March 2026

I wanted to add an emoji to a comment I just made on my last post, and I wanted something more than the old-style :) emoticon which I have used for (mumble) years. A quick Google told me about the ckeditor_emoji module for Dupal, with a comment by Jeff Geerling of all people (A YouTuber I occasionally watch, who has contributed many Ansible modules I regularly use), to make sure that your Drupal database supports the "utf8mb4" encoding.

There is a handy trick I use to keeping track of changes made to the configuration of a system, and one which I sometimes neglect in my rush. It has changed a bit over the years, and I never did figure out how to do it on AIX, where unlike other UN*X versions, the configuration was stored in a database called Object Data Manager, or simply ODM. The trick is track the changes using some form of version control.  At first, this was Revision Control System, or RCS, and from what I recall from those days, to say that it was "far from ideal" was an understatement.

While working on another article, I finally hit the point where I really REALLY wanted to put smaller images in the overall article view, but to be able to click on the image and have the image show up full-sized. Such is the pain-point of including screenshots in an article. So, I did some checking, and found the Colorbox plugin.

I have been a PHP programmer for years, having used it without frameworks, to frameworks like Zend Framework (now rebranded as Laminas) and Laravel, to custom in-house frameworks. At the same time, I went from using it with JavaScript in its various versions, to using the jQuery library with jQuery UI and various add-ons like DataTables.