Next up was Wednesday’s keynote by Whitehouse.gov representative David Cole. The presentation was brief but informative. It’s reassuring to see Drupal being used for such a high-profile Web site that serves up lots of data.

I struck out during the post-keynote session, I attended a contrib development session that was over my head, then I jumped over to a session about UX development within Drupal. I had been keeping an eye on the #drupalcon Twitter posts and saw good reviews coming from that session, but by the time I got there it was over.

My last session of the day – and the conference as a whole – was “Module Building for Beginners.” The intention of the session was to show the development of a very simple module from scratch. The presenters moved very quickly. I was trying to follow along but it was very difficult. I encountered a hiccup early in the development of the module and the session was almost lost. I managed to get things working again and barely hung on for the rest. As I had hoped, I came away with the very basics for building a module.

All in all, Drupalcon 2010 was three days well spent. I learned more about theming, module development, key contributed modules and how to use them, what’s coming in Drupal 7, and some SEO info. The level of knowledge I gained wasn’t deep in any one area, but it was about all I could have expected with my current level of experience.

Perhaps most importantly, I left the conference with a good feel for the outstanding and growing Drupal community. Drupal developers and contributors are passionate about what they’re doing. I came away very confident that Drupal is in for a long, successful ride.

Next came another information-packed session given by Todd Nienkerk of Four Kitchens. The session was “Accelerated grid theming using NineSixty.” Todd moved pretty quickly and it was hard to take proper notes, but again, lots of great info.

The third session I attended was “Views for developers” by Larry Garfield of Palantir.net. I’m sure this session was quite good for an experienced Drupal user but I was lost. I used the time to do some work.

Tim O’Reilly’s keynote “Open Source in the Cloud Era” was entertaining and thought-provoking. He provided a context for the value of Drupal and the Drupal community. Comparing it to the growth pattern Linux went through, he basically put Drupal at a tipping point where the community might take it to be a true major player CMS. He also looked ahead to the day when Drupal might add so many features that the acquired bloat/feature set may make it more appealing for enterprise solutions, but less appealing to users looking for a lightweight, fast solution. “Work on stuff that matters” were his last words to the crowd.

My last session of the day (I left a little early) was “2.4 million page views per day, 60 M per month, one server!” by Khalid Baheyeldin of 2bits.com. Khalid described some really clever ways he streamlined the performance of a site built for an unnamed entertainment company. Replacing little-used CCK module with some custom code, putting separate tasks (DB, Logs, etc.) on separate disks (rather than separate servers), and doing an end-around on the Drupal’s default way of handling 404 redirects were just some of the creative ways he found to keep the site zippy.

All in all a pretty great day. I attended sessions from 2bits.com, Chapter 3, and Four Kitchens. Not bad for a guy from Groove 11.

Lunch (burrito) was good, Dries’ keynote was solid, and a lively session about Drupal 7 delivered by Angie Byron had things moving along well again. But a simplistic and hastily delivered CCK session and a session about executing a Drupal implementation that was little more than common sense provided a frustrating end to the day.

Getting ready for an SEO session now that will hopefully kick off an improved Day 2.

I’ve been tracking all the #drupalcon tweets and the “Drupalistas” are nothing if not enthusiastic (the hard core pre-conference stuff started Saturday, two days before the “regular” conference). I’m terrible at networking, but I hope to meet a few Drupal folk. Groove 11 can always use more Drupal resources.

I also have a nagging feeling that in two or three months I will wish I could go back to Drupalcon SF 2010 and do it over again with the knowledge gained after the conference.

How does one find the width of the first line of a multi-line dynamic text field via Actionscript (AS2, specifically)? I couldn’t find a good solution to this via the usual forums, so I did it myself.

Here’s what I came up with. Pass in the string from the dynamic text field.

function getFirstLineWidth(_str:String):Number
{
	var firstLineWidth = 0;

	var wordArray:Array = new Array();
	wordArray = _str.split(" ");

	// "test_text" is a dummy text field on the stage. It must be
	//  the same width as the text field we're trying to measure.
	// It may be better to create a new text field on the fly then
	//  destroy it, but I needed to run this function a lot and wanted
	//  avoid the overhead.
	test_text._width = _textFieldWidth;
	test_text.text = "";

	while(wordArray.length > 0)
	{
		test_text.text += wordArray.shift() + " ";

		// Once the text goes to two lines, return the last width we recorded
		if(test_text.textHeight <= singleLineTextHeight)
		{
			firstLineWidth = test_text.textWidth;
		}
		else
		{
			break;
		}
	}

	return firstLineWidth;
}

• The Splash Screen. Why? The splash screen sits on top of everything else on my desktop, preventing me from doing any work for as long as 10 seconds. Thanks. Knowing that my user profile is loading is really some top notch information. At least let me turn this off in Preferences. Update: I just noticed that the Dreamweaver splash screen does not stay on top of other applications. Why does the Flash splash screen do so? Update2: A comment on this site suggests using F11 (on a mac) to bring up the desktop, then creating a new window in whatever program you’re using. This doesn’t seem to work for me, but I did discover that if I use Leopard’s “Spaces” feature and open Flash in its own space, I can move back to other spaces and the splash window is not present. Hooray!
• Default Save Location. When I choose “Save As” (in Flash, at least) the default location to save files is the last folder I saved a file. Why isn’t it the folder containing the file I just opened? I am always jumping from project to project so the default folder is almost always incorrect. I can’t imagine any benefit for choosing the last used folder. Lame. Again, can’t we make this a preference setting?
• Saving as CS3. I don’t know of too many people working in CS4. Almost none of my co-workers use it. Can’t I choose to always save as CS3 by default? Once again, a simple preference setting would make this so easy.
• Default keyboard shortcuts in Flash. By default, “Z” brings up the “Bind Tool” instead of the Zoom Tool. Whatever that tool does I’m sure it’s great, but why does it get the “Z” shortcut?? I can only imagine the ratio of Zoom Tool usage to Bind Tool usage. 1000 to 1? Maybe 10000 to 1? And, hello, “Zoom” starts with “Z”. Duh. And “Z” still brings up the Zoom Tool in Photoshop. Annoying inconsistency. Update: When I went to specify my own shortcuts under preferences, I saw that the Zoom Tool is called “Magnify”. That sort of explains the “M” shortcut, but for all the other reasons I’ve listed, it’s a dumb default.
• Speaking of keyboard shortcuts, why is Command-R the option to view rulers in Photoshop, but to view rulers in Flash it’s like Command-Control-Shift-Function-Alt-R? Command-R in Flash is “Import to Stage”. Two things wrong here: 1) Why don’t the commands match? and 2) Viewing rulers must be a more common action than importing to stage, isn’t it? Please, somebody set me straight if I’m wrong here.

I know keyboard shortcuts can be customized but why are they so goofy out of the box?

Update (5/7/9): According to a comment to this blog entry, the “Save As” issue goes back several versions. Adobe’s excuse is “something like saving as an earlier version wipes out your undo history.” Lame.

The most referenced source seems to be this blog entry from Matt Cutts (a Google employee). That entry, however, is from 2005.
That’s ancient in internet terms. That article advocates for dashes over underscores, but it’s based on rather flimsy data.

There’s a follow-up entry of sorts from August 2007 where Matt seems to say underscores are fine, but dashes are slightly better.

And that’s it. I can’t find any definitive information from either side of the fence since then. That’s over a year and a half ago.

Arguments (from people who have some evidence to back it up, as well as people who are just guessing) on the side of dashes:

• It looks better.
• Dashes are used in everyday language (i.e. natural language).
• Sites with dashes in their URLs show up higher in search results than sites with underscores.

Pros (again, from people who may or may not know better) for underscores:

• Underscores are not used in everyday language, so they’re a good replacement for spaces.
• Plenty of sites (Wikipedia, TypePad, etc.) use underscores.
• Sites with underscores in their URLs show up higher in search results than sites with dashes.

Ugh. Can’t anyone provide a definitive answer? I have sites to build!

The first thing I found in my efforts was this page about how to add CSS that will only be read by the iPhone browser. Very nice!

I did most of my initial debugging by letting the iPhone-only CSS format my local version of the Groove11.com site in Firefox. When I wanted to see the real deal, I simply published my files and refreshed my iPhone browser. Kind of clunky but fine for this instance.

The same site that gave me the code for adding iPhone-only CSS, however, also mentions an open source iPhone simulator called iPhoney. I didn’t try it but it may be worthwhile for larger scale sites.

One problem I ran into with my iPhone CSS is that the Groove11.com site ended up looking very small, as if I had zoomed out of it on my phone. I tried changing the widths of the divs throughout the home page but nothing helped. After some googling, I found an article (“6 Tips to Optimize Your Website for iPhone“) that pointed me to the “viewport” meta tag. Setting the “content” attribute to “width = device-width” will make a site’s content, appropriately enough, fit the width of the device. The full tag is:

The site’s looking pretty good on the iPhone, if I do say so myself.