Onyxbits

Dear internet,
I need to vent my anger about Drupal's organic group Module. It all started relatively harmless by noticing, that I am dealing with group owners of low discipline and little technical understanding. You know, that kind of people, who is just not aware of there being a need to do something, if the thing in question does not draw attention to itself by any other means, but showing a big red box on top of the screen, stating: "Take care of me! Yes, it is urgent and yes, you have to click here..."

Somehow, trivial problems tend to be the hardest/most time consuming ones to solve, it seems. I'm currently working on a small community website with a focus on collaboration. Among other things, this project calls for a file section, where users can exchange files. So far, thats easy. Just add a new content type, that allows for a single file to be attached and hook it up with taxonomy for navigation.
It could have ended there, but I decided to go for gold...

Ok, according to my webserver statistics, a lot of people come to my website, looking for instructions on how to use Drupal for blogging, so I decided to start writing a howto on that topic. I'm far from finished yet, but following the "publish early, publish often" mantra, it's probably enough to offer some value already.

I think, I have a major face palm coming my way. For the last couple of weeks I have been wondering why ads for browser games are becoming rampant on my website, severely cutting into my bottom line. I have tried banning them, I have tried rephrasing pages. No luck. The situation just got worse. Even after practically stripping the pages in question naked, they kept coming.

Ok, I admit it, I googled for top paying AdSense keywords. What did I get? Well, I suppose, pretty much the same, everyone else also gets, when looking for this. A long list of phrases containing all kinds of combinations of financial keywords like "debt consolidation", "credit card report", "mortgage refinance rate" and so on, all garnished with an unrealistically high dollar price tag.

Did you ever wonder, how often Google slips you public service ads instead of something that actually pays money? The problem with AdWords is, that advertisers can target countries and regions, meaning, that you might see real banners, while visitors from abroad might just get PSA. Of course, it's possible to use proxies to check, but thats neither reliable, nor convenient and most certainly not safe.

Have you ever had that sudden sensation of "why am I doing this?" sneaking up on you? You know, that kind of feeling where some common practice, you were so accustomed to in your daily routine that you never questioned it, all of a sudden seems to be totally absurd and pointless to do? Like, for example, washing your hands after using the toilet, closing the faucet and realizing that you opened it with supposedly dirty hands and now are touching it with supposedly clean hands, potentially picking up again what you deposited there in the first place?

Six weeks without internet access can really cause you to do funny things. I for myself decided, to pass the time by finally rewriting an old project of mine, that was, to put it mildly, an embarrassment to show to anyone. I am still not quite finished with it yet, but since I haven't been able to blog for a while and there are always people searching for code examples, solving common problems, I guess, I could as well work some snippets into blog posts.