Category Development

The Business Case for Responsive Web Design

Lately the team has been spending quite a bit of time solidifying our mobile web offering. There are many tools available to execute a mobile web strategy and each have their strengths. Mobile-specific websites and apps have until recently been the go-to options whether provisioned through a 3rd party mobile service provider like mobify or custom built by your web team. There has, however, been much recent buzz about another option.

Drupal Performance Tuning ++

Evan wrote a good article about the various high level options you have when looking at performing some lightweight drupal performance tuning. Good if you're just looking to optimize page load times and resource utilization on a server you may not have command line access to. What I'm going to share is the learning we've done over the course of many Drupal deployments in VPS and Dedicated hosting environments where we DO have access to some of the more low level options and settings made available with root or administrator access.

Delivery Methods

How does one send concepts, wireframes, and/or mockups to a client for review? Email? Post it in the PM system of choice? Print them out on a $40 inkjet and add a staple or two? While all the methods are common and accepted these days, none do a very good job of gathering very specific feedback, especially when face-to-face interaction is almost a luxury these days.

Drupal Performance Tuning

Performance problems are a bit of an embarrassment of riches. It's great that your site is getting a lot of visitors, but are all those visitors slowing down your site or potentially causing crashes? How do you go about resolving this issue? Unfortunately there's no hard-and-fast answer to performance problems, and examining the shear breadth and depth of the topic would result in the longest and most boring blog post ever. However I will attempt to outline the general strategies you might follow to diagnose and solve problems.

Working with Drupal's private files

On a recent project at Fuse we had to provide access to file uploads through Drupal only to users that were authenticated. One way to do this is to use the private files feature that Drupal core comes with. Something we hadn't done until now.

Quick tips: applying Drupal security updates to your site

This is a quick post to go through some of the important factors to consider when applying security updates to your Drupal site. It's not always as easy as just downloading the updates and applying them. I've assembled a list of things we consider when we are updating our client sites. For our clients that are reading this post, this is what we do for the $$ you pay us each month! Before you update

A Move to Responsive Web Design

Responsive web design is the next big thing in the web world, but why does it have designers and developers doing the happy dance? Let's take a look at what it is and what it means for the future of web development. The concept of responsive web design was pioneered by Ethan Marcotte in his article "Responsive Web Design" which appeared on A List Apart in May of last year.

Theme Your Drupal Forms Continued

Theming forms is always a little bit of a handful; designers like to create slick looking forms with rounded corners, drop shadows and custom looking form elements. Unfortunately it's not always an easy task to bring the design to life, but with a bit of css and jquery it is very easy to get your drupal forms looking a little less Drupal-ey.

Storytelling for a Web-Made World: Open Data and the Future

On Friday May 6th, I attended the Storytelling for a Web-Made World presentation at the Museum of Vancouver, an event for Make Web, Not War. Here's what went down, along with some thoughts from me at the end. Omar Rashid, Director of Municipal Government and Public Safety for Microsoft Canada was first to speak, discussing storytelling and how, over time, stories can be lost to history, forgotten by time and shrinking populations.