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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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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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.
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Accessing node flagged status in a Drupal 7 theme
July, 22 2011 CommentsI was recently working on a Drupal 7 project which required updating an Image style on a node based on whether or a flag was set or not.
The Requirements
The specific context was that the nodes were biography nodes and each biography had an image attached. The requirement was to give editors the ability to allow certain bio's to display a large or small version of an uploaded image.
I considered using taxonomy, a CCK field and finally settled on using a flag. Mostly due to the fact that the Flag module places a nice Ajax link on the node for logged in users, allowing them to quickly tag and un-tag the node as needed.
What you need to achieve this is:
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A busy Open Source week
May, 6 2011 CommentsFor those in the know it's Open Source Week May 2-7 and it's been a busy week for us here at Raised Eyebrow. There are lots of events happening around the city to celebrate all things open. Luckily, Raised Eyebrow is involved in more ways than one.
OGDI Field Module on Drupal.org
I launched my OGDI Field module on Drupal.org. It's now available for you to download and try out on your own Drupal website. The only requirement is that you need the CCK module and you're set.
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