Frank Robert Anderson

Getting XDebug working with the Zed editor, starring Claude

Mon, 05 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Zed IDE and Xdebug

Below is my journey at getting XDebug working with Zed. I have attempted this several times. If I had a spare hour, I would see if I could get Xdebug working. It normally ended in a fail, but not this time.

Why Zed

The Zed editor is one of the more interesting new projects in a long while. Zed is an editor that is built like a multiplayer video game. It was designed in the onset with multi-user chat and to allow for multiple users to edit files together. When AI began to gain traction, they realized that the AI could be another user and added the AI chat and agent to the editor.

How to play gloom with a 52 card deck

Fri, 30 Mar 2018 00:00:00 +0000

I played the Edward Gorey insired card game Gloom the other day. The game and mechanics are fun, if the dark humor of the game isn’t for you then try these rules on a standard 52 card deck.

Rules

Each player will have a family of face cards. The Aces will act as kill cards and the red/black number cards are the score cards. At the end of the game the number cards are talled with the Black numbers increasing the score and the Red cards decreasing the score. High score wins, tie-breaker is who has more cards.

Why DrupalCon

Tue, 20 Feb 2018 00:00:00 +0000

Collaboration and Contribution at DrupalCon

Drupal is the most flexible general purpose Content Management System on the market today—Open Source or not. Using Drupal enables us to provide a cost effective and flexible platform for our clients, while contributing to Drupal allows us to ensure it remains the most flexible general purpose Content Management System. As contributing to Drupal is the job of the Drupal Community, it’s essential that Drupal advocates and aficionados convene to teach and learn from each other. What better way to do that than at DrupalCon?

Rearchitecting for Drupal 8; a DrupalCon Session

Thu, 15 Feb 2018 00:00:00 +0000

Rearchitecting for Drupal 8

This is an export of my session from DrupalCon Baltimore 2017. This is here for posterity. The least effor possible was put into trascribing it from presentation format to a web page.

In case you are wondering

Hello My Name Is Frank

I am a Christian, Father, and Technology Enthusiast.

Online my name is frob (IRC, d.o, github)
On Twitter I am @frobdfas
My Blog is www.frobiovox.com
I work for Clarity Innovations Inc.

Switching to Celsius from Fahrenheit for normal people

Sun, 23 Apr 2017 00:00:00 +0000

TLDR;

For the majority of people who will be switching from Fahrenheit to Celsius, this is all you need to know.

[](This comment is here to try and keep the liquid template engine that my blog runs on from truncating in the middle of the next table and thus breaking the layout of my river pages. Please disregard this text, liquid has a limitation in that it doesn’t have a fix html or any html stipping that isn’t as heavy handed as remove everything. I want to keep some of my styling so I am adding this)

My Dilemma; What Technology to Pursue

Mon, 21 Nov 2016 00:00:00 +0000

Be warned, this is a rant.

I have a Dilemma about what to focus on learning. I will always explore technology. I will always study, this is my nature. As God has built us, I will always work. This is not a question of what tech I will use here and there. Or what tech I will dabble in as an aside. I need another focus, I have been doing Drupal and php for a long time –now is not time to move on, just time to hedge my speciality.

Lets take a look at webVR with AFrame

Mon, 24 Oct 2016 00:00:00 +0000

Do you remember that time when you tried to find a Javascript library only to find the wrong Javascript library with the same name. Well that happened when I was looking for A-Frame. Just so you know we are not talking about the slightly older MVC Javascript framework named AFrame; today, we are going to be talking about Mozilla’s WebVR library A-Frame.

What is A-Frame

A-Frame is an open-source web framework for building virtual reality experiences on the web. We can use A-Frame to build VR web page using only some custom markup. Under the hood, A-Frame uses the threejs framework. A-Frame was built to make virtual reality more accessible to the web community and to kick-start the WebVR content ecosystem. It is easy to learn and extensible, allowing us to quickly prototype Virtual Reality experiences. A-Frame makes WebVR accessible to content creators and not just cutting edge developers.

a new simple reading rogue like

Fri, 30 Sep 2016 00:00:00 +0000

My kid is smart™

I am going to say what every parent says, my kid is smart™. We read to her all the time and she loves it. We have been reading to her all her life. Now it’s time for her to start to learn to read, and we are struggling. She isn’t struggling, we (her parents) are struggling. This is because of the limited amount of material there is in this space. My daughter has a memory that is amazing; she “reads” her Arthur books to us word for word. This is because she has them memorized. Normally this happens after a single reading. Now that we are having her read she is doing the same thing. After one time through she is no longer reading –she is reciting.

Basic Hello World with composer and php

Tue, 16 Aug 2016 17:40:00 +0000

Getting started with composer

I want this to be an introduction to using Composer. If you are looking for more information about using Drupal with Composer then you should checkout the official composer facade doc page on drupal.org.

I will not be talking about publishing to Packagist. My php is nearly always for Drupal, and as such, if I publish anything it will most likely be to a project on drupal.org. In the end I will philosophize about Drupal and Composer, but we will start with the composer basics.

Semantic Git

Fri, 27 May 2016 00:00:00 +0000

Git is a great tool for managing source control. Git flow is a great workflow for working with git branches and tags. Semantic versioning is a great way for labeling and cataloging version dependence. If we put them together then we will have a dependency system that is reenforced by workflow that is reenforced by a dependency system. This is a circular dependency that is good.

Semantic git-flow

Background

skip TLDR;

Simplify Drupal 8 field value calls

Mon, 28 Mar 2016 00:00:00 +0000

Things change, it’s a fact of life; even more so it’s a fact of a web developer’s life.

In semantic versioned frameworks every new major version brings new api and discards the old apis. Like ripping off a band-aid, this is an excruciatingly painful experience that will eventually bring forward a less painful future. Thus, it has been with the change from Drupal 7 to Drupal 8.x.

Get the title of a node

Let load a node and return the title.

Lets plan a new Arduino based video game console

Tue, 22 Dec 2015 00:00:00 +0000

WHY make an new old video game system!?!

I saw this video.

These videos beg the question; How do I stop my kids from being like this?

When it’s easier to build something in Minecraft than in the real world. How can I keep my kids interested in the physical world when everything is becoming digital.

This got me thinking about how the older generation used to talk about the “push button” generation. And it got me thinking about my kids, a generation behind the generation that has every user interface purpose built for ease of use. Everything I see built today (hardware or software) is about as easy as it can be. Usually nothing more than a single “GO” button.

Altering Entity Field Querys for JOINS ORs and Profit

Wed, 11 Nov 2015 00:00:00 +0000

One of my favorite features from Drupal 7 is the EntityFieldQuery. The power of the EntityFieldQuery is a well known thing, and I a have written about extending EntityFieldQueries with subqueries before. This time I will go into extending the query as a query object, using Drupal’s hook and alter architecture.

Simple EntityFieldQuery

For our example we will start with a simple EntityFieldQuery for getting a list of nodes.


  $query = new EntityFieldQuery();
  $query->entityCondition('entity_type', 'node')
    ->entityCondition('bundle', 'activity_set');

  $result = $query->execute();

  if (isset($result['node'])) {
    $activity_sets = node_load_multiple(array_keys($result['node']));
    $activity_sets = node_view_multiple($activity_sets);
  }

Now lets say that we want this list to be a keyword filtered list of title or taxonomy. But, we also want to filter this to exclusively show nodes with another taxonomy field’s values. The one taxonomy field is an easy addition.

Add an API to Your Jekyll Blog

Sun, 25 Oct 2015 00:00:00 +0000

I really like github pages. I built my blog on it, even though I host it myself. When friends and family ask for me to build them a site I will point them to github pages. Markdown is so easy, liquid is so easy. What isn’t easy is dynamic lists of content. A simple list of related content isn’t as easy. Sure there are ways, but I want to learn Reactjs –so I will build it with that. That will require a RESTful API for my content.

Reflecting on Elixir and Phoenix

Fri, 09 Oct 2015 12:02:17 +0000

The New Hotness

I read a post recently that had the click bait title “Is Drupal Dying?” Ironically I read this while attending ElixirConf. The basis of that post was clients asking for the next thing –expecting Drupal to be old and busted in five years.

I am at ElixirConf because I see great potential in Elixir, Erlang, and Phoenix. I expect it to be the next big thing and for it to help provide a scalable platform for highly available, highly scalable, and interactive / dynamic websites.

Modern Drupal7 Site Building Tools

Tue, 22 Sep 2015 00:00:00 +0000

Why build a site with Drupal 7

Drupal8 is nearly out making Drupal 7 look like it isn’t an appealing choice. However, Drupal 7 is still a contender for the conviences 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.

The Modules

I know, I know, many of these modules are not new and this isn’t a list of everything someone will need to build a site (that subject has been done to death); this is a list of modules that allow site builders and someone with some front-end skill to build complicated sites with little to no custom module code.

Add Some Style to Your JavaScript Log

Thu, 10 Sep 2015 00:00:00 +0000

Skip the fluff

Backstory

Anytime I want to show off what the web can do with a simple blog I have to pull up this awesome site. I was on A Very Cool Site about Hackery, Math & Design, and the question was asked “how did he do that?”

So it was time to open my console. This is what I found.

Which lead to the question “how did he do that?”

Step One on replacing Jekyll, make yaml work

Sun, 26 Jul 2015 00:00:00 +0000

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.

YAML Parsing

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 …

I like Jekyll, but is it necessary?

Mon, 15 Jun 2015 00:00:00 +0000

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.

Need a join in an EntityFieldQuery, how about a subquery?

Wed, 10 Jun 2015 00:00:00 +0000

I saw this over at stackexchange and I had to write about it.

Shaddap and give me the code:

$query = new EntityFieldQuery();
$query->entityCondition('entity_type', 'user');

$roles_subquery = db_select('users_roles', 'ur');
$roles_subquery->fields('ur', array('uid'));
$roles_subquery->condition('rid', $my_role_id);

$query->propertyCondition('uid', $roles_subquery, 'IN');

In case you do not want to click the link I put in the opening paragraph. That is the code.

What was the problem?

This is the question.

I thought this was an easy task, yet there does not seem to be a Drupal-method for this. I came as far as knowing I have to use EntityFieldQuery for this - because the API said conditions for user_load_multiple() are deprecated.

Setting Up Jenkins on 12.04

Tue, 19 May 2015 00:00:00 +0000

What I have noticed, is that every step by step for installing Jenkins on Ubuntu 12.04 is currently wrong. It is wrong because Jenkins recently began to require Java 1.7 instead of 1.6.

I was able to find one saving grace. This site gave a great step by step on installing Jenkins –which I am going to condense for you all here.

Install the correct JAVA RTE

sudo apt-get purge openjdk*
sudo apt-get install python-software-properties
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:webupd8team/java
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install oracle-java7-installer
java -version

The output of the last command will say something like Java version 1.7.blah blah blah

Setting a default value for a link or url field in Drupal 7

Mon, 04 May 2015 00:00:00 +0000

So everyone who does drupal development should know by now about hook_alter the form api and the setting of default values.

In case you don’t I suggest reading these pages first:

Normally these things are just all well and good, do something like.

<?php
/**
 * Implements hook_form_alter().
 */
function some_modules_form_alter(&$form, &$form_state, $form_id) {
  $form['field_element']['#default_value'] = "some value";
}

Easy right? Easy, this unless you find yourself altering a compound element. A compound element is a form element that could potentially have multiple fields. A very common one is the link field. The link field could have (optionally) several different form elements depending on the settings of the form field. (All of this is assuming this is an entity edit form that is generated by Drupal’s field system)

Drupal or Wordpress? Why not Jekyll.

Tue, 27 Jan 2015 00:00:00 +0000

If you want a blog then you might be tempted to use Wordpress over a more complicated Drupal based site. However, more recently I have to ask why should anyone even really need Wordpress. A far simpler aprouch is a program called Jekyll. Noticed I didn’t call Jekyll a Content Management System.

So if Jekyll isn’t a CMS then what is it? Jekyll is a “blog aware” static site generator. The way it works is content editor can write the content and put it into the folder and then tell Jekyll to generate the site. Jekyll will generate the site in html files, just like in the before-time.

WebGL with three.js

Sat, 15 Nov 2014 00:00:00 +0000

Everything is moving away from the compiled native app and over to a more naturally cross platform ehh, platform: the web browser. While this has the advantage of (those not using IE) to have the same experience no matter what platform the site (hence to forth to be known as the webapp) is running on. This does still have some limitations. One relitively new api that has come out of this is WebGL

Creating screen-reader friendly read more links

Tue, 06 May 2014 00:00:00 +0000

Over the course of my career I have worked on more than a fair share of higher-eduation 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] (http://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG20/). The WebCAG, 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 WebCAG at some point, but this article is about strictly an incompatability between what the designer/UX people want and what the WebCAG says about “READ MORE” links. Specifically WCAG 2.0 SC 2.4.4. this states that any link needs to have context.

Utilizing Front End CSS Design Paradigms In Drupal

Fri, 24 Jan 2014 00:00:00 +0000

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

Creating Auto Submitting Forms with Drupal's Form API

Tue, 26 Nov 2013 00:00:00 +0000

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).

My use case was a semi-typical one: have the input from one select list affect the options in another select list. Here is my wireframe: [insert wireframe here]

This could be done in any number of ways including:

css less sass oocss drycss bem front end css design paradigm smacss down

Thu, 21 Nov 2013 00:00:00 +0000

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.

Object Oriented CSS

OOCSS has several principles that it is built upon.

Support should not be based on Marketshare

Sun, 06 Oct 2013 00:00:00 +0000

In web development IE has been the bane of front-end developers everywhere. For a long time it was IE6, and now it is IE8/9 that give the most grief. Every browser has its little issues here and there. Little quirks that make us developers need to test in every conceivable situation. Specifically it is that browsers do things their own way (for better or worse); they may or may not conform to standards and they may do somethings that are completely non-standard.

Back from DrupalConLA (A postmortem)

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

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 commut on public transportation. Ever time I found a 20 mile commute would lead to a 3 hour and 5 transfer bus rout. I was simply a fact that nowhere that I needed to go was a place the bus wanted to take me.