We’ve all been there. You just got through explaining a simple process or system flow (well, simple to you), but everyone around you has glazed looks in their eyes. Another time, someone said they understood but when they repeated it back, they clearly didn’t. Other times, people fully understand after a significant amount of effort, … Continue reading An Architect’s Best Friend: The Flow Diagram
Web SSO across multiple subdomains using the Magic Cookie Recipe
One of the greatest things about the web is that it’s stateless. One of the worst things about the web is that it’s stateless. To deal with this, Lou Montulli built in “cookies” as a feature of Netscape in 1994. This was a great way to allow browsers to store a bit of information that … Continue reading Web SSO across multiple subdomains using the Magic Cookie Recipe
Theming Field Collections in Drupal 7
Field collections is a great module that extends your Drupal site capabilities by allowing you to have “groups” of fields. This becomes extremely useful when you need multiple groupings of fields. If you’re a Drupal developer, you know how valuable this can be. If you’ve used Field Collections in the past, you know how frustrating … Continue reading Theming Field Collections in Drupal 7
A Tale of Two Platforms—Contributing to Competing Open Source Platforms
I’ve been a long-time developer of WordPress and Drupal. WordPress since version 2.6 and Drupal since version 6. Both platforms have their pros and cons; both platforms have their place in the CMS world. While I typically use WordPress for small to medium size websites that rely on limited, registered user interactions, I use Drupal … Continue reading A Tale of Two Platforms—Contributing to Competing Open Source Platforms
Drupal Module: Mini Blocks
The Mini Blocks module allows administrators to create simple key/value elements similar to typical Drupal Blocks, but with named keys rather than auto-increment integers.
WordPress Plugin: Similar Posts Ontology
The following is a WordPress contributed plugin. You can download it here: Similar Posts Ontology. Does your website utilize categories and tags? Does it use custom taxonomies? If so, this plugin will find similar content based on all your taxonomies. There are two ways to show related posts within your page. The first way to … Continue reading WordPress Plugin: Similar Posts Ontology
Fun With Internet Jargon And Lingo
Being in any industry brings its own set of jargon – most of it is uninteresting and only understandable to those in who’ve been around a while, but every once and a while, some of the jargon can be funny, geeky, or whimsical. What follows is a list of some of the best jargon and lingo of the Internet development industry. Some you may have heard before, but some you probably haven’t.
Clean Up A Hacked WordPress Site
Recently, a colleague contacted me saying his WordPress instance had been hacked and asked for suggestions on how to clean it up. This got me thinking about how many articles and blogs I read regarding being proactive about security, but how few I’ve read about cleaning up your site if it’s been infected.
Smartphone Comparisons – The Dilema
I’ve stated before that I believe comparisons like this are unnecessary on mobile devices (for example, a faster processor on a phone doesn’t make a phone better if there are no apps that you use that can take advantage of it), however with recent comparisons I’ve noticed many problems.
Read Facebook Feeds In PHP
So you want to read a Facebook feed in your PHP application but you’re running into trouble. If you’re like me you probably spent hours pulling your hair out trying to figure out what the issue is when your code looks perfectly fine.