Randomland bugs and errors.

[Nick]

You do have a mailbox. I think it will take a long time to fill it all the way up though. I can impose a size limit on the mail boxes and possibly have it delete mail older then 4 months or something.   Another option would be to set up dovecot and just have gmail connect and download the messages. This would allow gmail to delete them after it gets them. One final other option would be to disable local delivery for some accounts. But if outgoing mail fails for some reason then messages might get lost (they will still hang around in the spooler for a while.)

[zourtney]

ok, well, we can mess with it if it ever becomes a problem. I suppose it doesn't matter until then. But I do suspect that 90% of the mail I get on the Randomland accounts is spam. And only 10% of the legitimate mail is even worth reading.

But hey, that's email for ya.

[Nick]

Yup. Another sad situation in the digital world. If the same were true for stoplights then the roads would be unusable. (I.E only 10% stopped when they were supposed to.)

I guess I will set up some email deletion thing to clear out anything older then X time. What should X be?

[Nick]

The most recent post on the front page (the black background microsoft one) has no date, attributed author or other basic information. What happened?

[zourtney]

good catch. I have no idea, nor do I seem to be able to fix it by editing the authoring information. Strange...

[zourtney]

So....I know why that post does not display the author, publish date/time, and comment link. It is because I created it as a Page content type. I checked around on other Pages and they exhibit the same behavior. I'm assuming this could be remedied by changing the template PHP file, but I could wrong.

Perhaps we should slim down our content types a bit.

• We have Book Page, Page, and Story which all seem intended for static text. We have Blog Entry which is also going to be static text, when you think about it.
• We have CCK Gallery and CCK Image which appear to never be used. Or do we use CCK Gallery? If we stick to the "put everything in your own gallery and tag it" camp, we ought to phase out CCK Gallery, I suppose. I think dynamic galleries (ie imagestream) are the way to go.¹
• We have the Panel content type which, in my opinion, should phased out. If we want to do custom layouts, why not just write the code ourselves? This module was cool in concept but cumbersome in practice.
  
  

What say ye?

¹ See this thread about the issue with dynamic galleries and the "Exclude from ImageStream" flag

[Nick]

I never used any of the panel thing. I don't think so anyway. I installed it when I first started playing with drupal and didn't like it. From what I read, story is the best way to post most things. 'Page' is for larger bits that tend to stay in one place in the navigation of a site and don't need authoring info (like a FAQ or a directory or about page.) Pages probably should not show  up in the blog roll/story board on the front page. Think of 'story' as articles and 'pages' as something that would list articles or something of the sort. I guess. Book pages are for multi-paged stories....... dang drupal people and naming things!

I do like the image stream. I was showing off some pics of you're new kitty and was reminded of how nicely usable, yet unfinished it feels.

[zourtney]

I agree, I like it too, however unrefined it might be. It's a keeper! And, about the Story / Book Page / Page thing -- what format should we use for multipage articles?

We have things like the Francine tale. It is 6 separate pages stored in 6 separate nodes...each is quite long. Currently, I have (tried to) set it up so that the parent page is an index, "land page" if you will, for the Francine stories. Prev-Next navigation is present, but not user friendly...once you hit the last page, "next" takes you to an entirely different article (Blazer Stories maybe?).

On the other hand, we have that short Drupal Module tutorial I created a while back. For some reason, I felt like splitting it up into separate pages. Which seems like a valid liberty to give an author. My page is stored in one node and uses the <!--pagebreak--> syntax. This is built-in and triggers the default Drupal paging URL format of nodename?page=0,x. Why 0,whatever? Beats me. It's a bit ugly, but it works ok. The bottom navigation could use some styling, but it is functional.

All that to say...what is your preferred paging method? I am gravitation toward pagebreak style; and thinking about looking into URL rewrites to implement a nodename/page/x type format. But how about you others -- multiple nodes? Single node with pagebreaks? A single page, no matter how long it might be? Cast a vote.

[Nick]

The book page/book is the one I know of for multi paged things. If that <!--pagebreak--> thing works well to split one node into multiple pages, then I like that better. Then we can do away with the books all together (I like them in idea but not navigation or formatting) and just use the story type with the <!--pagebreak--> for multiple pages. If you so like. Either way all I would like is a consistent way all over the site to ease CSS and other formatting burdens. And to make it all look/feel the same. 

[Nick]

For those who didn't know, a module that we somewhat recently installed was causing a '500 Internal Server Error' to any automated web clients trying to index Randomland.  After some investigation and liberal use of wget to see the php errors it the buggy module was identified and disabled. Now we can be seen by all once more.

[zourtney]

Oops. "My bad."

[Nick]

Email seems to not be working again... I don't know why. I should be able t fix it soon though.

[zourtney]

Dude, that sucks. I guess that's why I ended up moving my primary email accounts away from Randomland.

[Nick]

Gmail seems to be blocking the email forwards I set up. It seems to be a DNS issue with the crappy qwest provided domain showing up before the mail.randomland.net name. So our reverse lookup records look wrong and it rejects the mail. I changed the aliases so that mail is kept on the server now, it was being forwarded without local storage. You can set gmail to download the messages, but you will get them at a delay. Probably not an issue, just annoying (at least to me.) Another (crappy) option is to try and get postfix to log into the gmail servers to use them as a relay. Or set up thunderburd to run all the time and forward everything. But yeah. Poots. Google, again, hates us.

[zourtney]

Poots, indeed