base.ox4.org

Word up OX4ers

The lovely peeps behind radicalx suggested that we set up remote file access for Drupal users. So we did. 

You may have noticed 11 seconds of downtime on your OX4 site at about 8PM on 24 Jan 2011.

That was because we were deploying a new bit of software to protect our server against a denial of service attack called Slowloris. We can protect against it with a bit of software called Varnish. 

Patrick McCurdy produced this image as part of an art project in response to an interesting discussion 
thread on the eCampaigning forum. Duane Raymond has written up his thoughts.

Most people expect web sites to be easy to navigate. If visitors can't find what they want quickly and easily, they will probably leave your site very quickly. Controlling where block show can make your site a lot easier to navigate. This post explains how you can customise different blocks to be shown or hidden based on:

• Whether the visitor is looking at a page of certain node type.
• Whether they are looking at a page of a particular taxonomy vocabulary.
• Whether they are on a specific page.

There's a nice module - Embedded Media Field - that lets you show videos on your site by just putting the URL on a page. I struggled a bit in setting it up, so I thought I'd write this quick step-by-step guide.

Drupal is a very powerful Content Management System, but this has it's drawbacks. It's not always the easiest or most intuitive system to use. There are a couple of tools that can make this easier.

Problem

I have a block that I want to appear in the sidebar, but only when the viewer is looking at a certain node type.

This code can be used to avoid needing a log in block on your site.

There's a great step-by-step method on the fbloggs site on how to create use Drupal to create news items, display the latest stories in a block (which can be put in, for example, a block on your site), a page with the most recent news, and an archive of news. It's also quite a good introduction on how to create new content types and use the views module.
 
UPDATE: I've added some files that you can download and import to add news stories to your site. They're based on this step by step blog, but have some extra bits (e.g. RSS news feed). They're in the files section here.

Here's a step by step guide to making new your new ox4.org site yours.