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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Inexpensive Image Editing Tools: Format your photos on a budget
May, 18 2010 CommentsWe're often asked for recommendations on image editing software that doesn't cost an arm and a leg. Photoshop is fantastic, but the price tag is steep, and in fact, its strengths can also be weaknesses in that it's actually such a powerful program that it can overwhelm the novice or intermediate user.
So, where do you turn if your needs are relatively straightforward and your budget is limited? I would recommend one of the following tools:
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Datadotgc.ca - A Drupal case study
April, 29 2010 CommentsWe recently launched http://www.datadotgc.ca, an open data collection portal for Canada, built to help poke the Canadian government in the right direction, towards something like similar sites in the UK (data.gov.uk) and the US (data.gov). Read David Eaves' explanation of its purpose. For the benefit of the programming and Drupal community, I'm going to run through, with the aid of code samples, the development of the Drupal module to communicate with the CKAN API (which is where the data is stored). I'll also walk through Theming, integration with Google Charts, Tag Clouds and most importantly, caching.
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Rewrite a Views query
April, 13 2010 CommentsRecently, due to Views lack of ability to OR it's filters together and due to some serious constraints in relation to arguments and relationships, I found myself needing to figure out how to rewrite the SQL of a Drupal view so that I could get the records that I needed.
It seems like there are two ways to do this. You can either rewrite the SQL directly, or try to hack the query object that views provides.
A quick Google search and I ended up on Drupal.org
Which then led me to the Views documentation
From here I was able to deduce that the
hook_views_pre_execute()hook was what I needed.
I created my module and added the hook:
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Socially Conscious Geeks Unite!
March, 14 2010 Comments
I'm writing this from Austin, TX, where I'm participating in one of the geek world's biggest and best-loved festivals, South by Southwest Interactive (SXSWi for short). Yesterday afternoon, I had the great pleasure of co-facilitating a session with Leif Utne, VP of Community at Zanby, that was a group discussion on how design & tech geeks can make the world a better place while making a living. -
Socially Conscious Geek: Makin’ Money While Doin’ Good
January, 14 2010 Comments
Two years ago, Emira & I went to South by Southwest (AKA SXSW) for the first time, and presented a panel called “Boss Lady” that featured tips for online business owners from several of the savviest women entrepreneurs we know: Vickie Howell, Jenny Hart & Alex Beauchamp, all of whom appear in the pages of our book, The Boss of You. We had such a good time that we knew we wanted to go back as soon as humanly possible, though last year we were too busy getting our book out the door to attend the conference. -
Using Drupal to deliver video
December, 22 2009 CommentsThere are many ways to skin the cat when it comes to putting video on a Drupal site. I've tried and tested quite a few methods since my first introduction to Drupal 2 years ago. I've used Embedded Media Field as well as Video Filter but finally settled on the combination of FileField with JWPlayer or Flowplayer and in some cases the Media Mover Module for moving files to Amazon S3 storage. I'm going to use our recent launch of the CCPA website as a case study for how we currently handle video delivery. So let's dissect this a little.
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We're hiring…
December, 15 2009 CommentsWe're expanding our team here at Raised Eyebrow, and this time we're looking for a Front-End Developer/Themer -- someone who loves building websites, and is looking to extend their skills with Drupal and WordPress.
Beyond our roster of fantastic, progressive clients, we offer a positive & healthy work environment, beautifully remodeled heritage office space, and a team of web experts who love what we do and are keen to share knowledge and produce top-notch work.
Intrigued? Know someone who might be a fit? Check out the job description and get in touch.
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Ubercart & Content Type machine names
November, 18 2009 CommentsIf you use Ubercart on your Drupal website you may be familiar with product classes. Ubercart has, by default, a product content type, however say you have other content types on your site that you want to sell, you can create product classes from those - http://www.ubercart.org/docs/user/3341/understanding_product_classes.
This works nicely until that moment when you want to rename your content type machine name.. e.g from "contenttype" to "content_type"
I did that recently thinking everything would be hunky dory once I made the change, the results were not so nice. So to help prevent this from happening to anyone else, here's a simple rule to follow before making changes to your content type machine name.
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Generic caching function for Drupal 6
June, 24 2009 CommentsOne of the pieces of the Drupal performance puzzle is caching. After weeding out a couple of very demanding sql queries in a busy Drupal site, we decided to make more use of Drupal's caching mechanisms to cut down some of the database load.
Back in 2007, Lullabot's Jeff Eaton wrote a blog post about caching including a sample implementation for a caching function. This function was almost exactly what we wanted, but we wanted something more generic—a function that we could use in multiple places in the same module or template.php file without modification.
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Strange permissions on Coda file uploads
June, 24 2009 CommentsI've been working with Coda now for a few weeks and it's been going pretty smoothly. There are a few bugs in the software, or they may even be feature requests :) When creating a file locally and subsequently uploading it to the server the file permissions are set to 700. This was causing all sorts of weirdness on a Drupal site that I'm currently theming. This is definitely a bug, however it's pretty easy to overcome. In "Preferences -> Transfers" there is an option to "Set permissions on upload". Set this to 644. This is the recommended permission for files in your theme folder in Drupal. You should now have no more problems when uploading files. If you've already uploaded files, it's pretty easy to change via the command line using the chmod command:
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