sites I’ve built with Drupal so far, I haven’t had to do any code hacks. The sites have been pure Drupal Core, plus common add-on modules. And the obvious CSS styling. I still haven’t had to learn how to use hooks.

And it’s really nice that it’s so easy to turn Drupal sites into membership sites. Built-in user management. Just turn on Contact Forms, and enable for each user, a personal contact form.

The problem is that the personal member contact forms are only accessible to other logged in members. Anonymous browsers get an “access denied” page.

There are heaps of people on the Drupal forums who want this. But the standard answer is “it’s by design”.

There are threads with detailed code hacks and patches. And I just don’t have time to do them. All I want (and many others want) is the ability to allow members on a site to be contacted without showing their email address in the clear. Just asking to be harvested by spammers.

So on my latest site A Healthy Business I wanted members to have their own pages with contact forms. Experimented with several options. And came back, semi-reluctantly, to using iContact signup forms.

They look handsome. And I know I should be using an autoresponder anyway, to be efficient, which is available through iContact.

I was just a little hesitant. I found iContact a little non-intuitive to setup. To get the effect I wanted on my personal page, with an embedded contact page, I had to setup a List on iContact. Then the autoresponder. Then the campaign. Then the signup form. Create the thank you page on my site (optional, but preferable). It really shouldn’t take that many steps. And I did want to have extra custom fields on my form, but I couldn’t see where to do that.

It should be easier.

I upgraded this blog to WordPress 2.7 tonight.
Partly because I also needed to upgrade the blog at work, and I like trialling things on my sites first.

As usual, backed up production database through cpanel’s phpmyadmin export function.
Tested the upgrade on a localhost copy of my site.
Tested the automatic plugin upgrade in testing. That was sweet – no more downloading each plugin, unzipping, copying and testing. They all worked first time.

Then ran the upgrade in production. It worked first time. Beautiful. Even ran the automatic plugin upgrades in production as well. This saves sooo much time.

Checked if there were any new WordPress plugins I should be using The best source for this was Graywolf’s http://www.wolf-howl.com/seo/seo-plugins-for-wordpress-part-ii/. Decided to grab the twitter and feedburner plugins – I’m happy with All-in-one-SEO and the others I use.

But the twitter plugin didn’t authorise for me. Oh well. Check again in a few days, then I’ll delete it if it still doesn’t work. I didn’t use the twitter widget – I like using the fancy graphics for titles, and avoiding the widgets gives me more control. Most widgets can be done with tags, alternatively.

Did some maintenance on other parts of the site. Drop-down archives menu. Relocated link menu. Made the title clickable (well overdue).

Decided to make my RSS feeds through Feedburner. Interesting that I rebuilt my feedburner link, and it’s not the nice url address I used to have. But it has so many nice features. Google’s ownership of Feedburner must have helped development speed. And decided to make my RSS feeds full instead of partial – I’ve discovered how annoying it is to only read an excerpt of a blog post, when you are trying to keep up by mobile phone. Googled “full rss feed vs partial” and found that most people share my view.

Really enjoying the new WordPress admin layout. I thought the last one was very poorly thought out, in terms of writing a post vs page, and having to page down to find the categories for a post. Apparently there is a plugin to rearrange the menu from side to top, but I’m pretty happy.

And now it’s time for Friday night PIZZA!!!!

It’s not excellent service. But it was service in the end.

My scanner died, after years of trusty service. So I went to Harvey Norman armed with a catalogue of a basic model printer and scanner.

The salesguy was good. He convinced me to upgrade to a better machine. And to move from HP to Canon. So I brought it home, battling the traffic, and got ready to install.

There was so much packaging, it was incredible. Literally dozens of pieces of little red sticky tape, holding the printer together.

And then I turned it on. Error 6a80.

Hm. According to the installation menu, it was supposed to show a menu, letting me choose my language. But hey, at least it powered up.

I gave it the benefit of the doubt, and installed the ink cartridges. Powered on and off. Still got error 6a80.

Started Googling. Hm. It’s not in the error manual, and there were a significant number of people who seemed to get this problem on various Canon printer models. The two causes were generally paper jam, or foreign object inside the printer. And if this didn’t help, to get it serviced.

Well I hadn’t got as far as putting paper in, and there were no objects inside. I’d wasted over an hour stuffing around, and it was a new machine. They’re supposed to work out of the box. And there was no way I was going to wait for a brand new machine to get a service call. Not if they had sold a faulty product. This was going to be a return.

So I rang Harvey Norman. Got put on hold several times. Got passed around several times. The tech department wasn’t answering the phone. So they took my details, and said the tech department would ring back. They didn’t.

Hot, unhappy mum. Not recommended.

So the next day, I battled the traffic again, and set out to return the machine, by hook or crook. Maybe with a little attitude.

Tech guy one wasn’t much help. I was polite, despite being grumpy inside. But tech guy two had a Canon printer at home. And he said those lovely words: It’s not you – it’s a lemon.

They replaced it with a new one. That’s the way it should be. So I wasn’t going to be unhappy with HN after all.

I have hardware issues. Machines break when I touch them. I much prefer software – at least those are problems that can be fixed.

So I got the new printer home, and this time it did what it was supposed to do – it powered on and came up with a menu asking my preferred language. Success.

Almost. The installation CD wouldn’t run. Apparently I didn’t have admin rights to my own laptop. Even though Vista agreed that I was a member of the Admin group. And the usually faithful “right-click and run as administrator” didn’t work.

So I did it the old-fashioned way. Connected the printer to my laptop, and let it source the driver online and auto-install.

Printed the standard file: “hello world”.

Now to try scanning….

Got an email from FootballAustralia today, to my hotmail account (I’m a soccer mum).

Opening the email, all I got was black and grey.

The email only had images above the fold, and as Hotmail blocks images by default, all I saw was a couple of blocks of colour. No image text alternatives, no text content at all.
Could they have done any worse?

In the first few seconds, they lost my attention.
The likelihood of paging down below the fold to find the text, disappeared.
Especially as this email means the end of Saturday morning sleep-ins, replaced by rushing around to ferry two boys to different early soccer matches.

But because I know them, and I was curious from a marketing point of view to see what they had to say, I unblocked the images and showed content. And yes then it was a very handsome email, with lovely images.

But with images blocked, and all the spam filters these days, the most effective email is a text-based email, with images as the garnish, rather than the main message carrier.

C.

It’s fun planning for a new year. All the things you want to achieve this year. One of which is creating more videos. And videos need music. And music usually has copyright problems.

So I need a music program to create my own music. I have a lovely Roland touch-sensitive electric keyboard, which I haven’t played for around 3 years since my dad gave me his mum’s upright piano, which plays beautifully. So I have something to connect to my laptop, assuming the music program has a midi interface. Although dad taught me to read music in Kindergarten, I’ve only done 1 year of formal music theory (in 1976), so my knowledge is a little casual.

Hunting around, I’ve found this list of Garageband alternatives:

Mixcraft
M-Audio’s Session
Sony’s Acid Music Studio – they also have Acid Pro for Pros, or Super Duper Music Looper for kids.
FL Studio – formerly known as Fruity Loops
Steinberg’s Sequel
Magix Samplitude
Magix Music Maker 14
Reaper
Reason

They all seem to have a version at around the $US40-50 price point.
And all seem to have free downloads.

Each one seems to have it’s supporters online. And the more I research, the more I find it hard to decide.

The main selling points for me are the availability of sample loops to drag and drop.
And the ability to connect to my piano keyboard.

I was leaning towards the Sony products, but the Mixcraft description says that it is compatible with the Sony loop library. They all look really good. But I think Mixcraft is the go.

Happy to hear opinions before I buy the full version.