26
Apr
2012

Oppose CISPA

With a large amount of backlash from the internet community, we successfully prevented SOPA and PIPA legislation from being passed.  However, in their wake a new threat to civil liberties, and the openness of the internet is upon us...

This one is much worse.

29
Feb
2012

Parsing a Youtube URL

More than a few times in the past few years I've been tasked with enabling a user to add a youtube video to a piece of content in Drupal.

Sure there are specific modules out there that try to address this, but more often than not they do way more than what is needed, which generally ends up being simply that -- I want a youtube video added to this content type.

Well, I've once again had to deal with this situation, and this time around I think I found a fairly elegant solution.

08
Feb
2012

Building a custom realtime chat module for Drupal 7 (part 3)

If you've followed along with my previous two posts in this series, you should now have a functioning chat on your Drupal 7 site.

If not, start with those: Part 1, Part 2

That's kind of exciting, right? But we can make it better!

07
Feb
2012

Building a custom realtime chat module for Drupal 7 (part 2)

If you haven't already read part one, you should start there.

Step 1: Creating a basic Node.js server

As preparation for part 1 of this tutorial series, you should have installed Node.js on your server, along with its helper application npm. If you haven't done so, do that now as we're going to make use of npm now.

06
Feb
2012

Building a custom realtime chat module for Drupal 7 (part 1)

There was a time, not long ago, when implementing a real-time chat system was beyond the coding skill of most web developers. That's no longer the case, thanks to the awesomeness of Node.js.

 

 

27
Dec
2011

Make it Mom Friendly

Anyone over the age of 25 or so likely has a mom somewhat similar to mine. She is able to send emails, and maybe search google a bit, but overall she isn't the most tech savvy person in your life. But that's ok, mom is good at other things; she makes great cookies, she always has your happiness in mind, you know, mom stuff. So why does it matter? Why am I posting about moms?

Well, as it turns out there are a lot of people who manage content for their company website, or otherwise interact with the products we produce that might be a little more tech savvy than mom, but they're still not "rocket surgeons." They know enough about computers and the internet to do their job, but when you give them a shiny new tool they are probably pretty lost.

This is especially true when it comes to websites built with Drupal.