I’ve recently had to install drupal a number of times in a span of a few days. The way I usually do it – download tarballs, extract, create file structure, upload via ftp – was just too slow. Fortunately I have shell access to my shared hosting account on DreamHost, so here’s what I’ve been doing recently.

1. Fire up a terminal window in Mac OS and SSH to my wonderful DreamHost linux webserver (you can do the same in Linux, but you need some software SSH in windows) – Here’s the command I use:
   ssh username@servername.com
   and enter the password when the server asks you for it. Do note that the characters that you type in for your password may not appear on the screen, but they’re still being entered.
2. Change to the directory that you’re going to install drupal into. Alongside this, navigate over to drupal.org, and to their download page. At the time of writing this, Drupal 6.20 is the latest version, so the path to the .tar.gz file looks like this: http://ftp.drupal.org/files/projects/drupal-6.20.tar.gz I just right click in Firefox and select “Copy Link Location”.
3. Now, skip back over to the terminal window. Remember, I’ve navigated to the folder I want to install drupal to. Then type in wget http://ftp.drupal.org/files/projects/drupal-6.20.tar.gz. This downloads the drupal core tarball to the server directly.
4. Extract it using tar -xzvf drupal-6.20.tar.gz. You’ll see a screen ful of paths as the files are extracted to a folder called drupal-6.20.
5. I go ahead and start off the install in a browser, and get the settings file renamed and database hooked up, and everything else until it becomes time to get the contrib modules installed.
6. On any given install of drupal, I usually have atleast 10 or so contrib modules installed, and very often it goes up quite a bit. Like I said before, FTP just does not cut it for this, so, like our drupal core tar.gz file, I find the paths to every single contrib module that I want installed. And here’s a little secret – They’re all at the Modules page of Drupal.org!!! and happily listed in descending order of the modules most used. This is a quick process. I wget them to the sites/all/modules/ folder, so that I have about 20 GZipped Tar files; and that’s where I hit a snag.
7. You see, the tar command does not use wildcards happily. In fact it does not use wildcards. – (period) So I had to find an alternative, to get all these .tar.gz files extracted without having to repeat the same command again and again manually. I found a solution. In fact, I found two solutions
8. find -name '*.tar.gz' -exec tar -xzvf '{}' ';' – This piece of code extracts all .tar.gz files in the current folder, and all subfolders, making it ideal if you have all the tar files ready and waiting extraction in the sites/all/modules/ sites/all/themes/ and sites/all/libraries/ folders. Just run it in the sites/all/ folder, and then run back and rm -R *.tar.gz each folder to remove the tar files.
9. for i in *.tar.gz; do tar -xzvf $i; done – This piece of code extracts all .tar.gz files in the current folder. Leaving you to cleanup all the tar.gz files in the directory with a simple rm -R *.tar.gz
10. That’s it, done! Head over to http://yoursite.com/admin/build/modules and tick the check box next to the names of all the contrib modules you want to activate, save, and they’re ready to do your bidding!

I hope you find this time saving shortcut useful. The code is not mine. I found it on WebHostingTalk.com in a thread titled How do you untar multiple .tar.gz files? I was also helped along by a good friend who does not want to be named. Experiment and see what works best for you.

Talisman has a promo offer happening till the 8th of October. If you book an appointment before then, you can get a sweet 20% off on your tattoo!

Talisman Tattoos Gallery
Talisman on Facebook
Talisman on Twitter
Talisman on FourSquare

PLZ LEARN: TPB CANT BE SHUT DOWN

LOL!

AS U MITE HAS READ OR NOTICD, PEEPS ONCE AGAIN R TRYIN 2 SHUT US DOWN. DIS WILL NOT SUCCED, LOL. OURS RLY NICE WEBHOST WUZ THREATEND WIF RLY HUGE FINE, SO WE DECIDD 2 MOOV TEH SIET SO DAT THEY DIDNT GOT INTO TROUBLE, LOL. TEH DECISHUN 2 MOOV WUZ TAKEN BY US, TEH PIRATE BAY, LOL.

TEH PIRATE BAY IZ AN UNSINKABLE SHIP. IT WILL SAIL TEH INTERWEBS 4 AS LONG AS WE WANTS IT 2. REMEMBR DAT, K THX.

TPB, ONLY IN IT 4 TEH LULZ SINCE 2003

ColoursAlive is proud to announce that we’ve got two more websites out of our design workshop and into the wild for your viewing pleasure.

JeevaRaghunath.com is the website of acclaimed storyteller and childrens’ book writer, Jeeva Raghunath. She’s a bundle of energy when telling stories to kids. They just can’t get enough of her stories!

TalismanTattoos.in is the website of Chennai’s first Tattoo Artists, Amar and Nisha. They’ve recently started off their own tattoo boutique called Talisman, and are to teach interested students who are really interested, how to Tattoo.

Check out the websites and let us know what you think. Cheers!

Feel free to write in to us, and let us know whether you like our simple approach, or whether you totally hate it. We’d love to hear from you.

The long overdue demise of IE6 has begun in earnest… Google today mailed Google Apps admins stating that they would be phasing out support for legacy browsers, including Internet Explorer 6 in order to provide quicker and more sophisticated services to their users.

Dear Google Apps admin,

In order to continue to improve our products and deliver more sophisticated features and performance, we are harnessing some of the latest improvements in web browser technology.  This includes faster JavaScript processing and new standards like HTML5.  As a result, over the course of 2010, we will be phasing out support for Microsoft Internet Explorer 6.0 ​as well as other older browsers that are not supported by their own manufacturers.

We plan to begin phasing out support of these older browsers on the Google Docs suite and the Google Sites editor on March 1, 2010.  After that point, certain functionality within these applications may have higher latency and may not work correctly in these older browsers. Later in 2010, we will start to phase out support for these browsers for Google Mail and Google Calendar.

Google Apps will continue to support Internet Explorer 7.0 and above, Firefox 3.0 and above, Google Chrome 4.0 and above, and Safari 3.0 and above.

Starting this week, users on these older browsers will see a message in Google Docs and the Google Sites editor explaining this change and asking them to upgrade their browser.  We will also alert you again closer to March 1 to remind you of this change.

In 2009, the Google Apps team delivered more than 100 improvements to enhance your product experience.  We are aiming to beat that in 2010 and continue to deliver the best and most innovative collaboration products for businesses.

Thank you for your continued support!

I believe that this is a long-overdue step, and would be thrilled to see other service providers such as hotmail, yahoo and (in India) rediff begin phasing out support for legacy browsers, giving the internet a shove in the right direction.

This would mean that web developers can look forward to implementing more advanced features and styling of their websites without going through all the trouble of creating a scaled down, and bug fixed version for older, more buggy browsers.

If you’re wondering what browser to use instead of IE6, you could try Firefox, Chrome, Opera, Safari or even Internet Explorer 8.

Go ahead and exercise your right to choose.

This would eventually stop expansion in some regions and cause them to start to recollapse. As they were collapsing, the gravitational pull of the collapsing region got smaller, it would spin faster – just as skaters spinning on ice spin faster as they draw in their arms. Eventually, when the region got small enough, it would be spinning fast enough to balance the attraction of gravity, and in this way disklike rotating galaxies are born.

From A Brief History of Time – The updated and expanded tenth anniversary edition by Stephen Hawking.

Why this passage? Because the ‘tag’ mentioned that I have to:

• Grab the nearest book and go to Page 123
• Skip the first 5 sentences
• Post the next 3 sentences
• Tag more people – Which I will gladly skip because the people I know would TArGet me (in a bad way) if I did such things to them…
• And mention the person who inflicted this ‘thing’ upon me…

I must admit… I did not expect the lines to make much sense… but they did. Thankfully so.

If you’re wondering how to navigate the website and understand all that it has to offer, the best way would be to visit the zoo’s sitemap. The best bits about the website are the cryptic url (http://www.aazoopark.gov.in/) and the yahoomail contact address (aazp@yahoo.com).

Really, the Indian Government and it’s agencies should go to advertising / marketing workshops.