Blog
What we’re thinking about here at Raised Eyebrow these days. You can subscribe to our blog by RSS, or sign up for email updates.
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Why We Still Build Websites
A month ago or so, a colleague and friend of ours, Jason Mogus, wrote an eloquent and widely circulated blog post titled "Why We Stopped Building Websites." It's a great read. And, I'll admit, when I first read through it, I found myself wondering if perhaps we at Raised Eyebrow should, in fact, stop building websites. After all, Lauren and I, the partners in the business, don't really have that much to do with the day-to-day building of websites any more. We have brilliant staff who manage the ins and outs of website design, development and deployment. And I agree with Jason's thesis that it's not just about websites anymore.
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Should Your Nonprofit Use Pinterest?
January, 25 2012 CommentsHow can nonprofits use Pinterest (and other visually-driven social networking sites) effectively?
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Dummy Images
January, 4 2012 CommentsWhen we're building wireframes for clients very often use dummy content like lorem ipsum text and placeholder images to show the client what the content might look like.
We came across http://dummyimage.com/ which allows you to create images of an appropriate size programatically. There are loads of these services around (including several that use pictures of kittens) but dummyimage.com had a php-only approach with multiple file-types and a clean, simple look that complemented our wireframes:
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Drupal 7 Geotagging and Silverlight Maps
December, 23 2011 CommentsRaised Eyebrow is currently working with Microsoft on a multi-faceted Drupal 7 project. One of the project's technical requirements involves displaying nodes that have been tagged with Geographical information on a Silverlight Map.
As part of the requirements gathering phase of the project we were given access to a recently built Drupal 6 site - http://bhangra.me, which features just such a Silverlight map on its homepage, to provide a base for how we would create similar functionality in Drupal 7. Our job has been to decipher how the map on bhangra.me functioned and then replicate that in Drupal 7.
The Easy (Silverlight) Part
I say easy, because it was the easy part for me. The Silverlight Control was developed externally and was cleverly built to accept and parse an XML/RSS feed from Drupal (or elsewhere). This RSS feed contained some simple Geographical information stored as so:
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Currency Formatting javascript library available on Github
December, 14 2011 CommentsIn addition to all of the small modules we write for client projects, we also write quite a few small javascript libraries. Several times now, we've had a need for good currency formatting in javascript. On the most recent occasion, rather than re-use previously-written code that might or might not be a good fit with the current project, we decided to write a small, flexible, general-purpose, javascript currency formatter--something like PHP's money_format() function (though with far fewer options).
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Our Help Manual
November, 8 2011 CommentsThe lack of user documentation for open-source projects, like Wordpress and Drupal the two Content Management Systems we develop in most frequently at Raised Eyebrow, is a known issue. While a thriving user base and a good google search can often turn up answers to questions not addressed in documentation for a development team, that's not really a viable solution for end-users, in our case clients who are simply trying to maintain and manage their websites. And, since we build a lot of custom Drupal Modules or Wordpress Plugins to meet our client's specific communications needs, we then become the folks responsible for documentation.
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2 Big Wins for our Clients at CUPE's Communications Awards
November, 3 2011 CommentsWoo-hoo! We've just learned that two websites we launched this year have won at the 2011 CUPE Communications Awards!
CUPE's awards celebrate top-notch communications in the labour sector, so we are thrilled to see two of our union clients - the Hospital Employees' Union and CUPE Local 79 - be recognized for their websites.
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Webinar: 8 Best Practice Do's + Don'ts for Holiday Fundraising
November, 1 2011 Comments
As those in the non-profit world are only too aware, the holiday season is a big time for fundraising. Up to 1/2 of all donations for an organization can come in during this busy donor outreach season, through either targeted campaigns or as a result of end of the year giving.Delivered by Partner and Lead Strategist, Emira Mears and Christine Smith, a Project Manager with an extensive background in online fundraising, this webinar will focus on best practices for online fundraising efforts. Knowing that campaigns for holiday giving will be underway any day now, this webinar is focused on giving you targeted tips you can put into practice right away to help improve your online donor development now.
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Useful Content From the Non Profit Technology Network (NTEN)
October, 28 2011 CommentsThe NTEN newsletter is often a wealth of good information for non-profit organizations thinking about their digital strategy, but this last issue had some particularly juicy articles, relevant to the kinds of conversations we've been having with our clients lately. Here's some links to my favourites:
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RE Help Module on github
October, 27 2011 Comments
We write a lot of small Drupal modules for client sites. Often these modules just do a single, small job that makes Drupal slightly easier or more convenient to use. One of the standard services we provide for Drupal clients is an online help manual containing general Drupal information, plus specific documentation about how to use the various custom features we build on clients' individual sites. Recently we realized that, though we always provide access to this manual, we could make it more convenient for clients to access by placing a link to it directly in clients own websites. This module was the result. -
RE Apache SOLR Extras module on Github
October, 25 2011 CommentsThis is another small Drupal module that was developed to satisfy a single requirement. In this case, the requirement was to allow the creation of Apache SOLR cores via the Drupal administration backend. We developed a site cloning tool for a client using the Aegir project, and each cloned site required its own individual Apache SOLR search, which in turn meant setting up an individual core for each individual site. Setting up individual cores can be a tricky process and this module provides a simple interface for creating the cores. The process of creating cores manually is documented on drupal.org. When you configuring Apache SOLR on your site, you usually visit - http://example.com/admin/settings/apachesolr configuration page, and enter the Apache SOLR path:
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