Web Development Blog

Building a Product on top of Drupal

Kathleen — Tue, 16 Feb 2010 08:52:01 -0800

For the past year, all of my Drupal work has been devoted to building a product on top of Drupal. In the beginning of the year, I worked with the Science Collaboration Framework to create PD Online. For the past 7 months, I have been with GoingOn building a social education platform on top of Drupal. I hope I will have the opportunity to tell you everything I have learned at Drupalcon in the Building a Product on top of Drupal session held by Tao Starbow and I.

Structured Array of all US Universities and Colleges

Kathleen — Wed, 13 Jan 2010 18:05:16 -0800

While working on a project, I came to the conclusion that I needed to have an array of all colleges and universities within the United States. I searched around and came across this website which contained only an unordered list of universities in an HTML page. I extracted all of the information and generated an array with the university's domain name as the key.

Of course after I completed this, I realized I didn't need it. D'oh!

Tales from a web developer

Kathleen — Mon, 01 Jun 2009 15:09:32 -0700

I do web development locally. I have a rather powerful computer, dual core 2.5Ghz processor and 4GB of RAM. The problem is... my computer is a laptop. As such, it can suffer from overheating problems.

Last night, I decided I wanted to test to ensure a mass user mail feature worked as expected. The following exchange occurred on IRC:

Excited about Design 4 Drupal Boston

Kathleen — Sun, 24 May 2009 08:34:09 -0700

Since I live in New England, and I adore any Drupal social events, I am of course attending Design 4 Drupal this June! I'm excited to have another large event to meet up with and talk with other Drupal enthusiasts.

I am eager to contribute what I can to help designers maximize the Drupal theme layer, so I submitted three sessions: introduction to version control, sustainable theming and image upload for content.

Get the Drupalcon Schedule in your Google Calendar or iCal

Kathleen — Fri, 27 Feb 2009 12:06:00 -0800

I've put the entire Drupalcon Schedule into a Google Calendar. This allows you to access it on your smart phone or any other internet-enabled device. I am also putting in social events, with links and addresses (which can automatically be linked to a map). If there are any changes to the schedule, I will be able to make the update through my phone as soon as I hear about it.

The URIs: iCal, HTML, XML

A review of the current state of TinyMCE, FCKeditor and WYSIWYG API

Kathleen — Sun, 18 Jan 2009 20:33:50 -0800

When it comes to using a WYSIWYG editor in Drupal, TinyMCE and FCKeditor are the heavy weights in the contributed module arena. TinyMCE seems to have more supported plugins and modules, while FCKeditor seems to have the community's love (as much as any web developer can possibly love a WYSIWYG editor, that is). To complicate things, Drupal is moving towards using the WYSIWYG API module as the future for WYSIWYG editing, requiring more to consider than simply the TinyMCE (or TinyTinyMCE) and FCKeditor modules.

Learning more about Staging and Deployment

Kathleen — Sun, 18 Jan 2009 13:55:45 -0800

Staging and deployment is a vital part of any project, Drupal or not. As I've discussed previously, staging and deploying to production is particularly difficult for all the Content Management Systems out there that intermingle content and configuration settings within the database - and Drupal is definitely one of them.

Review of the HTC G1's Hardware

Kathleen — Fri, 14 Nov 2008 07:38:19 -0800

Since the G1, running on Google Android, is so new, I'll discuss some of the other points about the phone for anyone interested. I previously discussed the features that sold me on the G1. Everyone is very excited about the Android operating system, however, there have been serious misgivings about the HTC G1 hardware that is running this first generation Android.

People seem to be confused about the "chin" on the phone where the bottom part tilts slightly.

The Android Marketplace: A review of cool apps

Kathleen — Wed, 12 Nov 2008 13:01:06 -0800

The marketplace is coming out with really awesome apps. A lot of the popular apps for the iPhone are also available for G1. These apps take advantage of the internet connection, Google maps, GPS and tilting detection, making some really innovative stuff. They are all rather new since the G1 only just came out - but if they are great already, they will be awesome in a year!

I am hoping that the open source nature of Android, in addition to the market place starting out free will foster more free and open source applications.

Google's RC30 update for the Android was not to prevent Jailbreaking, but to fix a critical bug

Kathleen — Sun, 09 Nov 2008 11:19:10 -0800

Last week people discovered a means to access Android as a super user, effectively allowing them to "jailbreak" the phone. Saturday morning, RC30 was pushed out that closed this ability to access the phone as root.

Some people seem to think that this update was to solely prevent jailbreaking the phone, and are pretty upset that Google appears to be acting evil by closing down people's attempts to use their phone with open source software in any means they wish.