Stephan Miller
Building Websites, Traffic, and Income
Moving Day
This is going to be a quick post of thing I will be doing this weekend, if possible.
I am going to be moving this blog over the weekend. I will still try to post during the process. And I may take advantage of the Drupal WordPress Module. I wind then run this blog on the front page of a Drupal installation and work on Drupal in the background over the next few months. There will be so much more I can do with the two together.
Using BlueprintCSS for Drupal
First, the design is a work in process. I know it sucks right now. But BlueprintCSS is awsome for layouts. There are not too many tutorials that go into detail on how to use it. But it’s simple, so no worry. I just used it to build the layout and used a seperate stylesheet for the presentation. I am not sure of the correct practice. But it’s simple. And who needs flexible width designs. I’m done at least for now with flexible width. No more creating images to stretch. Everything is a predictable size and that’s the way I like it.
Importing ShareASale Datafeeds into Drupal Part 2
Okay, there is an issue using Node Import to import ShareASale datafeeds.
Either the datafeed itself or the import process makes characters like “&” come up as character codes. I have had the same issue before with xml files, but now is not the time to investigate, just to fix the issue.
My solution, though a little hacky, was to create a page in Drupal with the import format set to “php code” and then paste code to clean these characters.
The three tables to focus on are:
- term_data
- node
- node_revisions
Here is the code:
Santa Fe Office Interiors – Running on Drupal
I am not saying it’s the best site that I have built and the css and layout still needs a little work, but it works great for now and it took very little time to set this site up and modify an old Photoshop template to work. It’s using tables which, I know, in website design today is a no no, but with the deadline I was trying to meet to have at least a usable site didn’t allow for rewriting a whole table based template in css. And I know I still need to create mouseover effects on the links in the header graphic.
Importing ShareASale Datafeeds into Drupal Part 1
I finally cracked this code. Well, almost. I still have to create a template for the new nodes. I still have to clean up the taxonomy a little. Hopefully, I find a little tool for that, because yesterday I imported over 1000 products in less than five minutes.
Using a highly underpriced piece of software called Macro Express, I wrote a script that downloads datafeeds from from the ShareaSale ftp site and then breaks them into uploadable sized chunks.
The Drupal part of the process is still manual though. I am playing with the iOpus iMacros Firefox extension, but haven’t quite got it down yet. It’s a great extension. I have used it for other internet macros before.
A Weekend of Work
This weekend I got off my butt and went down a list of things I wanted to get done. Read more... (654 words, estimated 2:37 mins reading time)