Welcome to the personal website of Oliver Davies - a freelance Web & Drupal Developer based in Newport, South Wales.

Using VirtualHostX to Quickly Create Virtual Hosts on Mac OS X

July 2, 2010 - 21:00 — Oliver Davies

This isn't a Drupal related topic per se, but it is a walk-through of one of the applications that I use whilst doing Drupal development work. I assume, like most Mac OS X users, I use MAMP to run Apache, MySQL and PHP locally whilst developing. I also use virtual hosts in Apache to create local .dev domains which are as close as possible to the actual live domains. For example, if I was developing a site called mysite.com, my local development version would be mysite.dev.

Normally, I would have to edit the hosts file and Apache's httpd.conf file to create a virtual host. The first to set the domain and it's associated IP address, and the other to configure the domain's directory, default index file etc. However, using VirtualHostX, I can quickly create a virtual host without having to edt any files. Enter the virtual domain name, the local path and the port, and apply the settings. VirtualHostX automatically restarts Apache, so the domain is ready to work straight away. You can also enter custom directives from within the GUI.

Quickly Change the Content Type of Multiple Nodes using SQL

July 1, 2010 - 17:58 — Oliver Davies

In this Blog post, I will be changing values within my Drupal 6 site's database to quickly change the content type of multiple nodes. I will be using a test development site with the core Blog module installed, and converting Blog posts to a custom content type called 'News article'.

Creating a Photo Gallery from Flickr using Feeds, CCK and Views

June 28, 2010 - 17:15 — Oliver Davies

In this tutorial, I'll show you how I created my photo gallery which uses photos imported from my Flickr account.

The modules that I'll use to create the Gallery are:

10 Useful Drupal 6 Modules that I use on every Project

June 25, 2010 - 10:10 — Oliver Davies

Aside from the obvious candidates such as Views, CCK etc, here are a list of 10 contributed modules that I currently use on each Drupal project.

So, in no particular order:

Creating a Block of Social Media Icons using CCK, Views and Nodequeue

June 23, 2010 - 22:08 — Oliver Davies

Recent work means that I'm a bit later posting this than I originally intended...

I recently decided that I wanted to have a block displayed in a sidebar on my site containing icons and links to my social media profiles - Twitter, Facebook etc. I tried the Follow module, but it lacked the option to add extra networks such my Drupal.org account, and my RSS feed. I started to create my own version, and then found this Blog post by Hank Palan.

I created a 'Social icon' content type with the body field removed, and with fields for a link and image - then downloaded the favicons from the appropriate websites to use.

Updated Navigation

June 10, 2010 - 10:38 — Oliver Davies

I've done some re-structuring of the main navigation menu:

Improving Imagecache JPG quality

June 2, 2010 - 15:13 — Oliver Davies

Whilst uploading images for my Projects and Testimonials sections, I noticed that the Imagecache-scaled images weren't as high a quality the originals on my Mac. I did some searching online and found out that, by default, Drupal resamples uploaded jpgs to 75% of their original quality.

Importing images using the Imagefield_Import module

May 29, 2010 - 11:40 — Oliver Davies

Thanks to Bob at Mustardseed Media for tweeting about this module. It's undoubtedly saved me hours of work today alone!

I've recently started a personal project converting a website to Drupal. It's currently a static HTML/CSS site which also uses the Coppermine Photo Gallery. As part of building the new website, I wanted to move all the photos from the existing site onto the new one. However, with 1260 photos in 17 albums, this could have been a lengthy process!

Create a Slideshow of Multiple Images using the Fancy Slide module

May 26, 2010 - 21:42 — Oliver Davies

Whilst updating my About page, I thought about creating a slideshow of several images instead of just the one static image. When I looking on Drupal.org, the only slideshow modules were to create slideshows of images that were attached to different nodes - not multiple images attached to one node. Then, I found the Fancy Slide module. It's a jQuery Slideshow module with features that include integration with the CCK, ImageCache and Nodequeue modules.

Site Updated

May 26, 2010 - 21:01 — Oliver Davies

I've recently added the Projects and Testimonials sections to the site, and updated the About Me page.

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