Innovating Tomorrow -

Web Design Shirts

Matt Farina — Mon, 6 Oct 2008 06:00:00 -0400

Looking for a fun web development shirt? How about a shirt only your CSS and jQuery reading friends will understand? If so, check out the new shirts site WebDesignShirts.com. This site came about because Bob Christenson discovered the domain WebDesignShirts.com wasn't taken and thought the domain was too good of a name to pass up. Two days later a site had been launched and 16 different designs were up.

Drupal fans will see there are more drupal shirts than any other type and the site was built with drupal.

Content You Don't Want To Be Popular

Matt Farina — Fri, 3 Oct 2008 06:00:00 -0400

Resurgence, a ministry of Mars Hill Church built on drupal, had a bad piece of content in their popular content for the day. That would be their Page Not Found page. The landing page you hit when you went to a page on the site that doesn't exist. This page is by no means popular. In fact, this page may be the most unpopular and annoying page on the site. But, it shows us a great opportunity to look at a design flaw.

Note: While I don't know what algorithm they use to calculate the popularity of a page I'm going to assume it's based on page views. This is a common approach to calculating popularity, it's easy to implement, and it best explains how an error page became popular content.

The Algorithm

In reality there are at least 2 design flaws that are involved in an error page becoming popular. First, there is the algorithm that calculates popularity. How should that be counted? A simple assessment is the number of page views. But, this does not make content popular. It means it was viewed many times. One or a few people could have viewed it many times and tipped the scales. This is most likely the cause on the Resurgence website. I imagine a spam bot came through looking for a bunch of pages that don't exist triggering the Page Not Found page to become popular.

A better way to calculate popularity of content would be to take a number of characteristics (e.g., page views, unique visitors, some rating, number of comments, number of unique commenters) and use them to calculate the popularity. Also, remove your error pages from the available popularity options.

How Did It Get There?

The second, and less noticeable, design flaw is that in the sites architecture a person or robot was going to pages that don't exist. Where they pages that used to exist but are now gone? If so, a Page Not Found error is not what they should have seen. Especially one with no description like this one has. Instead an error message letting them know content is gone or moved and some information to help them find what they are looking for.

Free Drupal Theming Workshop

Matt Farina — Thu, 2 Oct 2008 06:00:00 -0400

Want to learn how to build a drupal 6 theme start to finish from scratch in one day? That's the goal of a free drupal theming workshop coming up on October 11th being held just outside of Detroit, Michigan, USA at St. Matthew Lutheran Church. The workshop is being led by Bob Christenson of Mustardseed Media Inc and the Mustardseed Media Video Podcast, a videocast covering drupal development.

Click here for workshop specifics or to sign up for the workshop.

Mustardseed Media Video Podcast

Matt Farina — Tue, 23 Sep 2008 06:00:00 -0400

Mustardseed Media, a company Innovating Tomorrow regularly partners with, recently launched a video podcast about web development focusing in on drupal development. This video podcast is unique compared to the ones I typically see in that it comes out regularly and offers low res and 720p HD resolution videos of each videocast. Plus, it has what might be the best introduction to any of the drupal videocasts I've seen so far.

These episodes don't focus on advanced development. Instead they cover the basic concepts and how tos new developers are asking and looking for.

Some of the recent episodes have focused on Imagefield and Imagecache, the Views Rotator module, module theming, podcasting With drupal 6, and Photoshop reflections.

If you're looking for some short and sweet drupal tutorial videos check out the Mustartseed Media Video Podcast.

Why To Implement Design for Accessibility

Matt Farina — Tue, 16 Sep 2008 05:00:00 -0400

Have you ever wondered who benefits from creating an accessible design? One that meets the needs of people who have impairments like the vision impaired. When I think of people in this situation I usually envision someone who is blind and can't think of many blind people. This can give way to the feeling that there aren't that many people with impairments and on the basis of this it's easy to make designing an accessible site a low priority.

According to the U.S. Census Bureau there are up to 60 million Americans with disabilities that are trying to use a computer to learn and interact on the web. If you do that math that's roughly 20% of the U.S. population. Yet, awareness of this issue seems to be fairly low and many designers are building sites and web applications that aren't usable to this 20%.

Are you still having trouble envisioning who this 20% is? Let's look at one large group. Consider everyone with color blindness. In the U.S. about 7% of men are color blind. In Australia the number is 8% of men. These men, not only have trouble picking out matching clothes but, have trouble reading parts of the screen where different colors point out different things. Take for example a set of links in a blog post. Color them a different color from the rest of the text and remove the underlining (a commonly used technique). Someone without any vision issues can see them fine. Someone with color blindness is likely to miss the link denoted by a different coloring. And there you have an inaccessible design.

So, next time you create a new design or update an existing design consider making it an accessible design. There are a lot more people out there with accessibility issues that you might think.

Who Is Involved In The Drupal Churches Group?

Matt Farina — Mon, 11 Aug 2008 06:00:00 -0400

Since the announcement to get the drupal churches group moving, again, there has been quite an increase in traffic on the site. With members getting involved in other areas of drupal, discussion of specific church use cases, and support questions as just a few of the possible functions for the group to help facilitate it's good to start with a rough understanding where the members of the group fit. In an effort to start gathering this information I've launched two new polls on the group.

If you are a drupal user with your church or a Christian drupal user please swing by the group and take these polls. There polls will only be open for two weeks so there is a limited time to take them.

Drupal Churches Group

Matt Farina — Wed, 6 Aug 2008 06:00:00 -0400

The Drupal Churches Group has grown stale with little activity in the last several months. This group, over on groups.drupal.org, was created on a whim but grew to be in the largest 10% of groups. Now, with a large base of members it sits virtually untapped with a large pool of potential. The question is, what will become of the group?

What does management want?

In an effort to see where the groups manager was interested in taking the group I contacted him. Unfortunately, he is no longer drupaling. Not because drupal doesn't rock. Life has taken him in a different direction and we should wish him the best. But, he did allow me to become the groups manager with an intent to tap into the potential for the good of the kingdom.

What do you want?

The question remains, what will become of the group? Before I make any changes I'd like to hear from the peanut gallery. What are your suggestions? Should the purpose of the group shift? What about the groups layout and design? Should there be a logo? How about a drupal for churches distribution? Is anyone interested in hosting a churches event?

No matter how crazy you think your idea is I'm interested. Even if it's just a desire for the group and not necessarily a change.

Yet Another Drupal Aggregator Setup

Matt Farina — Tue, 5 Aug 2008 06:00:00 -0400

When it comes to aggregating blogs in drupal there are any number of ways to do it (This is a big reason aggregation is being redesigned for the next major version of drupal). Most of these products are piece parts that need to be configured to work and aren't solutions out of the box. That's where the new Profile Blog Information module comes in.

The Profile Blog Information module ties in with the core profile and aggregator modules. Once enabled, fields appear on the users account screen to enter the blog title, url, and feed url. When a feed is entered the aggregator module pulls that feed so it can be displayed on a drupal site.

While this module works out of the box, there are a number of settings available for integration with the profile and aggregator modules.

If you're looking for a simple out of the box solution to pull in users blogs this may be the solution for you. If you're looking for something more advanced check out the SimpleFeed and FeedAPI modules.

Note: The Profile Blog Information module was developed by Innovating Tomorrow for Mustardseed Media.

Drupal 6 Development Can Be A Caching Pain

Matt Farina — Wed, 30 Jul 2008 18:00:00 -0400

Drupal provides some great caching tools to improve page loading performance. Production sites see huge speed increases because of caching. But, when a site is being developed caching can quickly turn into a nightmare. For example, when you add a new theme override function your to template.php file it isn't picked up right away and you may end up banging your head wondering what's going on. Or, when your developing filter code your filtered content may be cached. Going to the performance setting page and clearing the cache is annoying and a work flow problem. So, let's look at a couple simple solutions that can make development a little easier and less painful.

Cache Disable Module

Drupal wiz kid Dmitri Gaskin created the Cache Disable module which does just as it's name suggests. While some solutions clear the cache on every page load this module disables it. During development this is a great tool to use.

Clearing The Cache In Your Code

If you just want to clear part of the cache during development you can use some code snippets to do just that. For example, if you are developing a theme and just don't want the theme information to stay in the cache you could call drupal_rebuild_theme_registry() in your theme to rebuild the theme cache on every page load. A simple way to do this would be to add the following code snippet to the bottom of your page.tpl.php file.

<?php
  drupal_rebuild_theme_registry();
?>

Other cache clearing functions you can use are cache_clear_all(), menu_rebuild(), and drupal_flush_all_caches(), which clears all possible caches including those that contributed modules use with the caching system.

Once the sites are ready for production these functions or modules we added should be removed so we can get all the caching benefits.

Give Your Input To The Next Geeks and God Conference

Matt Farina — Tue, 29 Jul 2008 06:00:00 -0400

We just closed the door on the first Geeks and God conference and the planning has already started for the next conference. We are riding the wave of excitement and energy into planning the future of Geeks and God. The first planning meeting is this coming Friday!

I am looking for your help to make the next conference even more of a success than the first. If you have any thoughts, ideas, or suggestions regarding the next Geeks and God conference please comment on them here before Friday.