As a front end design fan I like to constantly improve my toolsets.  Two of the tools I use on new projects these days include Bootstrap for SASS and Breakpoint Slicer.  Both can be added to your SASS project with a 'require' line in the config.rb file and then @imported into your scss file. Here's how each helps you ..read more

If you're doing any theming with Drupal, you'll undoubtedly want to implement template suggestions for some of your fields at some point.  Usually you'll have some undesirable formatting, especially in Panels panes.  This post at Drupal.org has a method of how to find the appropriate template suggestion for your panel pane by working in your template.php file with the Devel module and dpm ..read more

I've been making email templates in one way or another for about three years now.  At Acton Institute, we send out a lot of mailings to engage and inform followeres of our nonprofit.  In fact, sending emails is such a routine task for us that I helped automate our process back in early 2013 with a Newsletter Maker app.  The app's sole purpose is to create WYSIWYG content areas as text fields or text areas in a predefined HTML template.  Since it's coded in Rails, fun things can be done like iterating through header CSS in the template and putting it into t ..read more

At work we send a weekly newsletter that has a summary of our blog posts from the last week.  As our blog has grown, this task has started to take a lot more time to manually format each post title and excerpt.  Seeking to automate this process was a goal of mine, as our main post listing is not easily formattable into a newsletter text block without editing ..read more

At last year's Drupalcon in Denver there was an excellent session called Delivering Drupal.  It had to do with the oftentimes painful process of deploying a website to web servers.  This was a huge deep dive session that went into the vast underbelly of devops and production server deployment.  There were a ton of great nuggets and I recommend watching the session recording for serious web developers ..read more

To begin, I would describe myself as all three of the things in the title of this post.  In the past I’ve struggled with weight and food cravings.  The main problem isn’t usually overeating if you have a sedentary lifestyle, but rather the fact that you aren’t moving, exercising, or eating as well as many others do.  If you’re active, you can usually eat a larger amount of food without gaining weight ..read more

If you've heard of VMWare and virtualization, you might be confused when you visit VMWare and see 100 different products offered.  I know I am.  If you're a web developer and want to easily cut through the noise, use VirtualBox by Oracle.  It's an open source alternative for virtualization and it does pretty much anything you need as a web developer that wants to spin up an environment for testing on your own computer.  It also works on both Windows and Mac computers ..read more

Good question. Traditional bread can be around 15g of carbs or more per slice. There are lots of alternatives to bread such as Flatout Light wraps that only have 6g of net carbs.  However, if you want real bread you're going to have to hunt.  If you're ok with ordering online, Julian Bakery specializes in low carb bread.  It's pretty good stuff at only 1g net carb a slice.  However, it's quite expensive.  Plus, you have to pay for shipping ..read more

While I tend to focus on technology on this blog, I like to branch out a bit and give tips on improving health.  Computer geeks everywhere could most definitely use some healthy advice! I've posted a variety of articles on my low carb experience and losing 60 pounds over the course of 4-5 months, which you can view with the low carb tag of this blog ..read more

If you're a CSS fan like I am, you've no doubt heard of CSS preprocessors such as SASS and LESS already. I see LESS mentioned more often outside of the Rails world, which really shouldn't be the case.  I feel like LESS has more overhead in the site/app itself, and is thus slower ..read more