Here are some tools and methods for running an accessibility audit on your site. This can be a little bit easier if you already have a design system or component library in place, but it isn't necessary to gain some insights into how your site can be more accessible. The way I usually do it [...]
Launching a college news site with Drupal
SUNY Oswego recently switched from a legacy install of Expression Engine to integrating with the rest of our web platform and using Drupal hosted by Acquia to "re-design" our new News site. Hopefully this post will help others thinking of migrating to Drupal and provide some helpful tips if you're already in the process of [...]
Crafting a design system for higher education
As a front-end developer at a University, I can see first hand why design systems can be such an integral part of an organization's communication (and marketing) strategy. This post aims to explain the reasons why large organizations, including higher education, can benefit from having a robust design system in place. What process is like [...]
What’s the difference between style guides, pattern libraries, and design systems?
In my organization, we're trying to implement an integrated marketing plan which will be helped along greatly by a sound design system. In order to implement this properly, a shared vocabulary needed to be created so we could be sure we were referring to the same thing. In this post I do my best to [...]
Using your Android phone as a pet/security camera with IP Cam and Ivideon
My wife and I just got a new puppy and are crate training him. We'd love to know how he's doing if we're not there so I decided to look into some DIY pet-cam solutions. Using the IP webcam app for Android and Ivideon cloud streaming service, I was quickly able to get up and [...]
Basic bash, node, and npm setup on Windows
I never thought this would be something I'd be writing about but it's actually super exciting. This has been a major bane when trying to dev on my Windows machines. A lot of developer tools installation instructions walk you through some terminal commands, then the Windows people are all commenting at the bottom trying to [...]
Playing around with the Drupal 8 JSON API as a data service
I'm familiar with the concepts of REST but have never done anything in practice before. I decided I wanted to end that and start messing with the JSON API in Drupal 8. It was surprisingly easy to get going with because of the incredible resources out there. In this multi-part series, I'm going to explore [...]
Starting a Vimeo embed at a given timestamp using the JS API
Vimeo by far provides the best hosted video embed service out there by far, in my opinion. This post explains how to change the behavior of a Vimeo embed to skip to a given timestamp when the user plays the video. We'll use data attributes to store the start time in the HTML. Why would [...]
Embedding Drupal 7 Views with the Paragraphs module
The Paragraphs module has been super helpful to developers and site builders who want to provide content editors with a solution to create amazing looking sites without having to know HTML. I'm currently using Panels/Panelizer and Fieldable Panels Panes in the Drupal build at work to allow content editors to create the pages they want. [...]
2016 year end review
This is becoming one of my favorite things to do around the time of each new year. It's a great opportunity to look back at the past year and take inventory of what has been done and reflect on what could've been better. 2016 was the year of some Drupal deep-diving. I learned a lot [...]