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

It struck me today that when running Entourage, I have two script menus. One is specific to Entourage, the other is for the optional — but handy — system-wide Script menu. Yet both have the same icon — the stylized black and white paper-rolled-into-an-S icon — in my menu bar.

The app-specific script menu was probably more common in classic Mac OS days than it is under Mac OS X. (But yet, as I type this, I noticed that MarsEdit has its own script menu, too. I think that just shows how wired into classic’s scripting Brent Simmons was — I mean, he worked on UserLand Frontier, the original scripting environment for the Mac.)

Ah, I just wish the two menus could be one and the same. If Entourage (or any other application) detected that you had the system’s Script menu enabled, it ought to just turn its own off in favor of the system menu. Or maybe the system-wide menu could show the app-specific scripts first, so that they are always in a known location (top of list, right side of menu bar), and take over the function of the application’s scripting menu. Or, they could just have two different icons, or one could be an icon while the other was text, or whatever.

I’m not even sure what the utility of trackbacks are, but I have the feature enabled on my Drupal site. Unfortunately, I discovered that this made the site susceptible to junk trackbacks.

Given that I only vaguely understand what they’re for, I should probably just disable the feature altogether. When the concept first came up, I was running Userland Manila and trackbacks didn’t make sense to me then — let alone now.

The response I’ve taken tonight is to enable a spam filter for Drupal that will scan trackbacks. I’ve also taken the liberty of deleting all of the existing junk — most of the identifiable source addresses came from Russia — to prevent these many tiny messages from clogging up my database. One set of queries, I kid you not, deleted over 3,000 database entries in one fell swoop.

This is an unfortunate state of affairs. Trackbacks are apparently just one more piece of social software that can get spammed. Sigh.

Continuing today’s Drupal love, I should mention that I recently figured out how to use the Inline module. Thanks to Inline, I’ve gotten much closer to the more-ideal state I felt I had with the built-in facilities of Userland Manila in 1999.

Namely, I adored Manila’s easy interlinking of pages. I could just quote the name of one page while in the body text of a second page, and the quoted title would become a link between them when published. I could also put images inline by quoting their titles in the body text of a page. It made the rapid creation of new, richly-linked sets of pages very fast and, while not effortless, much easier. I’ve used that to good effect, I think, in some past projects.

Drupal’s Inline module allows me to do much the same today. It uses double square brackets, which aren’t as convenient as quotes, but it gives me additional power I always wished Manila had. I can place the titles of pages on my site inside the double backets, to link between pages internally. I can also put the URLs of outside pages in those brackets, to link externally. I can also modify this by putting a pipe between the title or URL, and the link text that I want the reader to see on the page. This is very flexible, and that last ability really overcomes an obstacle I ran into with Manila — without the opportunity to change the link text, I ended up having some oddly-capitalized links within sentences.

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.