Matt Reimer's Blog Posts
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BC Candidate Lookup plugin for Citizens Connected
May 10, 2013 CommentsIn anticipation of the upcoming provincial election we were looking for ways to help organizations who want to target email campaigns at electoral candidates.
In parternship with OpenNorth we inputted candidate data which then became available to us as part of the fantastic opennorth API. From that point it was just a matter of tweaking our federal mp lookup plugin to consume it.
As you can see below the user is asked for a postal code and from this information a list of candidates is generated that the user can then add to the "To:" field of their email. In this way it becomes easy to quickly let your candidates know how you stand on an issue before an election.
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More automation with Drush shebang shell scripting
October 24, 2012 CommentsLast weekend our dev team attended the Pacific Northwest Drupal Summit. We had a blast, we nerded out about Foundation and we learned a lot (especially about SCSS and Compass). We were taking furious notes and we can expect some big changes to come to our Cogito Foundation theme in the coming weeks.
We also did a presentation where we took a website from design to build to theming to launch in front of a live audience in 45 minutes. People said we were crazy (and the jury is still out on that one) but it worked like a charm and the demo gods were with us.
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Design Patterns Updated for Foundation 3
September 5, 2012 CommentsIt's no secret that we love Zurb's Foundation here at Raised Eyebrow and version 3 has brought with it all kinds of amazing goodies that make theming and prototyping a breeze.
In a previous post I described some responsive design patterns that can help you think about layouts on various device sizes. These patterns have now been updated to use Foundation3 as well as some neat little updates to make things pretty and show you how it all works.
You can see the updated design patterns here.
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LocalTunnel
April 25, 2012 CommentsThis is a post in a series about some new tools we've been folding into our workflow here at Raised Eyebrow.
I'll give you a scenario: You've got a client who needs a change NOW but wants to vet the change before it goes live.
You could fumble around with a middle-man external sandbox server or send them a screenshot but chances are you've probably got their site running on MAMP or XAMPP or just plain Apache on your machine. It would be totally simple to make the change on your own box and then you wouldn't need to trip around FTP and SSH trying to get it somewhere they can see it.
Enter LocalTunnel, a ruby script and service that can expose a single port on your machine to the outside world temporarily.
I wrote a blog post on my site about the experience and the particulars of setting it up but the way it works is simple:
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Responsive Design Patterns
April 25, 2012 CommentsA while back Colin sent me a link to a blog post by Joshua Johnson about responsive design patterns. What’s a responsive design pattern you ask? It’s a mockup that helps us plan out how our sites are going to react on various display types and resolutions. Since we’ve started using Foundation all of our sites behave in basically the same on smaller devices: that is, columns become rows and we hide some elements.
Our newly deployed site Internet Hall of Fame is a good example of a complex-looking theme with a very basic, very out-of-the-box responsive behaviour. Notice the menus and the logo in particular:
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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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Getting control of YouTube via Javascript
October 7, 2011 CommentsRecently I was trying to write a WordPress slideshow plugin that would include YouTube videos. The challenge was that when I play the video I want to pause the slide. On regular picture slides I just needed to add a
click()event listener to the slide object and attach a call to pause jQueryCycle. YouTube, though, refused to take theclick()listener seriously. The solution came to me by reading up on the Youtube player api. -
Why We Love EZP Hosting
July 26, 2011 CommentsAs a web studio we spend a lot of time talking about what it takes to build a site but it's just as important to have a place to put it. We’ve tried a lot of different hosts over the years and it’s such a refreshing change to have a great one that I felt like shouting (alright, quietly typing) it to the world. That host for us is EZP.
When choosing a host, you might Google “Top 10 web hosts” and pick out the cheapest and highest-rated but it’s not exactly cut and dry. We’ve had issues in the past with hosts charging hidden fees for easily-enabled features and we realize now that a good rating on a host doesn’t mean anything coming from a reviewer who has never needed any support.
