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Showing posts from 2012

Maps Without Dedicated Server

Geographical Information System (GIS) was designed for engineers. That was good because engineers always work with standards which make interfaces open. Web Map Service (WMS) is one of the open interface standards. WMS focuses on maps portrayal via the Internet. A WMS client will request map graphics from the server which acquires, stores and prepares the maps using GIS back ends. A WMS server can be a full blown GIS engine or it can just be a gateway for other GIS engine. Due to the GIS engineering perspective, many GIS implementation was done by hardcore  programmers who work with C/C++ or Java programming languages. The legacy survives till today. The choice of programming language determines the type of server the GIS requires. Unfortunately, most GIS implementations only work with dedicated servers which incur high operating cost. A dedicated server need a special work force to overlook on the daily operation. We have to be realistic if we want to bring GIS into the mainstrea

Creating New Product in Drupal Commerce

Drupal Commerce Kickstart is an all-in-one profile for setting up shopping website or e-shop. Drupal Commerce is built according to the Drupal way. Drupal Commerce is modular and extendable, is based on entities and fields, uses views and taxonomy extensively, and simplifies administrative pages with intuitive menus to ease shop owners. However, before you can start with Drupal commerce you must first be proficient with the Drupal way. You will not be able to administer your shop if you do not know how Drupal works. You need to get yourself up and running with those Drupal thingy such as entity, field, node, views, taxonomy, menu, module, etc. On top of all that, please take note that Dupal Commerce documentation is very much a work in progress. Terminology in Drupal can be very confusing. Drupal Commerce adds to the confusion further. You could not have any other way but to learn the actual meaning of all the terms. Never assume anything. Let's start with the  product  term

Drupal Clean URL with GoDaddy

GoDaddy shared hosting allows multiple domains hosting where each domain can be hosted within its own folder in the document root. I install Drupal in a separate folder for each domain, even for the main domain. GoDaddy supports URL redirect and each domain can be redirected to its on folder. However, Drupal may get confused with the RewriteBase for clean URL rewriting. Drupal handles URL rewriting for clean URL automatically. In fact, Drupal will try to enable it by default. On the other hand, there is no issue with GoDaddy regarding the Drupal URL rewriting. However, Drupal need to know the RewriteBase when a domain is NOT pointing to the document root folder. The RewriteBase is not necessarily the Drupal installation folder. This can be tricky because GoDaddy URL redirect may be set in two places. In GoDaddy a domain can be redirected to a folder, even for the main domain. A http://xyz.com can be redirected to http://xyz.com/xyz which is my preferred configuration. The /xyz i

How @ITweetBio Authenticates You

@ ITweetBio lists Twitter bios and regularly tweets from the list . You can enlist your Twitter bio there. @ITweetBio wants to make it easy for you to enlist your bio without requiring you to register yourself with the service, or making you to authenticate the application. You are already known in Twitter by your handle. You can just give your Twitter handle like @ BlindTalk , and @ITweetBio will use the handle to read your bio from Twitter and enlist it. However, anyone can give your Twitter handle to @ITweetBio acting like he is you. @ITweetBio wants to verify that you are the one who gives the handle, not anyone else. I wrote a short article almost three years ago on Authentication by Mentioning using Twitter but I didn't give any sample code. I am going to give a sample code at the end of this article. I found it easy to authenticate someone using only his Twitter account. All he has to do is tweet a specific message from me and I will read his Twitter status that mu