Frank Robert Anderson

I am a Developer who does web good and likes to do other stuff good too.

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Getting XDebug working with the Zed editor, starring Claude

Written on January 5, 2026

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.

How to play gloom with a 52 card deck

Written on March 30, 2018

I played the Edward Gorey insired 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.

Why DrupalCon

Written on February 20, 2018

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.

Switching to Celsius from Fahrenheit for normal people

Written on April 23, 2017

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

My Dilemma; What Technology to Pursue

Written on November 21, 2016

I need to know what to study, not that I am board or have lots of time. I just need a new tool in my belt.

Lets take a look at webVR with AFrame

Written on October 24, 2016

I should continue my series on Machine Generated text or Composer or Drupal, but this just looks like too much fun. WebVR with AFrame.

a new simple reading rogue like

Written on September 30, 2016

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.

Basic Hello World with composer and php

Written on August 16, 2016

A Hello World style introduction to Composer.

Semantic Git

Written on May 27, 2016

Using git-flow as a workflow for semantic versioning. This is a circular dependency that is good.

Simplify Drupal 8 field value calls

Written on March 28, 2016

Explore a bit of field fetching with Drupal 8

Lets plan a new Arduino based video game console

Written on December 22, 2015

Why do we need a new game system? Because everything made today does too much.

Altering Entity Field Querys for JOINS ORs and Profit

Written on November 11, 2015

EntityFieldQueries are one of the most useful things in Drupal 7, using tags we can get around some of the limitations of using them.

Add an API to Your Jekyll Blog

Written on October 25, 2015

Without adding any non-Github pages approved plugins, build a RESTfull api for your blog by adding a json endpoint.

Reflecting on Elixir and Phoenix

Written on October 9, 2015

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.

Modern Drupal7 Site Building Tools

Written on September 22, 2015

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

Written on September 10, 2015

Style can be passes as a parameter to the console.log function.

Step One on replacing Jekyll, make yaml work

Written on July 26, 2015

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?

Written on June 15, 2015

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.

Setting Up Jenkins on 12.04

Written on May 19, 2015

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.

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

Written on May 4, 2015

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.

Drupal or Wordpress? Why not Jekyll.

Written on January 27, 2015

Are you fedup with the offerings of Drupal, Wordpress, and other big CMS's? Then maybe a return to roots is in order. Let look at Jekyll

WebGL with three.js

Written on November 15, 2014

Did you know that 3D is possible on the web with WEBGL? You did? Oh, well, go checkout Three.js then.

Creating screen-reader friendly read more links

Written on May 6, 2014

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.

Support should not be based on Marketshare

Written on October 6, 2013

Some general thoughts on the how and why of Graceful Degradation and Progressive Enhancement. No tutorials here, more philosophical than functional

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