Blog Posts

Image credit: "Paardenmolen bobbejaanland". Wikipedia

Confession time: I used to think carousels were a good idea and I was wrong.

If you haven't seen it yet: http://shouldiuseacarousel.com/ demonstrates through annoying use of a carousel, exactly why you should never use a carousel on a website.

The site explains why carousels are a bad idea, but why did I think they were a good idea? My belief was based on the idea that the carousel makes more use of the limited screen real estate by putting more content in the same number of pixels. "Real estate" is a dated term, and the whole idea comes from the flawed idea of keeping content "above the fold".

I will be attending the first Drupalcon in Latin America.

Image: NASA - Walt Disney and Werner von Braun

Web development is hard... but like the idiom says, "it's not rocket science".

But what if it was? Imagine this: Your team has been toiling for months and it's just a week from the launch of the Neptune probe. You're busy checking and rechecking the launch details when you get the call from the marketing manager: "Sorry to do this to you guys, but there's a few last minute changes. No big deal, I'm sure you can handle it before you go home tonight."

Image credit: Luc De Leeuw

Back in the 90's when the web was fresh and new and full of promise, we imagined information shared freely around the globe in a technical utopia. Our lives would be immeasurably better and everyone would share cat photos and live in harmony. What happened? Spam happened. (At least if you ask me.)

I've done back-of-the-envelope calculations and figured that I've lost thousands of dollars to spam over the years. Not to some fake Nigerian prince, but in lost productivity. Today, I've got email spam to a manageable level, but I've seen the rise in comment spam on this blog. I like to keep comments open and not require registration or Disqus, but lately I've been needing to clear out the spam every few days. What to do?

Image credit: Willi Heidelbach

I may have turned into a Drupal curmudgeon. The signs were already there... I don't install WYSIWYG editors unless I have to. More and more I choose to write code rather than install a module.

I had been using the Google Fonts module and I wanted to switch fonts. There was a problem with the new font for some reason—I spent about 30 minutes troubleshooting before I gave up and decided to just do it manually.