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Acquia webinar
Listening to a webinar from Acquia right now. The talk is by Ben Finklea of Volacci, entitled "Best Practices for Drupal Search Engine Optimization and Driving Site Conversions"

Now don't get me wrong, I think Google Wave is amazing, but recently i've been trying to work out what good it is if i can't use it for my emails and have to also sign in to my Gmail account.

The problem is that its obviously such a sophisticated tool, but currently you really need everyone you know to use it in order for it to be useful. Or so i thought.

I'm doing a lot of Illustrator work at the moment: making multiple frames and getting people to move efficiently requires a bit of illustrator magic here and there. I'm learning new little tricks with Illustrator every day so i thought i'd collect the most fun and useful tutorials that i come across right here:

Live trace:
http://bit.ly/5seGjT

On www.julianopie.com I wanted full screen flash to get that fully immersive flash experience. This is fairly simple to achieve with SWFObject, but there are a few IE gotchas.

Depending on how you want to do it there are a few CSS options. What I wanted to do was get the flash object to take over the whole browser and remove any other div, I also wanted to remove the scrollbars. Any scaling and scrolling I would do within the flash.

You can make an entire site in Flash and use Drupal as a back end using Drupal's Services module, but to make it easy and secure is a pain. But seeing as you're using Drupal as a framework for the data, why not also use a framework for the Flash end of things - this is where dp+dk step in.

Here's a link to a blog post that should get you started: http://bit.ly/7b8oit

All PC browsers

Fist of all by a Mac - then you can test the Mac browsers fairly easily (and now you own a Mac and be happy), I'm not going to cover testing in multiple versions of Mac browsers here as they are much less of an issue than the IE problems that we all love.

julianopie.comJulian Opie's new website, julianopie.com has been a while in the making and has incorporated a whole host of fresh (for me at least) techniques. But I think that this makes it a very different and exciting site.

The main objectives were to have something very different that made you play with the site, have a completely unique experience. At the same time I was determined that the site would be based on a CMS - be infinitely expandable so it could incorporate the thousands of artworks that Julian has made. It also had to work for non-flash browsers, each page should have a unique URL and be able to be crawled by search engines.

There seems to be a paucity of information out there on how to create styles for Panels, there's a tutorial here for doing it in a module:
http://manueg.okkernoot.net/blog/200910/how-create-panels-style-plugin
But i've done it in my theme which I thought other people might find quite handy. The good thing about putting the style (and layout plugins - look for a future lesson there) in the theme folder is that you've got all your theming stuff in one place. I think there's also a little less to do too.

Sometimes you want to get something quite specific into Views and its not easy with the standard filters. This is where arguments come in:

For instance I wanted to make a view show recordings for a particular composer.
I've 2 node types: Recording and Composer.
Each Recording has a node reference CCK field to select Composer(s) - there can be multiple composers

Heres an easy way to get at that data: