After laying the track, and connecting the wires, the track is functional, but it looks like a alien landscape with the surrounding scenery being perfectly flat and pink. It’s time to start creating the foundation for the module’s scenery.
Continue reading Creating a hillAll posts by Micah
Wiring Up the Module
Wiring and soldering wires is a fairly straightforward process. Once you have done it a couple of times, it becomes fairly easy, although repetitive, process. I recommend practicing on some scrap track before tackling the layout itself if you haven’t done this before.
Continue reading Wiring Up the Module
Laying Track
It is time to start laying track. Through my research and having laid the track on the module, I learned that this is one of the most important steps in building anything in model railroading. Take your time. Bad or uneven track will quickly ruin the fun in running trains.
One thing to note, I saved all ties that I removed from any track. I plan to use this to fill any gaps after the track is laid.
Continue reading Laying Track
Laying The Cork
Cork. The old standby for creating a roadbed to lay the track on. I used it because it worked best with laying the roadbed directly on the foam. Now that the track center lines have been laid out on the foam, it is time to lay the cork roadbed. This process, for the most part, is fairly easy. The hardest part is splicing the cork to fit where the turnouts will be.
Drupal With Slices And Paragrphs
The winds are a changing. Or, there is the potential for change in the near future. Currently I am looking at what it would take to move my employer’s site off of Joomla and on to Drupal. One of the things I am looking at is how to deal with content creation and management. Continue reading Drupal With Slices And Paragrphs
Handy Joomla ACL Tool
If anybody has a large Joomla 3.x site, and is wanting an easy way to manage it’s access control lists, I recommend the ACL Manager by Sander Potjer. It makes it easy to figure out which group or user has access to any resource, including those on the administrator side of the site. Go check it out!
Site: https://www.aclmanager.net
Joomla Extensions Directory: http://extensions.joomla.org/extensions/extension/access-a-security/site-access/acl-manager
(I am not affiliated with either Sander Potjer, or Open Source Maters, the people that maintain Joomla)
The Embedded Page Pull Apart
As a college, my employer has to put up ready made gainful employment ‘templates’ that they receive from the Department of Education for our certificate offerings. These ‘templates’, really an all-in-one web page, come with all of the CSS, Javascript, and HTML all smashed together in one file. The problem with these is that they where designed to be used on sites that serve regular static pages. The site that I manage uses a CMS. What to do? The answer is simple, pull it all apart. Continue reading The Embedded Page Pull Apart
Laying Out The Track Diagram
In my last post, I went through how I built the base for my test module. Today I will continue the journey, and I will show you how I laid out the track diagram onto the foam. Continue reading Laying Out The Track Diagram
Joomla Global Permissions Database Location
OK, I’ll admit that this one threw me for a loop at first. I was in the process of upgrading the ldsbc.edu site from Joomla 2.5 to Joomla 3.x. To help with the process, I was using a tool called SP Transfer to migrate the data to a new database. The issue I was running into was that the global permissions didn’t seem to be migrating over. With the development site, I went through and manually updated the permissions of over 55 groups via the back-end user interface while having the old permissions settings open in another browser. There had to be a better way. Continue reading Joomla Global Permissions Database Location
The Birth Of My Test Module
So, here I have this new room that I am going to build a model railroad in. I don’t have a plan drawn yet, as I am in the process of doing research. I also have a bunch of equipment of various vintage sitting in a box that will eventually need to be tested to see if they are worthy of being on the future railroad. So what to do in the meantime until I can start building the full size model railroad? Build a test module of course! Continue reading The Birth Of My Test Module