Setting up a Drupal site: Notes to self

This is just a collection of jots I ( = a Drupal newbie) wrote down as I set up a site with Drupal 7.2. Don’t expect this to be more coherent than a typical shopping list. March 2019 update: Drupal was a huge mistake. Just in case someone out there still has a chance to [...]

Catching the transient cookies: Log in, then crawl

The old way Sometimes all you need is a quick crawl within a site, which requires to log in first. There are two main techniques I can think about: One is to POST the login form with your script, and get the necessary cookie setting. The second is to login manually with a browser, and [...]

Google ads: How to lose the wait

Someone once told me that WWW stands for World Wide Wait. But when the page is held because the browser waits for a Google Ad to come in, that’s really annoying. I didn’t want that to happen in my site. So here’s the story about how to have the page displayed first, ads later. One [...]

One little button for Firefox: XUL is cool

Introduction This post summarizes some of my findings while attempting to make a descent single-button Firefox extension. I’ve tested the code shown below with Firefox 1.5 and 3.0 under Windows, and Firefox 3.0 under Linux, and there were zero portability issues. I would suggest reading a tutorial about toolbars and possibly Mozilla’s own tutorial about [...]

CSS and DIV layout: The main pitfalls

In the beginning web pages were simple and innocent. Then people started to abuse tables to achieve some layout. And then came CSS and DIV, the winning combination for making a web page oh-so-beautiful but not resizable. Web designers started telling the browser where to put what, and the browser responded with blind obedience, even [...]

The “kamakesef” formula revealed: Calculate the wedding present’s amount

Introduction An Israeli website, “Kama Kesef” (כמה כסף in Hebrew, meaning “how much money”) is a neat web calculator telling how much to give as a money present in weddings and other events. When I realized that I’m far from being the only one using it to decide what sum to write down on the [...]