Recent posts about Geekery
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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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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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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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. -
Prevent client frustration by reducing downtime
September, 26 2011 CommentsWe've all been there, the phone rings and suddenly it's panic stations. A client site is down, they're panicing and are very upset, and we have to drop everything to find out what's happening. This doesn't happen often, but when it does it puts the client and the whole dev team in a spin. It certainly not predictable, it's somewhat preventable, and it's completely frustrating.
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Curious for a Living at the Pacific Northwest Drupal Summit
September, 26 2011 Comments
I'll be in Portland next month for the Pacific Northwest Drupal Summit, and I'm looking forward to geeking out on Drupal, open-source and web development for a couple of days in beautiful Oregon. -
Better Questions, Better Websites: Free event for Vancouver web designers
September, 19 2011 CommentsI'm excited to have been invited to speak to the Vancouver Webdesign Meetup group this week on a topic that's close to my heart: Asking better questions. In this talk, I go beyond widgets and code, and deeper than site architecture and design - to the root of what drives human interaction, and should drive technology decisions as well: function, meaning, delight and evolution.
The event takes place Wednesday, September 21 at 7:00 pm. More details here.
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Transparent PNGs in IE
July, 26 2011 CommentsThere are lots of ways to achieve working transparent PNG's in IE (Microsoft Internet Explorer). I have found that none of these have succeeded in making life really easy when doing the dreaded cross browser testing and debugging. Until now that is. Today I discovered DD_belatedPNG by Drew Miller. An awesome library with a really strange name :)
With some simple JavaScript you can have transparent PNG's in a matter of seconds. All it takes are 3 steps:
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