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

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.

I finally figured out how to get the VirtualHost directives in my Apache configuration to work the way I wanted. I had previously had vhosts defined, but one would always clobber on the other. I suspected something was also in conflict from the server’s default configuration—before the vhosts were defined.

I figured out how to follow the first example in the Apache VirtualHost documentation, and ultimately, that worked. It simply took the addition of a NameVirtualHost line.

I also changed the name of the server at the same time, just to make sure it wouldn’t conflict with the domain. (I didn’t know if that would cause further problems, but having a specific server name was what was outlined in the Apache examples and I’m in no mood to experiment further this morning.) It had previously just been the domain name, but now it’s got a host name (which it always had, I just didn’t have it in the Apache configuration since my last attempt to fix vhosting).

I had also tried changing the DocumentRoot for my vhosts to “/” rather than the absolute path to the site directories. This turned out to be a bad thing: visiting every path in Drupal failed. When I undid that, replacing “/” with the full path to the site folders, it magically started working again.

A big benefit of this is that I can have sub-sites, which can be individually configured and even protected (to only allow access within my network, perhaps). Now, I can use this to do some testing on upgrades and data imports (hello, my old data from Userland Manila!) and other stuff like that.

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.