Chris Graham's blog

Been banging my head against a brick wall for over an hour trying to work out why I kept getting a "Could not connect to database" error when installing LimeSurvey.

According to their mods on the forums, this is "intended" behaviour.  Well tyvm for that mods.

At no point do they mention in their installation documentation or in the error message that you actually have to go to run an install script that isn't in the main directory.

Just append /admin to your URL for your limesurvey installation and it will redirect to the install script.

OK, so it really started to bug me that every time I was theming up a website and have Skype installed that the toolbar would replace all of the phone numbers on my pages with their buttons.

Now, sometimes this is a good thing and I'm not giving off completely, but there are times when the buttons just mess up your design completely.

There are a few options you can use to show/hide the skype buttons:

Hiding buttons with CSS

You can add the following to your CSS to hide all of the buttons:

Today I was setting up a virtual machine with Debian 6 (Squeeze) to run a basic web development server.

After a few hours of tinkering with MySQL to get remote connections from my machine, setting up a bridged network adapater (making sure to add the MAC address to my firewall settings) and various other configurations, I decided it woud be useful to edit my CSS files from my Windows XP machine.

I am currently setting up one of our spare machines as a test server for Solr to replace the core Drupal search on our websites.

As Solr is written in Java (it runs on on servlet container such as Tomcat), I needed to get Java installed.  A lot of websites I read were giving me a lot of interesting instructions on how to use fakeroot to create a Debian package to install the binary etc etc... but it turns out it is actually quite easy.

Removing cached search descriptions

To remove a URL description/title that has been cached by Google you can log into the webmaster tools at www.google.com/webmasters/tools/ using the login details from the password file.

To remove the description from the Google cache, click on the site you are trying to remove the link from. Go to Site Configuration > Crawler Access and click the Remove URL tab. Create a new removal request using the URL of the page you are trying to clear and select the appropriate removal type, tick the checkbox and click submit.

A simple method to improve the YSlow rating on your sites with a Debian server is to provide entity tags (ETags) and compress JS/CSS.  You will need to to run the following commands to get the required apache modules:

• a2enmod deflate
• a2enmod expires

Now edit the /etc/apache2/httpd.conf file to include:

The Problem

We were recently asked by a member of staff to give them access to one of our websites on a laptop so that they could demo it at a meeting.

The Solution

I decided to go with Wampserver and a local copy of the site as the demo did not need to have the latest content.

We've recently started using the Service Calendar in CRM to record room bookings for our conference facilities and training rooms.

In order to make it as easy to use as possible we wanted to have only 3 status codes.  Under Open we kept Tentative and removed Requested and under Scheduled we change Pending to Need More Information and Reserved to Booking Complete.

I was recently doing a full update of Drupal core and modules on our Community Leadership Programme website.  Apart from the usual problems with Panels and Ctools there is a bit of pain if you update the SMTP module with Drush (probably goes for any other module that requires a third party download).