Tag Archives: howto

Using Twitter oAuth with Drupal

Steps to Get Twitter.module working with Rules:

Required Modules:

Take the following steps:

  1. Install a few modules: To start with, install the following modules:

    • oAuth
    • Twitter
    • Twitter Post
    • For using Rules (optional)
      • Twitter actions
      • Token
      • Rules
      • Rules Administration UI

  2. OAuth settings: Visit the oAuth setting page (admin/settings/oauth) and under OAuth cryptography select “RSA-SHA1” and click “Save configuration”.

  3. Register with Twitter: On the Twitter settings page (admin/settings/twitter) you now need to register your application with Twitter (https://twitter.com/apps/new).

    • Application Name: a simple name to identify what you are doing.
    • Description: Minimum of 10 characters is required.
    • Application website: The URL of the website your are registering.
    • Organization: Your organization name.
    • Website: Your homepage URL.
    • Application Type: Browser
    • Callback URL: This is provided by the Twitter module (admin/settings/twitter) http://{your_url}/twitter/oauth
    • Default Access type: Read & Write

  4. Secrets: Once the application has been registered, Twitter will provide you with the Consumer key and Consumer secret. Enter those on the Twitter module settings page back on your site (admin/settings/twitter) and click “Save configuration”.

  5. Post to Twitter (Optional): If you wanting an option to post to Twitter when you add new content to your site, click the “Post” tab and select the node types you want it to show on as well as set the default format of the post.

  6. Setup your account: This next step is critical. Edit your account page and select the sub-tab of “Twitter accounts” (user//edit/twitter) and click “Add account”. This will take you to the Twitter.com page to authorize and allow access to your account.

    • If you want to use the “Post to Twitter” form at the bottom of the new node’s you can make this account global to the site by clicking “make global”. This will not effect the rules module.

  7. Time to add a rule (Optional: Rules integration): Go to the “Add a new rule” page (admin/rules/trigger/add), set the name, and set the Event for “After saving new content”. On the next page, add and action of “Post a message to Twitter”. On the setting page, enter the Twitter account name that you authorized in step 6. Enter the message that you want to tweet. If you installed the Token module you will be able to add tokens like “Node Title”.

  8. Watch it work! Now all you need to do is create a new node and it will post a message to the Twitter account you specified.

Making Yogurt from Scratch

Last Christmas we were given an Excalibur food dehydrator  and have used it on and off this spring. This summer, however, we began putting it to use in earnest.

During peach season, we cut and dried a box of peaches every night (That’s as many as we could put in the dryer.) When we got pears that was the way we preserved them. Most of our 450 lbs of apples went into sauce but we saved a few for the dryer. I have continued to look for excuses to use the dryer, and was recently comparing notes with my sister, Karah (who also has the same dryer) on how we use our dryer when she mentioned making yogurt.

[flickr-photo:id=4101308686,size=m]

Ever since the kids started eating solid foods, yogurt has been a big part of their diet at home. We have tried a few different kinds but have mostly settled on plain, sometimes organic, yogurt. The kids, of course, would choose flavored yogurt every time we go to the store, but the sugar content is too high for our preferences. 

So when Karah mentioned yogurt, my ears perked because that was something that I have wanted to make for a while. I’ve been experimenting with it a little and still don’t have it perfect yet but I’m fairly happy with the results and thought I’d share what I do.

Here is what you will need:

  • 7 1/2 cups of milk (I’ve only used non-fat but you can use full fat if you’d like)
  • 1/2 – 1 cup of Powered Milk
  • 1/2 cup of yogurt (I’ve read you can use yogurt cultures but haven’t tried those yet.)
  • 1 tablespoon of sugar or honey

Additionally you will need the following tools:

  • Double-boiler that holds at least 2 quarts (We don’t have a true double-boiler but use a 3.5 quart sauce pan with handles on each side inside a 6 quart pan.)
  • Candy thermometer
  • Wire-wisk
  • 2 quart jars with lids and rings
  • 1 pint jar with lid and ring (optional)

Making it happen!

The first thing you need to do is to heat the milk. Put water in your larger pan (or the lower part of the double boiler), and then the milk in the smaller, inside part. Heat the milk to 180ºf using your candy thermometer to ensure that the milk doesn’t get too hot.

[flickr-photo:id=4101309452,size=m]

While the milk is heating, stir in 1/2 – 1 cup of powdered milk with a wire wisk. The less fat in your milk, the more powdered-milk you want to add.

When the milk reaches 160ºf, I begin to fill the my sink with cold water. Once it reaches 180ºf, remove the small pan from the double-boiler and place it in the sink of cold water. Make sure the water is below the top of the pan. You can add ice t cool it faster or just add more cold water as you need to. 

Put a few table spoons of water in the bottom of each of your jars and put them in the microwave for 3 minutes on high. The water will boil and steam. Once the microwave is done, place the lids on the jars to keep the steam in. This will sanitize the jars.

[flickr-photo:id=4100556735,size=m]

Once the milk has cooled down to 110ºf, mix in 1/2 cup of plain yogurt with the wire whisk. Now add your honey or sugar and stir it in with the whisk, too. You are now ready fill the jars. Dump out any remaining water from the jars and fill them with the warm milk and yogurt mixture. I try to put at least 2 cups into the pint jar to save for starter for the next batch. They say you can use it 4-5 times before you should start it with fresh yogurt. The remainder is then poured into the 2 other jars. Put the lids on and screw the rings on tight.

[flickr-photo:id=4100558599,size=m]

The last step is to place the filled jars into the food dryer at 120ºf. This can be done with a food dryer but there are other methods as well.

Now it’s time to let the cultures grow! Leave them in for 10-12 hours. The longer they are in the dryer, the stronger the flavor.

When the yogurt is done, put the jars in the fridge and let them cool off before you eat it. We sometimes mix the yogurt with honey or sugar-free fruit spread to give it some additional flavor or you can eat it plain (My favorite!).

I’ve tried making some vanilla flavored yogurt but am not yet happy with what I have tried.

Hope you enjoy it yourself as much as we have. 

 

How to post photos to Flickr, Facebook and live to Tweet about it

I’ve recently been asked by a couple people how I upload pictures to Flickr and get Facebook to post a note about it as well as send a tweet out about it. Here are my secrets!

Email to Flickr

Flickr: Your AccountFlickr provides a wonderful email interface that allows you to upload images by sending them as an email attachment. Additionally you can make it post a notice an short link to Twitter once that photo is uploaded.

Emailing to Flickr: In your account preferences, you will see a tab titled “Email“. This page lists all the email addresses associated with your account, your email preferences as well as your Flickr inbound email addresses. The email address listed as Your Flickr upload email is the address for you to send your pictures to for direct posting. The email subject becomes the picture title and the body of the email becomes the description. Flickr also allows for a syntax to keyword it.

Add Twitter: If you also have a Twitter account, Flickr will send a Tweet out for you and include a link to the picture on Flickr. To set this up, to to the “Extending Flickr” tab, scroll down to the section listed as “Your Blogs” and click “edit”. From that page click “Add another blog” and select “Twitter” from the drop down. Follow the instructions to link your accounts and you will then be given a new address on the “Email” page that is your post and Tweet address.

NOTE: Keep these addresses private. Anyone who sends a message to this address will be able to post to your account. Flickr provides a means to reset the addresses if you need to.

Add a little Facebook

Are you ready to add in some Facebook integration? Back on the “Extending Flickr“, there is a section near the bottom titled “Your Facebook account”. Click the link that is provided to link your two accounts.

You will see a screen similar to the one below:
Facebook | Brent Hardinge

Enter your Flickr username and follow the instruction to link the two accounts.

Now each time a new picture is added to Flickr, Facebook will post a message about it.

Howto Install Drush on Dreamhost

If you haven’t used Drush before (and you build Drupal websites, Drush is “a command line shell and Unix scripting interface for Drupal”. It has some amazingly useful commands for interacting with Drupal. You can do thing like:

drush dl views

And it will download and unpack the Views module into the correct folder. Then you would type:

drush enable views

And Views would be installed. Just like that. You can read the full documentation on Drupal.org.

What about using it in Dreamhost? It’s a little different because at the time of this writing, Dreamhost does not default to PHP 5 on the command line and you have to specify it to look at PHP 5. Here are the steps to install it on your Dreamhost account.

  1. Download and Unpack Drush: First, you need to login to the shell of your Dreamhost account. In your home directory, download and unpack Drush. From the command line type:

    curl -O http://ftp.drupal.org/files/projects/drush-All-Versions-2.0.tar.gz

    (The latest version at the time of writing.)

    Now type:

    tar -zxf drush-All-Versions-2.0.tar.gz

    You should be left with a folder called drush that contains the drush library.

  2. Get Drush on the Commandline: Now you need to make drush available to you on the command line. Open the file called .bash_profile by typing

    nano .bash_profile

    and navigate to the bottom of the screen. Enter the following line:

    alias drush='/usr/local/php5/bin/php /home/<dreamhost username>/drush/drush.php'

    (Don’t forget to replace <dreamhost username> with your Dreamhost username.) Now save the file with the keystroke CTRL + X

  3. Logout: Now type exit to logout. This will force the shell to re-read the .bash_profile file.
  4. Log Back In: Log back in and you should be ready to drush!

Comments

I have had problems with either not knowing that I had new comments or not realizing they were in the moderation queue. So this weekend, I setup two things that should help alleviate that.

First, I turned off comment moderation. But I didn’t just do that alone. I also added Mollom, a content moderation service. Mollom is a webservice that will monitor your content, comments and form submissions and present CAPCHA or just plain block the content if it feels that it is spammy.

The second thing I did was to enable comment notification. How, you might ask? Drupal 6 has actions and triggers built in and this was my first experience getting to play with them. Over the weekend I found an article on how to setup comment notifications in Drupal 6 using triggers and actions and it really was easy. So now, everytime someone leaves a comment, I know what was left and I can respond quickly, if need be.