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joaquin's picture

When it comes to web development, it can be tough to be the last person to touch something

Do you remember that Art Director who burst into your office with a crazy deadline for a print piece and then let you figure out who to actually make it happen? Or the salesperson who sold a client something that couldn't possibly be delivered? Chances are if you been in the design field long enough you've got at least a dozen of these stories. These days, if you are a web designer I've got bad news for you: you may actually be that person. Read More…

sam's picture

Dylan Wilder-Tack, Drupal Security Team Member

When discussing the benefits of open-source frameworks (especially Drupal), I've often heard, "But if everyone has access to the source code, how secure can it possibly be?" My standard response would be to discuss the platforms maturity and how it's been hardened by years of real world use. Read More…

vosechu's picture

Clearing the state of a actionscript 3 app (aka, globals are eeevil)

Imagination time: Imagine for a moment that you have an app, it has one button and one little window. When you click the button it changes the text within the window to something else. Now, when you get into flash development it seems like the easiest and clearest way to do this is to wipe out the contents in the window, but you would be wrong for thinking so. While it is the most obvious I intend to prove to you that to do so is both slower and prevents you from turning on the juice later with caching. On to story time: We're building an app for the OpenPeak tabletop device, it's totally rad and you'll love it I promise but that's really not the point of the post. When we started the app we had what I considered a pretty awesome solution, we'd clear the state, build it onto a global, then write the global out to a window on the app. It actually worked great for a long time until we decided to start doing some caching where it became wildly apparent that I had actually written all three parts of that app dead wrong. It's pretty exciting to do something wrong enough that you can write about it later. :) Read More…

vosechu's picture

The Value of 10% Time in Improving Your Life and Productivity

Convincing people that 10% time is valuable can sometimes be a chore but I'm probably one of the luckiest guys in the country because my bosses actually want to do 10% time, but aren't quite sure how to get to the point where we can afford it. But more than just being able to afford you it's important to convince yourself, your coworkers, and your bosses that you can't afford not to do something like 10% time. Read More…

joaquin's picture

Design has a Big Impact on Web Development Project Cost

You know that button on the website you want to change? The one that looks like it was designed in 1999? Guess what? It was designed in 1999, and so was the underlying technology. As a design element it's ripe for change, so in your new designs you change it. The only problem is that little change adds a week to development time. Read More…

scott's picture

Drupal Theming 101: Theme Developer Module

If you haven't already heard of it, the Theme Developer is a great tool. It works like firebug, but for Drupal. You can click any element on the page to inspect it, and the Theme Developer window will show you what template files and functions were used to render it, and give you suggestions on which files you can edit to affect it. For a newbie Drupal themer, this can be a god-send. Read More…

scott's picture

Drupal Theming 101: How to Remove System Stylesheets

When you first start creating a Drupal theme, you might be frustrated by the large number of stylesheets that are included by default in your theme -- especially if you're creating a Zen sub-theme. Most of the documentation suggests that you override these styles in your own themename.css file. You can certainly do this, but it can make managing your CSS a nightmare, trying to keep straight what lines are your own code, and which are just there to override some default Drupal style you didn't want. Read More…

joaquin's picture

What Every Designer Should Know About Development

As someone who has worked in the web industry for over 10 years, I've seen a lot of friction between designers and developers. Though there are rare individuals who act as both developer and designer, when a project is sufficiently complex and or the timeline is compressed enough, it often requires cooperation by people who specialize in one or the other discipline. This often means a struggle between vision and execution. Read More…

vosechu's picture

Facebook API Terminology

The toad just finished a small project involving the Facebook API and by far the most confusing aspect of the project was the terminology regarding the many, many different API's and what each one actually does. I thought this merited a write-up and I hope you find it helpful. FBML, Frames and the Canvas Read More…

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