Development Seed Blog

Timeline is a very cool module that lets you display nodes or events on a very nice, interactive timeline. This display was developed by the folks over at MIT's SIMILE Project, and they describe it as a "DHTML-based AJAXy widget for visualizing time-based events. It is like Google Maps for time-based information."

Here's a quick look at it.

Several months ago we built out a ‘Tell a Friend’ feature to plug into our websites. We wanted it to be more than just another ‘email this page’, and the existing functionality in the forward module built by Sean Robertson, was a solid foundation.

A letter to the editor feature is essentially an extended petition where you collect names and messages, but instead of just storing them, you also send them off to the email address of whatever paper the user chooses. From a functionality standpoint the only semi-difficult part is handling the email addresses of newspapers, the rest of the functionality exists all over.

Like everybody else who has been watching Microsoft try to figure out how to compete with Apple's ipod I've been waiting for the MS folks to launch a competing service. Well now it looks like they're about too. And if the placeholder site's favicon and the netcraft site report is any indication that site's gonna be running linux.

Urchin (link via the google cache) a web analytics company and a division of Google has just been drawn deeper in, been transformed, rebranded, and now re-emerged as Google Analytics. The business plan of what had been Urchin has been remade into the google mold as well. Google only acquired Urchin back in March, but what was then a $199 a month service is now free.

Currently the service seems to be experiencing a few growing pains, but I know that one this period of transition is over we'll be using the service, and I know some of our clients will to.

Eric and Ian have been looking for a better “email this page to a friend" module for a while. Drupal currently has two modules with this kind of functionality, but for various reason neither really did what we wanted. A few months back Ian swapped out the emailthispage module for the forward module, and so what I’ve done is take the forward module a little bit further.

We want our sites to send emails with a crisp and clean look and
really were not happy with the plain text emails which the forward module currently produces. We had the plain text vs. html discussion internally and decided that for what we needed html emails were the way to go. Using html really lets us really produce a clean and organized looking email, and one that can include an image or two as well.