website

pingVision website redesign is live

2008-07-07T21:03:56-05:00

Whew! This was a long time coming, and just a tad more than a CSS reboot. We rearchitected the pingVision website from the ground up. Since the initial site had started with Drupal 4.5, there was a lot of legacy cruft in the database, left behind by modules no longer in use and, I have to admit, experiments I tried that didn't quite work out. The old site was launched in January 2005, back when Drupal was still pretty new to me. I've learned some things since then.

So we started over, and simply imported the published content, existing users and taxonomy structures. It was a lot easier than tracking down tables, variables and indexes left behind by modules of yore.

You may have noticed that we now have a video section. As I write this we have nothing completed yet, but we'll have some videos up very soon. We're very excited to get this part of the pingVision creative work back into gear. It's been too long.

This new site, powered by Drupal 6, is the result of weeks of back-burner development and almost a year of architecture and design tweaks, thrashings and polishes. We've leveraged some of our own contributions to the Drupal community, including Nodecarousel and Simplelist, along with some of the wonderful Drupal module staples, such as CCK, Nodequeue, Pathauto and Imagecache.

What do you think? Leave us a comment. We're also giving Mollom a try for comment spam/abuse management, so be nice, or at least polite. ;) And if you find a bug, please spare the comment and just tell us directly.

Privacy Policy

2008-07-05T01:18:09-05:00

This Privacy Policy pertains only to this website, pingv.com.

Personally Identifiable Information

We take your privacy very seriously. If you post a comment, register on the website or sign up for our newsletter, you are voluntarily disclosing personally identifiable information. However, we will not sell any personally identifiable information we may collect from or about you, and will not disclose or share such information to any party unless we have reason to believe we are required by law to do so.

Activity Tracking

When you visit this website, our servers collect some technical information about you, such as your web browser type. Our servers also record the IP address from which you are accessing the website.

This website uses cookies to track session activity.

We also use Google Analytics to track aggregate behavior and performance of the website. We use this information to help improve this website. Google Analytics sets cookies to provide this service. What Google does with this information on their end is a matter of Google policy, of which we have no control. You can clear or block cookies to help protect your privacy in this regard. There are tools to help you do this, including Firefox plug-ins. Information on Google's policy regarding the information it collects from website visitors can be found at http://www.google.com/analytics/tos.html.

We also use the Mollom service to monitor content for spam or abuse. Information on how Mollom uses that information can be found at http://mollom.com/web-service-privacy-po....

Disclaimer

This website contains a lot of information, including content generated by website visitors not affiliated in any way with pingVision. You should be aware that you use any of the information on this website at your own risk.

This website is public. Content on this website is aggregated and republished in whole or in part by several other websites, usually with our blessing but sometimes without our consent or permission. Content you post on this website may end up appearing elsewhere. Caveat emptor.

A month of anniversaries

2007-01-31T17:34:16-06:00

The thought of our past years in me doth breed
Perpetual benedictions.

-William Wordsworth, Intimations of Immortality

Two years ago

Wow. Two years ago we launched this pingVision site. Actually, as I write this, it was about two years and nineteen or so hours ago. I had been working with Drupal for several months at that point, helping people when I could and eventually parlaying that activity into some freelance work.

pingVision was the beginning of a formalization of that -- a shingle for a business partnership with my friend and colleague, Katherine Lawrence, as we contemplated a business plan incorporating Drupal web development, DVD authoring and other interactive media notions not yet ready for public discussion, into a coherent plan for world domination ... or at least a means to make a decent living.

Happy birthday, pingVision!

A year ago last week

We forged pingVision into a limited liability company a year ago last Wednesday. Alas, we had no birthday cake on hand -- too busy -- so we at the office just enjoyed memories of the seven-layer fudge cake we had for Drupal's fifth birthday the previous week.

Since that time a year ago, we've become a company of over ten people, which just boggles my mind. I had never dreamed of that a year ago. I'm humbled and thrilled, especially when I consider the caliber of people we have in our pingVision family.

Happy birthday, pingVision, LLC!

A year ago

A year ago, BlogHer launched. Time has flown by since then, and yet it seems like developing the BlogHer site happened a lifetime ago. Back then, I was the sole designer and the sole developer we had pingVision, and the experience drove home to me the importance of building a team. I really enjoy collaboration more than just sitting alone in front of the computer until the wee hours. And yet, while it was very hard to build that site pro bono while trying to find and complete paying client work, it was a project I delighted in working on. Today the BlogHer community is a wild success because of the energetic and insightful work of its founders and the bevy of outstanding Contributing Editors (of which [full disclosure] I am one, though I make no claim at being "outstanding").

Happy birthday, Blogher!

That claiming thing

2005-11-17T14:08:54-06:00

No Need to Click Here - I'm just claiming my feed at Feedster feedster:d9dcdd800fe38e60a194f814805cf3ae

Spam 2.0 for Drupal

2005-08-27T19:01:33-05:00

One of the joys of designing and deploying Drupal distributions is when a new module is released. The developers working on the extended modules for Drupal truly make this the ideal open source CMS for most websites these days. (That's why we use it as our core for nearly all of our web projects.)

Our most recent delight: Jeremy of Kerneltrap has released a completely rewritten spam module, "Spam 2.0." Among its features:

Written in PHP specifically for Drupal.
Highly configurable.
Automatically detects and unpublishes spam comments and other spam content.
Automatically learns to detect spam in any language using Bayesian logic.
Automatically learns and blocks spammer URLs.
Automatically blacklists IPs of learned spammers, preventing them from posting additional spam and wasting database resources.
Detects repeated postings of the same identical content.
Detects content containing too many links, or the same link over and over.
Supports the creation of custom filters using powerful regular expressions.
Can notify the user that his or her content was determined to be spam, preventing confusion over why their content doesn't show up.
Can notify the site administrator in an email when spam is detected.
Provides simple administrative interfaces for reviewing spam content.
Provides comprehensive logging to offer an understanding as to how and why content is determined to be or not to be spam.

We'll be trying this out right away and comparing the experience with the existing spam modules (also developed by Jeremy). Hopefully, with some pre-emptive sniffing of spamalicious content, we can open up our comments to non-registered users on our various sites.

Drupal comment module hack to add author's name to 'recent comments' block

2005-08-15T00:51:32-05:00

Update: Woe to the developer who doesn't learn. Please ignore this post, and DON'T HACK!

~~With the update of Drupal to release 4.6.3, I lost a hack to the comments module that added the commenter's name to the "recent comments" block in the sidebar. So I went ahead and re-did the hack.~~

I've attached the revised comment.module for Drupal 4.6.3 here.

Note: This is the comment.module for Drupal 4.6.3 only, and this hack is offered as-is. Use at your own risk. You are strongly advised to back up your current comment.module, and have it on-hand for rapid restoring should this not work.

(I expect it to work, but want to cover my butt in case the unexpected happens.)

~~Hope this is helpful!~~

Drupal 4.6.3 update

2005-08-15T00:41:15-05:00

We just updated pingVision to Drupal 4.6.3, a security-fix that addresses another xmp-rpc breach:

The Drupal project has released version 4.6.3 of its open-source content management platform. Drupal 4.6.3 is a maintenance release that fixes problems reported using the bug tracking system. Drupal 4.6.3 also fixes a new security vulnerability in the third-party XML-RPC library that Drupal ships with. Since the same bug is also present in the Drupal 4.5 series, Drupal 4.5.5 is released as well. If you cannot upgrade at once, we strongly suggest that you remove the xmlrpc.php file from your Drupal installation's root directory. The xmlrpc.php file is used only for Drupal to receive XML-RPC calls.

Anyone running Drupal should update immediately. The download tarball is here. Also, if you are running Drupal 4.5.x, there is an update for you here.

If you cannot do the update right away, or do not know how, here is the short-term fix:

If you cannot upgrade immediately, you can secure your site by removing the XML-RPC server: simply remove the file "xmlrpc.php" in the root of your Drupal directory.

This will prevent you from using a program like ecto to post to your site, but it will protect your site from the newly discovered security vulnerability.

---

Update: If you are running CivicSpace, a security advisory is here.

Drupal 4.6.2 security update

2005-06-29T16:55:11-05:00

Drupal administrators should be aware that a security update has been released:

The Drupal project has released version 4.6.2 of its open-source content management platform. Drupal 4.6.2 is a maintenance release that provides corrections of problems reported using the bug tracking system. Drupal 4.6.2 also fixes two security vulnerabilities: one related to the use of Drupal's input filters and one in the XML-RPC library that Drupal ships with. Upgrading your existing Drupal sites is highly recommended. As the same bugs are also present in the Drupal 4.5 series, Drupal 4.5.4 is released as well.

We've interrupted an ongoing design project (to be announced in the next few days) to update all of our sites. We recommend that all Drupal and CivicSpace users reading this to do this upgrade as soon as possible. If you already have version 4.6.1 installed, you can download the tarball and upload only the files from /modules and /includes bearing dates post-June 5th. There were no database changes.

Third-Party Notices

2005-06-10T17:45:14-05:00

QuickTime and the QuickTime Logo are trademarks of Apple Computer, Inc., registered in the U.S. and other countries. The Get QuickTime Badge is a trademark of Apple Computer Inc., used with permission.

Site redesign, and "working with Microsoft"

2005-06-06T14:46:26-05:00

This past weekend we updated our site to Drupal 4.6.1, which institutes some minor functionality and security fixes.

In addition, returning visitors will have noticed that we redesigned our website. Those keeping track will note that this is the second major redesign since we launched pingV.com. We do what we can when we can. It's hard to find the time, though, when client work keeps things busy.

What I find especially frustrating, though, is how Microsoft forces me to spend so much time pampering their software. Yes, I'm talking about Internet Explorer, the iconoclastic web browser that refuses to acknowledge web standards.

How much online productivity is lost trying to get websites to look and function properly on Internet Explorer?

That would be an interesting question to explore. Talk to just about any web designer, and they will tell you that, for every 100 hours they spend on design, 50-60 hours are dedicated to actual design, and the rest is devoted to creating xhtml and CSS hacks to get it to work on Internet Explorer.

The problem we as web developers face is that Internet Explorer has the dominant market share for web browsers worldwide, thanks to Microsoft's practice of forcing computer manufacturers to bundle Internet Explorer with Windows operating systems. I mean, let's face it: If people had to download Internet Explorer, as they have to in order to use Firefox, Opera, etc., IE would be a minor player indeed in the browser world. And my feeling is that efficiency, productivity and growth in internet-based business and communications would grow at rates far greater than they do today.

Don't get me wrong. I'm not an "evil empire" rhetoritician. I use Microsoft-powered computers for various applications, and find some of their releases to be quite stable. (My Windows NT-based workstations are as rock solid as any PC or Mac I've owned or used.) But when it comes to browsers, and measuring up to worldwide web standards, Microsoft falls short.

They're promising to fix a lot of these bugs and design flaws in Internet Explorer 7, whose release was pushed way up to summer 2005. Let's hope so. I'd rather be designing than carrying water for Bill Gates.