Jaharmi’s Irreality renewable hyperlinks with 0% transfat since 1999

Sometime after my Drupal 5.1 upgrade — but before a day had passed — I noticed that line breaks and paragraphs were missing from my posted stories. That just didn’t seem right.

After a bit of searching on the Drupal site, I stumbled upon a solution. (See, for example, this thread.) I have my own custom input format that I call “Standard filter”. Each of the filters had started out with a standard weight of 10, which meant they all ran as one big glob.

I reordered the various filters in this custom input format until the rendering improved. The winning combination was one where the “Filtered HTML” filter was highest (with a weight of -10), coming before the various inline filters and so on that I’d added to my custom input format. I spread the rest of the filters along the weight scale, going all the way from -10 to 10. Having “Filtered HTML” come first in the priority queue makes some sense, as it gets to attack its problem set first before the “Line break” filter and others step in to do their duty.

I learned something about Drupal thanks to this problem. Even though it was a pain, I came away impressed. That pretty much summarizes all of the Drupal work I did over the weekend — I learned a lot and like Drupal more because of it.

My last post was the first one I’ve posted with Flock, an upwardly-mobile special purpose Web browser.

I am quite surprised at how deftly it handled connecting with my Drupal site, allowing me to post a story with relative ease. It did so much better than I’ve managed to accomplish with MarsEdit, unfortunately—and that could be misconfiguration of MarsEdit, but the point is that I still haven’t hit on the right combination. In contrast, Flock asked for my Drupal site login information and URL, and from there, it automatically configured everything. (In other words, it performed the way that MarsEdit did when I was using it with my older Userland Manila site, but not with Drupal.)

Still, all is not perfect. While Flock correctly handled a complex posting task—including discovering all of my various taxonomy tags for categorization, letting me set multiple tags for a story, and handling various HTML entities such as typographer’s quotes and em dashes—the Drupal story did not get a human-readable URL assigned by the pathauto module. I think that’s probably more of a Drupal problem, something to do with the pathauto module, rather than a blog posting tool problem. MarsEdit posts exhibit the same result. (For what it’s worth, I’ve now posted this in the issue tracker for the Pathauto module.)

Also, Flock suffers from a user interface that feels derived from the Mozilla project. There’s just some odd happenings in the text editing fields, and I have yet to figure out if there are keyboard shortcuts for some of the editing toolbar buttons/functions.

On the plus side, there is a useful source view so you can check out the HTML source of your blog post. Since Drupal doesn’t need that formatting (since its Filtered HTML and Full HTML input methods will automatically wrap paragraphs, for example), it’s superfluous for my purposes, but still handy to see if you need to.

I also wish I could see the taxonomy tags right in the main editing window, or as a drawer. I don’t prefer MarsEdit presenting them in a drawer, but even that is preferable to Flock’s drop-down sheet, which is much more modal.