It's the little things that make a good site into a great site. I'm sure that the iPhone's ability to add bookmarks to your home screen is one of its most underused features, but with advances in HTML5 and Mobile WebKit, it is becoming a more useful tool.

Since 1.1.3, iOS has supported custom bookmark icons. The icons are square PNG files (iOS uses 57x57 pixels for its native apps, but I've heard of other sizes, such as 45x45 working as well). You can either name the file apple-touch-icon.png and add it to the root folder of your site, or use the following link tag to point to a custom path:

<link rel="apple-touch-icon" href="/Graphics/iphone-icon.png" />

Mobile site libraries, such as jQTouch, include settings to automatically insert the above code.

Negative indent. Hackish solution, but it gets the job done... most of the time. It fails spectacularly in IE7, however.

If you're ever looking to hide that special text from your evil seventh aunty thrice-removed (i.e. ie) try this handy trick


#selector {
color: transparent;
text-transform: capitalize;
}


Interesting tidbit. IE will ignore the transparent color UNLESS you apply a text-transform to it as well. That seems to be the cue that IE waits for before doing anything TOO crazy.

Today I was made aware of some strange MySQL errors on our development server that ended up being related to a lack of sufficient disk space. Upon inspection, the /tmp partition had completely filled up. A majority of the files were temporary files created by the Drupal module devel with devel_themer enabled. Turns out these temporary files are not deleted at the end of a session. There were also CURLCOOKIE files related to cron jobs to hit cron.php on various dev and production sites, and some other temporary files that if left unattended could result in the same errors.

My solution is to have these files deleted every night, but only if they're three days old, which should be adequate time for the developer to need access to these temporary files. I added this to root's cron.

# Delete some /tmp files older than 3 days
5 4 * * * find /tmp -type f -name "Apache-Session*" -mtime +3 -exec rm -f {} \;
6 4 * * * find /tmp -type f -name "backup_migrate_*" -mtime +3 -exec rm -f {} \;
7 4 * * * find /tmp -type f -name "devel_themer_*" -mtime +3 -exec rm -f {} \;
8 4 * * * find /tmp -type f -name "CURLCOOKIE_*" -mtime +3 -exec rm -f {} \;

Similarly, I have a cron job to remove old Apache logs, which is helpful since an old project will never have it's logs deleted unless they're removed manually.

# Delete Apache logs older than 30 days
30 3 * * * find /var/log/httpd -type f -mtime +30 -exec rm -f {} \;

Do you have other ideas for managing temporary files that don't clean up after themselves? Let us know in the comments.

We've all been there. A client wants the nodes of one content type to be filtered and displayed on six different pages based on the content of one of the fields. No problem! Views was MADE for a task like this!

Oh yeah, I forgot, there's this twist. The client wants to be able to control the order that the nodes appear in. Again, no problem! We have Nodequeue!

When you create a nodequeue, it automatically generates a corresponding view that's pre-configured to receive the nodes in the queue, in the prescribed order. Excellent. Let's just whip up a node queue for each page that the customer wants. STOP RIGHT THERE!

This seems like the most straight-forward solution, but there are hidden problems. If we create one nodequeue per page, then we have to maintain each view independently. Need to suddenly add a field to the view? Need to do custom templates? Maintaining six identical nodequeues becomes a black hole of time.

Enter the Smartqueue

Nodequeue ships with the Smartqueue API and includes one for taxonomies right out of the box. A Taxonomy Smartqueue allows you to create a single nodequeue, associate it with content types and vocabularies. When you add a node to the queue, it is automatically placed in one or more subqueues based on its terms. The user can then re-order the nodes within each individual subqueue to the order they would like them displayed.

Our six-page, six-nodequeue, six-view solution can now be reduced to a six-page, one-nodequeue, one-view solution. By utilizing the Nodequeue: Subqueue arguments, you can easily select which subqueue to display in the view, and by adding additional displays, you can easily customize your views to accommodate any minor differences between the different subqueues.