Development
Apr 22, 2013
in Development
While we prefer Agile by far, it can make sense to do an initial project using the Waterfall process first. We know Agile can be much more efficient, but it does have its pitfalls as well.
Agile is delivery driven, meaning that “something like what we want” will be delivered when we want it and within budget (this is how the term ‘beta’ started creeping in everywhere). Along the way, minds and scope can change and evolve without issue because being able to deliver “something like what is wanted” drives project decisions.
Apr 5, 2013
in Development
Let's take a moment to talk about shell commands. Some of you might remember DOS variants like the popular MS-DOS, so you will be familiar with a CLI (Command Line Interface). People who were born after 1990 probably won't. I grew up with the Apple IIGS, and the IBM PC in 286 and 386 variations. I fell in love with computing on a 486 DX2 running America Online 3.0 and Windows 95, with a turbo button that could switch from 33 to 66 MHz, and I remember the release of the first Intel Pentium processor.
Feb 27, 2013
I've been watching a new competition for the past couple weeks called Moduleoff. It's a bi-weekly Drupal module development challenge. You are given a set of criteria and then you are required to submit a video and sample module. (You even receive a prize if you win!) At last, a challenge I had an idea for—Challenge 5: Do something cool with Node.js
Feb 18, 2013
in Development
Recently it was announced that Opera would move their browser to WebKit. Formerly powered by the proprietary layout engine Presto, Opera will no longer be so unique; it will join the family of WebKit browsers including Chrome and Safari. This is a substantial change which warrants a general discussion of the different browsers available on the market and their underlying technology.
Jan 24, 2013
in Development
There seems to have been a fair amount of chatter lately (including at Jason Pamental's excellent Western Mass Drupal Camp keynote presentation) about how we're entering a PSD-less era of web development, favoring instead a method of quickly creating functional mockups that more directly reflect how the final site will behave on an ever expanding array of devices. I understand how this could be an appealing concept, especially to someone who is focused on the programming side of the equation...
Jan 9, 2013
If you're using Drush, you might have bumped into the Site Aliases feature (or at least heard about it). For those who don't know, a site alias specifies a Drupal site, giving it a short name. These are super useful for running commands against remote sites, automating database syncs, and speeding up your development workflow.
Jan 3, 2013
This is the Intro to jQuery session I presented at the 2012 Western Mass Drupal Camp. Included in this post is a video of my presentation and the text content of my slideshow. Enjoy!
tags: JavaScript, jQuery
Dec 20, 2012
in Development, News
We've been busy here at the left-click Advanced office, but we decided to take some time to create a digital holiday card to thank all of our friends and clients for a wonderful year. We created a digital holiday tree comprised of our retail division's Twitter posts from the last year, with all of our employees as ornaments, in front of a winter wonderland scene. Presenting: The Holiday Tree And you may have guessed… this tree is made with Drupal! Using the Feeds module, and taking advantage of Twitter's RSS feeds of tweets using the format...
Nov 8, 2012
This past month a tool was open sourced on github called image2css, which is a simple PHP class that takes an image and converts it to CSS3 box-shadow. The creator posted a version of the Mona Lisa in pure CSS. That's an interesting concept, but why not do it all on the client side and let the server be? This is very possible with some newer web technologies, namely canvas and the JavaScript functions that come with it.
Following the steps outlined below, augmented with some Drupal themeing and configuration, I built this tool: image2css
Jan 24, 2012
in Development
In a rare public acknowledgment of their failure to support web standards, Microsoft recently launched The Internet Explorer 6 Countdown and set a goal of reducing usage of IE 6 to less than 1% worldwide. We were thrilled to load up the IE 6 countdown last weekend and see that as of December 2011, less than 1% of United States website visitors are using IE 6. More websites can confidently stop supporting IE 6, following in the wake of Google's brave decision to phase out IE 6 support for its content-rich products like YouTube, Gmail, Docs, and Sites starting in early 2010.