Month / March 2011

by Darren

I’ve got an Apple iMac!

After years of being a Microsoft Windows user I’ve finally got my first Apple Mac!

A work colleague was selling his 2009 iMac 24″ with 2.6GHz Core Duo CPU, 4GB RAM and a 640GB hard drive at a price that was too good to ignore.

I didn’t really need another computer but for the price I thought it would be worth getting to try out the Apple computer experience. The intention was to see if it would be suitable as a general family computer, to replace the dual core Athlon 64 Windows Vista Pro based Shuttle PC with 20″ NEC monitor we currently use.

I’ve played with friends’ Macs over the years but never really used them on a day to day basis (apart from the early Macs I used to develop on in Smalltalk many years ago!)

First impressions so far are pretty good and it seems like it will be a good fit for a family PC.

by Darren

Enabling HTML tag formatting in Drupal WYSIWYG / TinyMCE

I use Drupal for many of my more complex web sites – it’s an excellent Content Management System. I also regularly use the TinyMCE WYSIWYG editor to provide rich text editing capability when editing content.

Recently I noticed that I was no longer able to format sections of text using HTML levels such as paragraph, heading1, heading2 etc. I’m sure this was present in previous versions but seemed to have disappeared in later versions. Sure, I could open up the raw HTML source editor for the content and add the appropriate tags there, but that defeats the object of having a WYSIWYG editor.

After searching for a solution and looking into various plugins which reportedly added this functionality, I came across the simplest solution that was there all along… there is an “HTML block format” check box in the TinyMCE toolbar button configuration that I’d missed!

When this is enabled, a new combo box is added to the TinyMCE toolbar allowing “Paragraph”, “Heading 2”, “Preformatted” etc. formatting styles to be selected.