Brick by Brick

Anyone who has worked with Drupal much knows that one of the platform’s greatest strengths is its community.  With 3,100+ attendees and overflowing conference rooms the size of football fields, the recent Drupalcon Denver 2012 was probably the greatest gathering of drupalistas the world has ever seen.   Attending the conference was a real treat and I learned a ton.

While the pure scope of the conference was impressive, the quality of the sessions was the most impressive thing about Drupalcon Denver.  I took around 20 pages of typed notes during the conference, and have countless things I want to experiment with and follow up on.  Since no one is interested in reading my twenty pages of notes, I want to break out my three key takeaways from the conference.

1. Mobile

Everyone knows that mobile is becoming a more and more critical part of website development.  Drupalcon Denver really drove the point home for me.

In his keynote, Luke Wroblewski argued for developing for mobile first, desktop second.  In addition to the obvious fact that if you do that your website will work on all devices, mobile first development forces teams to focus on only critical functionality instead of bells and whistles.  This makes everything a bit simpler and more usable. The examples he gives in his presentation really demonstrate the positive impact a mobile first approach can have on a website.

It was also encouraging to hear that mobile is the #1 priority for Drupal 8, which Dries Buytaert talked about with the first keynote of the conference. (more…)

Everyone wants their website to be popular. You want to get your idea or product out there and the internet is a great way to do that. After a while of things going smoothly you start to get complaints – the website is slow, people in Europe are having a hard time downloading files, the server is getting overloaded. You need to start optimizing your website to provide a fast, consistent experience for everyone that visits.

There are a multitude of different things that one can do, and one of the easiest is to start using a Content Delivery Network, or CDN. For the most part setting up and using a CDN is much easier than attempting to rewrite a site to be horizontally scalable and can provide many different benefits.

What is a CDN?

A CDN is a collection of servers that share a set of static files or content and are usually geographically separated. The CDN takes care of incoming requests for a file, figures out which is the best server to use, and then routes the request to that server. A CDN might have a set of servers in the eastern US, the western US, Asia, and Europe. When a visitor from the UK visits your site, the CDN detects they are in Europe and will route requests for files to their European servers instead of the servers in the US.

In most cases sites will put large video files, images, documents, javascript, cascading style sheets (CSS), and other rarely-changing files up onto a CDN service. Dynamic content will still be hosted like normal, such as from a server in Dallas, TX. It is rare that a website will be hosted entirely on a CDN.

There are two types of CDNs that can be used. One is a CDN service that sits in front of your website that routes all the requests to either other CDN servers or your own servers. Akamai is probably the best known CDN provider that does this. The second type is a CDN that hosts files and you point your application to that other set of servers for requests of static files.

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Last April I noticed Fox displaying hashtags on the screen of some its shows to promote tweeting.  Since then, this practice has continued, and I have noticed similar instances on other networks and shows.

Up until now, from what I’ve seen, Fox has mainly displayed the show’s name as the hashtag (#Glee or #Fringe, for instance), but starting last week, Fox started displaying episode-specific Fringe hashtags – noted by influential showbiz publication Variety.  #WhereYouBelong  was displayed for last week’s episode “A Short Story About Love” while #ChangeYourWorld  will be displayed for tonight’s episode,  “Nothing As It Seems.”

While some people suspect that this is a hat tip to the show’s fan base, I surmise that it is also a social media experiment for the network.  If it is not, it should be, and Fringe is a great show to experiment with for several reasons:

• As a cult sci-fi TV show, its rabid fan base is comprised of people who are likely to use the Internet to express their loyalty to the show.  This includes: fan blogs, a Wikipedia-like site (as noted by Wired), shipping web videos (videos comprised of scenes from the show set to music – many of which are about actual and fan desired romantic relationships between characters), and participation in other online forums.
• The fan base has responded well to efforts by an internal Fox Fringe fan boy and champion, Ari Margolis, who has reached out to fans with great response.
• Fan sites like Fringenuity spark, promote, and track social media activity.
  • Here’s an interesting tidbit about the #WhereYouBelong campaign for last week’s episode: “We’ve increased the number of contributing tweeters by nearly 10K since our #LoveIsTheAnswer campaign [conducted on February 24, 2012]. The tweets contribution overwhelmingly came from the collective fandom as opposed to a few core contributors.”
• There are previous successful fan-driven Twitter trending events.
• The show’s future on the network is in a precarious state as the ratings are not great.  Thus, the fans feel a need to give the show as much love as possible to increase the chances of the show’s renewal – even if the boys over at TV by the Numbers feel that such efforts do little to sway network decisions.

Twitter is not new, and members of the mass American TV watching populace have had awareness of it for a couple of years.  However, like any form of media, harnessing social media is (or are since “media” are plural) a continuing process.  Regardless if Fox started using episode-specific hashtags as a premeditated experiment or not, the network folks should see if this increases fan involvement and connection to the network as this would increase loyalty and could boost ratings. My questions from last April are still valid:

Further, what is Fox expecting from more Twitter activity?  Does Fox hope that greater buzz will attract more viewers to its shows?  Is it planning to sell “sponsored” tweets from one of its official Twitter accounts during the conversation of an episode that is currently airing?

Disclaimer: I’m a Fringe fan and have participated in some of these social media campaigns.  I also appreciate Fox for giving us such a great TV show and hope that the show can continue.

Last Friday was a big day for the Brick Factory.   To celebrate the start of the NCAA basketball tournament, we ordered barbeque from Hill Country and watched some of the games in our conference room.  More importantly, our super talented designer Freddy Trejo (pictured above) delivered an amazing piece of Brick Factory-inspired artwork that he has been working on the last few months.   You can view a high resolution photo of the piece here.   We are proudly showcasing the piece in our lobby.  Below is Freddy’s explanation of the piece as well as an image showing the evolution of the artwork over time.

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For this piece, the creative process began when I was asked to create an illustration for the company’s homepage. I wanted it to be simple and iconic. After that was completed my mind kept on working. When I was asked to create an actual piece of art, the gears were already turning. Like most of the things I do I complete them first in my mind to the point where I have a clear vision of what the final product will look like. Then I try to materialize the vision.

For inspiration, I looked at old etchings, propaganda posters, and Americana ephemera. The result was somewhere in between.  I wanted to create an image of a dreamscape setting in which things are transpiring, where there is constant progress, development, and construction. In this place of perpetual deconstruction and reconstruction we strive to create an ideal product. I envisioned a common space in our minds and where creativity is unbound and where ideas can easily materialize. The structure is weathered, strong, bold, with a lot of character and plenty of space. The Brick Factory stands right in the heart of the visionaries’ mind scape. It is a place that manufactures building blocks from which to build great things. This artwork is my representation of our company standing strong in creative frontier.

The style I used is one that I developed in college and used for my thesis. It involves a combination of different media. The process begins digitally and then I build up the artwork with many layers of transparencies and texture.  This piece is 80 x 32 inches, the largest piece I have ever made.

-Freddy Trejo

A splash page is an interim page on a site that asks a visitor to perform an action, such as making a donation or signing up for an email list, before visiting the page they intended.  While splash pages can be annoying to users, they work.  Given their effectiveness, we end up building splash pages for clients quite frequently in the CMS we specialize in, Drupal.

For Drupal 6 development, there is a module called Splash that we like to use.  The Splash module allows you to designate whether to use a single splash page or rotate through a series of options, set how often users see the pages (daily, weekly, etc.) and to control whether the splash page is shown as a webpage or lightbox.

When Drupal 7 was released a little over a year ago, the Splash module was not upgraded.   This left us in a bit of a bind, as we have transitioned most of our work to Drupal 7 and there wasn’t a simple way to create and manage splash pages.  To rectify the problem, we modified Splash to work with Drupal 7 for internal use, and waited to see if the owners of the modules would release an official Drupal 7 version. 

After many months of waiting, we decided it would be best if we took the reigns ourselves and launched a new splash module for Drupal 7. Over a few months, we put together the code (re-wrote all of it), tested it on our end and made it through the extensive Drupal project approval project process. We named the module Splashify, and it is ready for folks to use.

Splashify not only has all the features the Drupal 6 Splash module has, but it sports a few additional goodies:

• Mobile Support: Do you not want the splash page to come up on mobile devices? Or maybe you need a custom splash page to come up for mobile devices? In either case, Splashify gives you full control by giving you specific options for mobile devices.
• Search Engine Friendly: We noticed that with the Drupal 6 Splash module, it often times would end up indexing the splash page as the home page for the site. This is obviously bad for SEO, as you don’t want your home page linked to your splash page in Google. We determined the best way of fixing the problem was to redirect to the splash page through JavaScript. This would make the original home page come up in the search engines, but still show the splash page to site visitors. Problem solved!
• Customize When the Splash Page Comes Up: The splash page can be configured to show up on a specific page of the site (or pages), or on all pages of the site. For example, this allows the splash page to come up when someone clicks on a link to an interior page from the search engines, if you desire. This gives you full control where the splash page shows up on your website.
• Colorbox: Splashify supports using the lightbox jQuery plugin “Colorbox”. We found this lightweight lightbox solution to work well across browsers and to be an effective option for displaying a splash page.

The module is still in development, which means we can use help testing the module and making sure all of the major bugs are ironed out. Let us know if there are any features you would like to see in Splashify!