Rainer Feike techblog

This is a “short as possible” reference for CSS selector syntax. Intended audience should be very familiar with XHTML, DOM and CSS Styling.

Basics

Type selector
Select all HTML elements of a special type.
Example: em {font-weight: bold;}
Class selector
Select all elements with a given class.
Example: .classname {font-weight: normal;}
ID selector
Select the one element with a given id.
Example: #idname {font-weight: normal;}
Concatenator
Select HTML elements of special type only with given class/id.
Example: em.classname, em#idname {font-weight: normal;}
Universal selector
Select all elements.
Example: * {padding:0;}
Descendent selector
Select all elements that are lower down in the DOM tree (descendants).
Example: p em {font-weight: normal;}
-> Applies to all em's within p's.

Advanced

Child selector
Select all elements that are children in the DOM tree (direct descendant).
Example: p > em {font-weight: normal;}
-> Applies to all em's directly within p's, not supported by ie6 and below.

Adjacent sibling selectors
Select all elements that are on the same DOM level in the same DOM subtree
Example: h3 + p {font-size:80%;}
-> Applies to all p's that "belong" to a h3
(more…)

Since a while I am thinking about a better possibility to present a link-matrix to my users. Currently it’s just a matrix where I have the topics as lines and a geographic location for each topic as column.
Now, if the user searches for “gewerblicher Rechtsschutz München” she navigates to the line “gewerblicher Rechtsschutz” and to the column 8 (what is the region code for München).

There are several drawbacks:

(1) Too many links on this one page
(2) Too much visual impression confuses the user
(3) Too hard to point to the small href links inside the matrix’s cells

Now - I am thinking about a solution with jQuery…
Anyone any idea? Thanks.

My favorite current project is opentimesheet.org.
It’s about efficient online time registration and recording.
Last 14 years as freelancer I was using a horrible number of time capturing systems. Actually I am using about three at a time now. There are so many of them, and most companies invent their own - starting with excel - ending up in a very special time consumptive “solution”.

Break the rule - join the new open source project!

When I googled my name today, I found really interesting posts that are 12 years old. Thanks to google for awakening those sweet memories.

It’s about FFT transformations and I found it in Google Groups.

For those of you who are not grandfathers… before www got popular, we were communicating via usenet - groups

Man, 12 years old … and still in the google cache!

This is about how I manage to create content for domains without CMS from a Drupal enabled domain without any manual work.

On address www.immobilien-spot.de I am running a community for real estate agents. It’s primary focused on Immobilien in München (that’s German for real estate in Munich).

Estate agents can become members, can show 10 of their best buildings and act like usual in communities (Blog, Forum, Contact…). Additionally the agents can book a special site to promote one of their offers, i.e. an office loft for rent. This office loft is shown in the offer list and also on a static site called officeloft.de (this is an example, I don’t own that domain). To feed the content of officeloft.de from the Drupal content on immobilien-spot.de, I’ve established a special node type called a “promotion”.

A promotion node consists of a node-ref (pointing to the estate offer node), an entry place (office-loft.de) and a booking period (March 2008). To render the promotion node completely different from all other nodes, I have installed the sections and pathauto modules for Drupal. With pathauto one can automatically create special paths for nodetypes, and with sections.module one can assign special page.tpl.php for this path.

What’s left is to have a nightly cronjob that copies the rendered promotion node to the special site’s http-root directory (what should be a subdirectory of the main domains http-root - else you have to struggle with your OS). And finally transpose all of the relative path’s inside the copy to be absolute.

Have fun!

As Mr. Schwartz, CEO of SUN Microsystems wrote here, SUN is going to acquire MySQL AB for about 1 Billion Dollars.

What does this mean to Oracle, Sybase, DB2 and MSSQL Server?

It’s out of the question, that MySQL is the most used Database worldwide. The main reasons are, that MySQL runs with poor hardware, it’s easy to install, to administrate and to use. And it’s for free. When I look back at my jobs in the trading area of investment banks, I remember lot’s of Solaris/Sybase installations. Now, I foresee problems for Sybase here. When I look back at my jobs in the backoffice area of retail banking, I remember lot’s of Solaris/Oracle and AIX/DB2 installations. Will SUN MySQL be as reliable as Oracle or DB2 is? Then I foresee problems here as well.

Why should one pay for Oracle or DB2 when MySQL comes from SUN and is for free?

I am sure MSSQL will keep it’s place in the low-range small office area - just because of the MS certified staff that’s working here. But I foresee huge problems (see here also) for the big systems Oracle, Sybase and DB2.

All the IT world is moving to open source !!!

And that’s a good way

On my search about if search engines like small site or big sites I found no satisfying answer. So I set up a little experiment on my own. I drive a lawyer directory with like about 20.000 pages for two years now. For search terms like “Rechtsanwalt Berlin” - I am aiming for city specific searches - I rank very well on the first SERP.

Now I set up special pages for the most biggest cities in Germany, having urls like rechtsanwalt–berlin (double dash - cause single was already taken for sure) and put three pages there. So it’s a real small site with a very specific topic.

Today - with this entry - I make it public and give em some PR power. In four weeks we’ll see how they do.

Rechtsanwalt Berlin
This is Germanys most biggest city. My current anwalt-seiten ranking on Google is 10. Now I started the special site Rechtsanwalt Berlin - let’s see what happens in like two weeks.

Rechtsanwalt Hamburg
This is Germanys second biggest city close to the North Sea. My current ranking on Google is 9. I set up the special site Rechtsanwalt Hamburg lately - let’s see what happens.

Rechtsanwalt München
This is Germanys third biggest city and I always have troubles with the “ü”. You probably now it from the Oktoberfest!
My current ranking on Google is 18. I launched Rechtsanwalt München view days ago - be patient…

I’ll keep you informed here.

Yesterday I stared the beta run (this is very 2.0 webish) of my wiiclub project. It’s a community for Wii Gamers in German. It makes extensive use of lots of Drupals community features, like i.e.

• the userpoints api
• the fivestar rating
• the buddylist module
• the chartroom module
• lots of image galleries
• features cck types like a “game report”
• uses forum, blog, poll

The site is very much web2.0 like, that means it has

• community features
• bright colors
• orange button with gradient
• gradients in backgrounds
• big primary navigation
• a star like beta-batch
• rounded corners
• centered non-table layout
• cute icons
• clear breadcumb

So, if you are addicted to Wii - come join us

I recently wanted to check my entries in dmoz and found some of my sites were kicked out. Why did they do this? Didn’t get any explanation for sure. They did some work like reorganizing the structure - or whatever. Well, I’m a little bit angry currently - but it doesn’t make sense anyway anymore (except for backlinks - is dmoz a huge link-farm?).

Do you know a single person that uses a directory to browse the internet? Don’t think so.. but if yes - she will not use dmoz more then two times. In the “rich subject tree” you’re everytime a dozen clicks away from your goal - and the choice is subject to ‘editors’, and what’s the relation to AOL? That’s exactly not what the democratic web2.0 is for.

Google claims a few hours to add an interesting new site to its index - the dmoz wants some weeks or months. So maybe we miss some important happening when using dmoz?

Thanks a lot to all the hundreds of thousands of editors that were building the biggest directory of the universe - I am afraid it’s out-dated now - you can not take the challenge of the rapidly growing web anymore.

Yahoo already gave up - when will dmoz power off?

Last weeks I was working on a new Drupal driven company site. This time I wanted to create my theme from scratch (calles “ANewCompany”) and wanted to use heavy taxonomy for cross linking.
The site is on air now and promises professional web2.0 programming (German).

On the site I use following modules:

Blog, Book, Forum, Poll - for content creation
Comment, Contact - for visitor interaction
Drupal - for site registry
Locale - for string translation and adjustment
Menu, Path - for site navigation
Taxonomy - for cross linking and navigation
Search - for site wide full text search
Statistics - for access statistics
Akismet - for spam protection
Comment mail - for admin notifications
Service links - for social network linking
TinyMCE - as wysiwyg editor
Views - for some data mining and block representation
Fivestar, Voting API - for content voting

I developed a new page.tpl.php template where I’ve foreseen the regions as follows

  function ANewCompany_regions() {
      return array(
	  'header' => t ('header'),
          'content_top' => t('content top'),
          'content' => t('content'),
          'sidebar_left' => t('sidebar left'),
          'sidebar_right' => t('sidebar right'),
          'content_bottom' => t('content bottom'),
          'footer' => t('footer'),
          'super_footer' => t('super footer')
      );
  }

For the sidebars I use a table-less floating CSS layer concept for reasons i.e. stated here.
In my template.php file I overwrite theme_links for primary_links (to achieve rounded tabs as primary navigation) and the book navigation theme_book_navigation($node) to make it more nice. Special theming for blog and book content is done by node-blog.tpl.php and node-book.tpl.php files.

Next days I will working on a generalization of the theme to contribute it to the drupal theme repository.