Welcome to Look Alive! Blog of Alli Price, a Front-end Developer living in the UK who works with Drupal and lots of other fun stuff!

Posted: Thursday, June 16th 2011

A quick gotcha explanation if you find that Drupal's block cache isn't working.

Chances are this could be described somewhere, but after a bit of Googling and it not turning up, I figure put it up!

Pretty simple really, Drupal won't cache blocks for User 1 (block.module, line 28):

/*
* Note that user 1 is excluded from block caching.
*/

 

There you have it!

Posted: Tuesday, May 24th 2011

Chances are this might have completely passed you by, but there's been a shift for whatever reason for sites to start using hash tag URLs, the big cases being Twitter, Facebook and Gawker group (blogs such as io9, kotaku, gizmodo).

The Gawker switch pissed me off because it broke any URLs that come through RSS readers etc, and didn't work for mobile (redirect to a mobile site that couldn't work with the URL, perhaps http://xkcd.com/869/), a key mistake was only having #! URLs without any no javascript normal URLs.

Anywho the following post gives you an excellent overview as to the in's and out's of the whole thing, in short, hash tags for applications where SEO isn't a concern.

http://www.quirkey.com/blog/2011/02/10/ish/

Posted: Monday, May 16th 2011

Through my years of internet use, somewhere along the way I became a horder of tabs it would seem. A normal thing I would do is start on a subject or problem I'm working on, like a particular CSS technique and end up with many tabs, usually full of good stuff. For whatever reason chances are I'd not get round to reading them all, but keep the tabs open anyway with the intention of coming back to them.

Whilst bearable in Firefox < 4, 4 really doesn't like it, taking up huge amounts of RAM. As a solution I've gone through tagging like crazy, I never really jived with bookmarks, they always seem to get unweildy, but with 4 everything bookmark-ish seems greatly improved with tags (which quite possibly were in 3.6, the RAM gluttony has prompted this!).

So now I've got some nicely categorised things saved for later should I ever come back to them, with tags such as "designs I like" and "read later".

There are however other solutions out there such as the Too many tabs plugin, the idea of tagging however seems more appealing :)

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/toomanytabs-saves-your-me...

 

A proper dev post is coming soon!! Promise innit.

Posted: Monday, May 2nd 2011
Tags:

One quick weekend and the site is (barely) styled, developed and live! I hope to add a bit more colour to the site in the following weeks but this should do for now.

I intend to post anything here in part for myself as a way of remembering cool or useful things I come across or up with, and also as a way of answering questions with how to do something web-ish, primarily Drupal related I'd imagine.

With that in mind, my first useful snippet is a link!

Web Designer Depot has written up some excellent tips on creating Print stylesheets, normally if a print stylesheet is needed we'd install the contributed Email/Print Drupal module (http://drupal.org/project/print), but there are still great lessons to be learnt.

http://www.webdesignerdepot.com/2010/01/10-tips-for-better-print-style-s...