Up until October 2012 I’d been to Disney World five times, never with kids. This week that all changed as my wife and I took the kids on our first-ever destination vacation to Disney World. It was a hell of a trip. We went for five days and six nights, staying at the Port Orleans … Read more
The Nuketown7 redesign is finally done. Or rather, it’s finally done enough to launch. Over the next two weeks Nuketown will be on hiatus as I upgrade the site to Drupal 7 and implement the new theme. During the upgrade you can check out The Atomic Age for status updates. That’s my ancient Blogger site, and I’m dusting it off to support the downtime.
We’re almost back to normal after Hurricane Sandy. We got power back Wednesday night, we got our landline, cable, and Internet late Thursday morning, and today the college where I work got power back after being down for most of this week. Easton, Pa. isn’t 100% yet; I have a few friends who still don’t … Read more
Hurricane Sandy has come and gone, living much of Northampton County, Pa. without power. Most of College Hill — including Lafayette College — doesn’t have power, though there are a few streets where the lights are still on.
Two Rivers Brewing in Easton, Pa. has been running a kickstarter for the last month to pay for their new state of the art draft system, which will make sure that their beer is served perfectly. They made their $20,000 goal over the weekend, but there’s still another two days to participate. There are no … Read more
When it comes to operating systems, I’m not an early adopter. Part of this is work — our support for the most recent Mac operating system tends to lag a few months behind the official release as we wait for software and network partners to replace upgrades that run with the OS. I’m also gun … Read more
It’s the little things that kill you. Most of the broad strokes of the Nuketown Redesign are done: I have template for pages, nodes, microcontent, and blocks, and the site renders under the new theme without any major errors. Since last month my work has focused on building out the nooks and cranies of the theme. It’s stuff like block headers, the “read more” links, and sidebar bulleted lists.
In short, the little stuff … and it’s time consuming. Each component takes about two hours to knock out (though in the case of captions for images that’s more like 8 hours … and I’m still not done) as I tweak css and tweak template files. It is satisfying, in that each small piece that I complete brings its own sense of accomplishment but man, there are a lot of pieces.
I was distracted from my theming adventures by needing to re-jigger how Nuketown 7 handles Twitter updates but that landed in a good place.
One of my goals for the Nuketown 7 redesign project was to tightly integrate social media options into it. In particular I wanted to be able to capture all of that microcontent — the quick movie and book reviews, the game news, the retweets — that the site currently misses and incorporate it into the design. The key here isn’t that I’m simply trying to post tweets about new articles; I want to make microcontent an integral part of the site.
To do that the tweets needed to be captured as nodes, which would then allow me to manipulate and display them however I see fit. I accomplished this by creating a “microcontent” content type and then setting up the Feeds module to import tweets from my NuketownSF account via RSS.
Naturally once I got this working Twitter deprecated RSS feeds. As of March 2013, you’ll no longer be able to use them … and Nuketown’s microcontent import would cease to function.
Fortunately I have a Plan B: the Twitter module. When I started building out Nuketown7 I’d considered using this module, but it had two drawbacks:
Nuketown’s redesign project has slowly crept forward for the last year, but it saw a nice surge in progress this summer. First off, I have a solid Drupal 7 foundation for the site, with all of my social media, audio and visual, and content tools chosen and functional. I’ve also learned a heck of a … Read more
I was on the road last week, missing my family terribly and looking forward to getting back home. Oh sure, I had a blast on my trip — I got to hang out with higher education friends as part of Moodle Hack/Doc Fest at Kalamazoo College, I saw two baseball games, and got to watch prices rise and fall at the Kalamazoo Beer Exchange — but I was looking forward to coming home the whole time.