Web Development

What the heck happened to cascadingStyle.net?

Submitted by Brian McMurray on Mon, 01/25/2010 - 21:59

As you may or may not have noticed, oh faithful readers, cascadingStyle has been languishing for quite some time now. It's been over a year since I last posted! To make matters worse, I suffered a catastrophic hosting failure and lost everything but the database for this site and the site was down for nearly a month completely.

With a new host, the site is back up and running and the content is restored. Commenting is disabled for now but should be coming back soon, and a temporary theme has been dropped in until I have some time to redesign.

Look for more posts soon!

Thanks for bearing with me,

Brian McMurray

Making SMS Work For You -- Building SMS Actions for Drupal

Submitted by Brian McMurray on Mon, 08/18/2008 - 12:57

At the MIT Mobile Experience Lab, we are doing a lot of interesting projects to connect people more with the places they visit, the people they know (or don't know), and information, with an emphasis on helping people while they are mobile. Since an increasing number of mobile people carry mobiles, a lot of my work has been working on ways to create connection by using a cellphone.

Lately in particular I have been working with SMS. The SMS Framework for Drupal is pretty awesome, but we needed better two-way communication. We aren't trying to just let people post to a Drupal site via SMS, we needed to be able to send commands to Drupal via SMS to trigger activity in the site and receive feedback.

I drew a lot of the design for my SMS actions from my experience working with the Services module and it functions in a very similar way. Contrib modules register their own actions (keywords which are triggered off the first word of an incoming SMS) and specify callback methods for those actions. The callbacks then process the text and can fire back responses to the user or simply just perform some action in the system.

Busy Summer

Submitted by Brian McMurray on Mon, 07/14/2008 - 09:28

Steve and I have been insanely busy this summer so far and so we've been very quiet here lately. We are going to try to change that with some posts about what all we've been up to (when we can talk about it).

We have both been neck-deep in Drupal for the past several months. Most recently, I've been writing some custom modules and working on integration with the SMS Framework module to build a really awesome prototype system for a project here at the MIT Mobile Experience Lab. We'll be running our prototype tests later on this summer and I'll write more about what we're doing then.

Drupal BootCamp Wrap-Up and Our Top 10 Drupal 5 Modules

Submitted by Brian McMurray on Wed, 05/21/2008 - 12:36

A few weeks ago, Steve and I organized a Drupal BootCamp here at Bradley University that went very, very well. About 40 people attended. Steve and I tag-teamed the morning sessions on how to get started using Drupal to build a simple website, step-by-step.

The Campaign for a Bradley Renaissance: A Multimedia Introduction

Submitted by Steven Merrill on Fri, 04/25/2008 - 07:54

Since the Campaign for a Bradley Renaissance has now been officially opened, I can start talking about the gala kickoff event, which Bradley's Multimedia and Theatre programs collaborated on to produce.

I took point on a good deal of the interactive portions of the night: alumni text messaging onto the big screens, an interactive "Bradley College Bowl" quiz app that pitted tables against one another to answer BU trivia, and some apps to display photographs that were being taken and delivered to us behind the scenes with WiFi. We also built a special iPhone interface that showed photos being taken at the event and so that iPhone users wouldn't have to use SMS messages to participate.

Curious about Drupal? Find out more at Drupal Boot Camp Champaign!

Submitted by Brian McMurray on Tue, 04/01/2008 - 12:25

Coming up this Friday, April 4th, 2008, the Central Illinois Drupal Meet Up Group in conjunction with the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign is hosting a Drupal Boot Camp on UIUC's campus. If you have heard of Drupal but never used it, feel burdened by the learning curve, or are just interested in learning more about Drupal, this is the event for you! Did I mention yet that this is FREE?

Build a jQuery Lightbox Image Gallery by Changing One Line

Submitted by Steven Merrill on Thu, 03/13/2008 - 12:01

We're back from Boston DrupalCon 2008 and busy catching up with everything else. The site that I'm using this technique on will launch soon, but I wanted to share it now. Also, check out my Technorati Profile!

Drupal's Image module provides you with a pretty no-frills image gallery out of the box. In a site I was recently building, I wanted to present large imagery, but my main content column inside the site was somewhat cramped, and so I decided that some sort of Lightbox / Thickbox effect was in order to present the images to the user.

Luckily, with two extra modules and changing a single line of template.php code, you can get your gallery up and running with Lightbox.

Druplash and Druplex Presentation at DrupalCon Boston 2008 Went Great

Submitted by Brian McMurray on Wed, 03/05/2008 - 22:40

Today was Steve's and my presentation on how to build content-managed Flash sites using Drupal. I'd just like to say thanks to everyone who came out and for the great questions. We've posted our slides as a PDF up on the session page at the DrupalCon Boston site and you can download them here as well.

Druplash and Druplex at DrupalCon Boston 2008!

Submitted by Brian McMurray on Thu, 02/21/2008 - 17:04

It's official, Steve's and my presentation titled "Druplash and Druplex: Content-Managed Flash and Flex sites powered by Drupal" has been accepted at DrupalCon Boston 2008. We'll be presenting on strategies to create easy-to-maintain Flash and Flex sites which degrade nicely for iPhone and mobile users and maximum search engine friendliness using the Drupal content management framework.

The presentation will contain an overview of historical problems with 100% Flash websites, how with a variety of popular free toolsets most of these problems can now be overcome, different ways to get dynamic data into Flash and Flex, how the Web Services layer of Drupal makes it really easy to get data into Flash and Flex, and show some demo sites we've been producing.

Steve and I are both really excited to be heading off to our first DrupalCon and to even be presenting there!

Flex and Remote Objects: Using the Same Remote Method For Different Purposes

Submitted by Brian McMurray on Tue, 02/12/2008 - 16:39

There are a lot of really great tutorials out on Drupal.org and Adobe's sites which describe methods for using Flex with Drupal through Services and AMFPHP. (For a list of some tutorials, I'll post references at the bottom of the post) Remoting in Flex is super easy with the <mx:RemoteObject> but the one thing I noticed with all of the tutorials is that they all describe just one way of using RemoteObjects and Methods to get data from Drupal.

Imagine, if you will, that you have built a super awesome Drupal site heavily using the Views module. Now you want to tap into all of that data to create a Flex application, whether it's a new Druplex front-end for your entire site or maybe just a simple management tool.

Syndicate content