nodalpoint.org - New Recommended Reading List - Comments

The comment block is proving

Greg — Wed, 04 Apr 2007 12:04:20 -0400

The comment block is proving difficult. It seems that a table that the block code depends on (node_comment_statistics) has been messed up during the upgrade process. The result is that administrators see the block when logged in, but everyone else doesn't. I'm still working on a solution...

comment block

Neil — Tue, 03 Apr 2007 20:32:53 -0400

I see it when logged in, but not otherwise. If that helps.

Done. Theoretically there

Greg — Tue, 03 Apr 2007 13:36:56 -0400

Done.

Theoretically there should be a directory page for 'weblinks', however I have the categories all screwed up. Or maybe Drupal does. I use a site wide 'tags' vocabulary, which I have associated with the weblink content type, however when displaying a directory style page for weblinks *everything* tagged with the site wide vocabulary is shown, not just weblinks.

For now I have done as you suggested and pointed the 'more' link to the wiki page. I need to add some text at the top of that page to let people know that new links can now be added via the create content link.

Now if I could only figure out why the 'recent comments' block isn't working...

Re: update2 (random links)

dalloliogm — Mon, 26 Mar 2007 09:57:18 -0400

Hi,
I suggest to add a 'See full Recommended Reading List' below the 10 random choosen links, to facilitate the access to the wiki page on http://wiki.nodalpoint.org/blogs .

Right you are. I have this

Greg — Thu, 15 Mar 2007 09:44:59 -0400

Right you are. I have this working on a local copy of Drupal, thanks for the tip. I'll start adding the links from the wiki shortly. As an added bonus it would be nice to have some automated way of generating an OPML feed of the links.

Where is my blog?

paraschopra — Thu, 15 Mar 2007 05:07:43 -0400

Hey,

Please add my blog BioHacking to the list. The URL of the blog is http://www.paraschopra.com/blog/biohacking.php

Thanks,
Paras Chopra

---
www.paraschopra.com

tagging clouds

michael — Wed, 14 Mar 2007 16:48:51 -0400

Thanks for including me in the list Greg.

I like the sound of tagging blogs. Creating a tag cloud of all subjects covered in bioinformatics blogs could be really interesting.
You could pull these tags from delicious for example, so these tags could be user generated. Very web 2.0!

Mike

You should have no problem

Greg — Wed, 14 Mar 2007 02:00:38 -0400

You should have no problem now. It seems that during the database upgrade something strange happened with the user roles. Let me know if there are still problems.

I see this, I'm not sure

Greg — Tue, 13 Mar 2007 21:17:50 -0400

I see this, I'm not sure why. I'll investigate the problem today and let you know when it is fixed.

Still can't edit Wiki page...

ejain — Tue, 13 Mar 2007 14:26:30 -0400

I'm logged in on the Wiki site (it says so at the bottom), but I still get "This page is read only" if I click on "Show pagesource" :-(

Make a block

alf — Tue, 13 Mar 2007 13:32:56 -0400

Make a block and put PHP code in it. Something like

$result = db_query("SELECT * FROM {links} ORDER BY RAND() LIMIT 10"); while ($item = db_fetch_object($result)){ $items[] = l($item->title, $item->url); } print theme('item_list', $items);

should do it. You'll need rows in a 'links' table, obviously.

There are many possibilities

Greg — Tue, 13 Mar 2007 13:03:13 -0400

There are many possibilities with Drupal, it does include tagging, weblinks and other interesting modules. Unfortunately for all its much vaunted flexibility, it is difficult to get simple out-of-the-box functionality with most modules (or at least I find it that way). I don't think I'll be changing CMS just yet, but these days I don't have the time to hack on custom Drupal solutions.

I never figured out how to

Greg — Tue, 13 Mar 2007 12:44:25 -0400

I never figured out how to have the wiki check the same cookie that nodalpoint sets, so you need to login twice. The login link is right at the bottom on the right, use the same user name and password for nodalpoint.

I tried to track down a Drupal module that would display a random selection of links from a database, however there does not seem to be a *straight forward* way of doing this. And I can't make any sense of the multiple, weblinks modules, which claim to have close to this functionality.

tagging blogs

dalloliogm — Tue, 13 Mar 2007 08:39:54 -0400

What about tagging them and allow every registered user to have only the blogs of interests in its page?
Anyway, the idea of a random selection is good: it's better to show only 6 or 7 blogs (leaving a link to 'See the full list of blogs' below them) than showing too many.

Re: New Recommended Reading List

ejain — Tue, 13 Mar 2007 06:24:43 -0400

The Wiki page seems to be read-only?

In any case, how about showing a random selection (i.e. change the links each time the page is reloaded)?

New Recommended Reading List

Greg — Tue, 06 Mar 2007 10:44:19 -0500

Update: I won't bother with a vote since there hasn't been a great deal of active editing of the wiki list. I've started to add the links to a 'links directory' on the main website. The suggestion to pull random links into the side bar works (thanks Alf) and should be up shortly.

Update 2: Done. The Recommended Reading block to the right should now show a random selection of links (10) each time the page is loaded. Currently there are 32 sites in the database.

Now that the site is reasonably stable, it is time to finish off the house cleaning (at least a little bit more of it). I'm inviting everyone to help reorganize the recommended reading list. I have a new candidate list up on the wiki here. Please go and have a look, add any blogs that I have missed or add comments to the ones that are there.