Prestigious operator of commplicated auto-complete.
I remember when the web was fun. It was this new thing. People were trying new things all the time. There was no google, there was barely a yahoo. Search engines existed but you had to look for things yourself. You found pages by clicking links and exploring. Your site got discovered because someone else linked to you. Maybe your site had a niche community that allowed it into a webring. Most sites were just curiosities.
The calls for AI regulation arrived just as the technology plateaued. The danger is people handing too much autonomy to a machine, and the guardrails mostly target local AI.
It's funny, I wrote this to complain about the direction php but my LLM keeps wanting to turn this into a positive take on php.
Running a coding agent with approvals turned off is only safe if a machine boundary, not a dialog box, protects your host. ztd gives every agent run its own throwaway VM across libvirt, lima, Proxmox, and EC2.
A serverless form handler for static sites. Point a form at a URL, and it validates the submission and relays it to SES, SMTP, a webhook, or Salesforce Web2Lead. One YAML file, no application code.
The silver lining of being laid off is time to finish the open source projects that have been waiting for a weekend that never came -- and a reason to keep the work visible.
Sometimes you have to copy a library straight into your project. v records exactly which commit you copied and gives you one command to refresh it.
Last week I wrote a list of everything I need to update. Second item: personal site. Here is what has been sitting at www.frankrobertanderson.com this whole time.
Look at that footer. © Copyright 2009.
That site is old enough to drive. It was built on Drupal 6, with a theme I wrote myself. I still have a soft spot for the dark burgundy background and the typewriter-font nameplate. The contact link is broken –it is supposed to point at the contact form on my Drupal.org profile.
After more than ten years, my time at Clarity Innovations has come to an end. I was laid off.
I want to say up front that I enjoyed working there. Ten years is a long time to spend anywhere, and I would not have spent it there if I had not wanted to.
This was not my fault, and it was not theirs.
An enormous amount of money was poured into education technology over the last decade. When that kind of money stops, things do not just go back to the way they were – it leaves a vacuum. That is the economy we are in right now. A lot of good people are getting the same news I got, for the same reasons.
An early look at the space game I'm building — the question that started it a decade ago, what actually runs today, and where it's headed. Very much a work in progress.
Let me start with a bit of history. It might seem like a hard thing for today’s generation to understand, but content used to cost money – especially novel or reliable content. In order to keep up with the latest in science or tech, one needed to subscribe to journals or magazines. An encyclopedia set was an expensive necessity before the age when almost all written content became free.
It was in this time that the foundations of the World Wide Web were being laid in the internet protocol that would become http – the protocol that serves web pages and other hypermedia to the world. And that is why HTTP has had a provision for “Payment Required” responses that has gone unused for 30 years.
AI agents can build a full-stack app in an afternoon, but should it. The right workflow depends on your experience level. A guide to using generative AI effectively whether you're a seasoned engineer or just starting out.
Static site generators output HTML, but they can output JSON too. Here is how to add a JSON API to your Hugo site, and why the technique works with any SSG.
The Zed editor is one of the more interesting new projects in a long while. The only problem is I use PHP and Zed sucks at PHP. One thing that sucks is Xdebug support. I finally got Xdebug working with the help of Claude. Notice, however, that I didn't say Claude got Xdebug working.
Thirteen essential episodes of Star Trek: The Original Series, picked and ordered by a coworker who knows his Trek. A curated list for introducing your kids to the franchise.
I played the Edward Gorey inspired card game Gloom the other day. The game and mechanics are fun, but if the dark humor of the game isn't for you then try these rules on a standard 52 card deck.
Contributing to Drupal allows us to ensure Drupal remains the best and most flexible general purpose Content Management System. Contributing to Drupal is the job of the Drupal Community.
This is an export of my session from DrupalCon Baltimore 2017. This is here for posterity. The least effort possible was put into transcribing it from presentation format to a web page.
For the majority of people who will be switching from Fahrenheit to Celsius, this is all you need to know.
I need to know what to study, not that I am bored or have lots of time. I just need a new tool in my belt.
I should continue my series on Machine Generated text or Composer or Drupal, but this just looks like too much fun. WebVR with AFrame.
With everyone's kids being so smart it is a wonder that we don't have machine generated children's book already. This sounds like an oversight to me because computers are already raising our kids.
A Hello World style introduction to Composer.
Using git-flow as a workflow for semantic versioning. This is a circular dependency that is good.
Explore a bit of field fetching with Drupal 8
How to work with case sensitive files on a file system that is case insensitive
Every "learn to make games" tutorial hands you the same space shooter. I want to make a different one — built around a question instead of a high score.
Why do we need a new game system? Because everything made today does too much.
EntityFieldQueries are one of the most useful things in Drupal 7, using tags we can get around some of the limitations of using them.
Without adding any non-Github pages approved plugins, build a RESTfull api for your blog by adding a json endpoint.
I reflect on what I have seen at ElixirConf 2015, what does this mean for Drupal, and Why use Elixir or Phoenix instead of Drupal or Jekyll.
With Drupal 8 on the horizon, it is tempting to write off Drupal 7. Don’t. The module ecosystem for Drupal 7 is mature, battle-tested, and – for site builders specifically – more powerful than ever. What follows is my curated list of the modules that let a site builder with some front-end skill create complicated sites with little to no custom module code.
Drupal 8 is nearly out making Drupal 7 look like it isn’t an appealing choice. However, Drupal 7 is still a contender for the conveniences in site-building crown. The module ecosystem for Drupal 7 is mature and, specifically for site builders, it is a very exciting time for Drupal 7.
Style can be passed as a parameter to the console.log function.
As you might remember in my post on replacing Jekyll with Gulp (and my post on Jekyll). YAML will be a large part of getting this working.
First am trying to use npm-yaml. Simple installation, npm install --save-dev npm-yaml. And it works great with the _config file that holds general site information. So I try it with the html.
gulp.task('test-index', function() {
var config = gulp.src('./index.html')
.pipe(yaml({ space: 2 }))
.pipe(gulp.dest('./gulp-dist/'))
})
With that I get a big fat …
Jekyll solved my blog problem: it is fast to set up, free to host, and I actually write content on it instead of endlessly rebuilding the platform. But now I am wondering if I even need Jekyll, or if I can replace it with Gulp and cut out the Ruby dependency entirely.
One of the first “Content Management Systems” I ever wrote was a perl script that took flat text files and wrapped templates around them and gave me html. I cobbled this thing together and thought, huh, it worked. At the time everything was changing and I hardly ever wrote content. So a script that did this wasn’t extremely useful to me. It was more of an academic experience – especially because, at the time, I wasn’t a professional web developer.
Did you know that EntityFieldQueries can have subqueries? They can.
In this post Frank walks through the basics of setting up Jenkins to run on Ubuntu. This is a simple step by step with links to more information.
I have been in LA again for DrupalCon. To my surprise this was not the first year of a DrupalCon Stabbing.
I lived in Long Beach for around 7 years. Every time I had some regular obligation. I did my due diligence and checked to see if I could take public transit to wherever I was going, whenever I need to go there. Be it school, or work, or church. I was never able to find a reasonable commute on public transportation. Every time I found a 20 mile commute would lead to a 3 hour and 5 transfer bus route. It was simply a fact that nowhere that I needed to go was a place the bus wanted to take me.
Sometimes the best solution is to do something hacky. I am not saying this is the best way to make Drupal forms autosubmit. I am only saying that this is one way.
Are you fed up with the offerings of Drupal, Wordpress, and other big CMSs? Then maybe a return to roots is in order. Let's look at Jekyll
Did you know that 3D is possible on the web with WEBGL? You did? Oh, well, go checkout Three.js then.
Over the course of my career I have worked on more than a fair share of higher-education sites. When dealing with a universities website there are many challenges. One of the biggest challenges is in dealing with the accessibility standards. I am writing about WCAG. The WCAG, or Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, is a detailed list for how accessibility should be done on the web.
I might write about the problems with WCAG at some point, but this article is about strictly an incompatibility between what the designer/UX people want and what the WCAG says about “READ MORE” links. Specifically WCAG 2.0 SC 2.4.4. This states that any link needs to have context.
At SandCamp I gave a talk on utilizing front end design paradigms and how they can be used with Drupal. In this talk I focused on SMACSS, however, there are many more out there such as DRY, BEM, and OOCSS. For more information, checkout my blog post on the subject of the multitude of css paradigms.
Utilizing Front End CSS Design Paradigms In Drupal Talk from SandCamp 2014
Sometimes you need a form to submit itself. A select list changes, the page reloads with new options, no extra clicks required. Drupal’s Form API has an #ajax handler for this, but it can be overkill when all you want is a simple page reload on change. Here is a lighter approach.
If you are unfamiliar with building forms in Drupal, please view Patrick’s post on the various options for building forms in Drupal. I will be focusing on forms built with Drupal’s Form API (or fapi).
Front End CSS Design Paradigms have been a very hot topic lately and many people are attempting to solve the problem of large CSS rule sets that are difficult to maintain. With all the new options it might be difficult to decide where you should focus your attention. Here is a little overview of some of the more popular options.
OOCSS has several principles that it is built upon.
Some general thoughts on the how and why of Graceful Degradation and Progressive Enhancement. No tutorials here, more philosophical than functional