Open Data

NOTE: The campaign of fear tactics used to gain and hold power by so many rulers, notably in the United States in this poor young millennium, is utterly and completely condemned in all circumstances except with regards to our own financial gain.

Is your web site accessible to the blind and visually-impaired?  You might want to make sure it is after you read this NewStandard In Other News summary:

That's the gold standard we strive for. And the approach is backed by the research of a university with a multi-billion dollar endowment. Excerpt from a Harvard Business Review article (the full thing costs $7) here:

What can Agaric Design do? Agaric Design can do most anything you can imagine, and more.

Our satisfied clients include nonprofit organizations, family-owned businesses, entrepreneurial ventures, high-tech professionals, musicians, artists, journalists, consultants, activists, and families. Oh, and regular folk who just want a web site of their own!

A good friend asked about the name "Agaric," and pointed out that the top search hits were for a subset of agaric mushrooms, called "fly agaric," which are historically considered hallucinogenic (though the U.S. government doesn't seem to have gotten around to declaring them illegal).

I had only looked at the straight definition before, on my Mac's built-in Oxford American Dictionary:

(Drupal 4.7) Sometimes moving the menu entry for a category, page (I think), or other node will fail when done from the "edit" tab on that node.

Don't panic.  Just go to administer/menu and edit the menu item from there.

It's worked every time for us so far, but we rather hope this bug will be fixed in Drupal 5.0.

A neighbor was telling me today about his web site. About how he can't change anything on it himself, and how he calls and calls the person who designed it to have a change made and his calls aren't even returned.

About how his direct request to learn how the web site works so that he can hire someone else if necessary did provoke a response, but he still hasn't been taught anything.

About how he has hired another person, a "virtual assistant," to deal with the web site and the person who made it.

Planet Photoshop Effects Tutorials

A good, simple module for Drupal called Nice Menus has an annoying bug (supposedly not on all themes, but certainly on most of them): It frequently loses the focus when the mouse moves from the top-level menu to a child menu, causing the drop-down menu to disappear as the user goes to click on it.

Very annoying. (If you click and hold and move the mouse down, the second-level menu stays and you can then click on it. Not exactly a solution you can ask your users to do.)