Recent blog posts

Switching to Skim for PDFs

I often have a ridiculous number of PDFs open. I like to have reference materials handy, and it's nice to be able to have two or three PDFs side by side on my large monitor so I can compare information.

My habits are too much for Apple's built-in Preview app. If I try to open more than 10 documents, it keeps adding them to an existing document window, so I have to take the extra step of moving the document to its own window; and if I open a LOT of documents, it'll start to crash now and then when I bring the app to the foreground.

Uninstalling CiviCRM

CiviCRM is a fantastic system for organizations - especially non-profits - who offer memberships, host events, or collect donations.

They have excellent documentation, including the installation guide. However, when I needed to remove CiviCRM from a test site recently, I couldn't find documentation on uninstalling it.

If you find you need to remove CiviCRM from a Drupal site - perhaps to roll back to an earlier version - here's what worked for me:

Navigating a page in Firefox using the keyboard

Did you know you can search link text in Firefox - which is an easy way to navigate a page from the keyboard?

Just type the apostrophe key:

'

(between the semicolon ;   and the Return key)

and type a few letters of a link. Once Firefox highlights the link you want, press return to open that link.

 

I like to do everything from the keyboard, as much as possible. (The mouse - or in my case, the trackball - is fine, and great - it's a wonderful invention. But it's so much faster to use the keyboard, in so many cases.)

The best colors for link text

When I'm creating a new website, I have a lot of decisions to make about the theme. I am not a designer, so I usually just find a decent starter theme and make some small changes.

On a recent project - The Democracy Habit - I needed to decide what color to use for text links.

I want to make my sites as accessible as possible, so I started with that as a guideline, then looked for recommendations based on solid research about both accessibility and usability.

Talkwalker - this is not transparent pricing

I came across some info on a service called Talkwalker recently; it sounded like a possible alternative to Google Alerts for monitoring topics I'm interested in.

They have a free tier, which is nice:

https://www.talkwalker.com/free-social-media-monitoring-analytics-tools

But I wanted to know what the paid version would cost; that's always one of the first things I need to know about a tool I'm considering.

Their pricing page trumpets "Simple and transparent pricing":

Using Paragraph view modes

One of my clients is migrating a Drupal 7 site to modern Drupal, and a particular challenge is moving from Views that use field collections to using paragraphs.

One paragraph type, linkcollections, is themed differently on different types of pages. On pages aimed at kids, the links get icons and are color coded; on pages aimed at older readers, there are no icons, and all the entries are the same color.

It took some experimentation to figure out how to set things up to accommodate both kinds of collections.

libmysqlclient driver version 3.3.2

I recently worked on a Drupal site that was showing this error:

10.6.10-MariaDB-log

The libmysqlclient driver version 3.3.2 is less than the minimum required version. Upgrade to libmysqlclient version 5.5.3 or up, or alternatively switch mysql drivers to MySQLnd version 5.0.9 or up.

I tried searching for

drupal "libmysqlclient driver version 3.3.2" "minimum required"