My use case was this: a client with many sites is using RSS feeds to populate site content. Usually this is a no brainer. We can put together a recipe of Feeds and Imagecache but this is a little different. Instead of the main image being a separate entity in the RSS feed, it's coded right in to the body.

So, the first thing we do is create the feed.

With the feed in place, the picture is wherever it came in.

Using a preprocess function, we can intercept the node's content and pull out the image's URL. This will come in handy in the template file. Here's some code to pull the image URL and then generate the path by using the Imagecache External module:

<?php

So - this morning started off with a dry mouth - as does any morning waking up in a Hotel after a slightly elongated trip from Halifax to Washington DC. My mind was sharp,  but body was reeling from the delays in our trip to DC last night.

I grew up in a family where neither of my busy parent had any clue about being handy. For me, it's been a bit of a dream to learn what makes a house. As a developer, I have found myself many times in the bowels of frameworks whether they be Drupal, .Net or a custom framework I worked on for the fish industry with a bunch of crazy awesome icelanders.

It's always funny to walk in to a house and wonder what these pieces must be that are making up this house. It's always comforting to know that a house is just a series of small pieces. If you look at each piece, you can start to abstract them together and see how it's built. You examine pieces and see how you are able to reuse pieces in order to achieve your own flavor or a goal. When I finally stumbled upon Drupal, I felt the same way. As I stripped back the pieces and examined the framework, I have since started to understand what the small pieces are that must make up the core of the system.

This site is dedicated to sharing a little about what makes me tick. Part of getting to know what goes on around here is knowing what else is going on in parts of my world.

This morning, I woke up at 6am as it had been storming all night.

Well, it's funny how things work out sometimes. My little development company is starting to get busy and grow. As a result of building new partnerships with Brightwhite, Co and Co, HeadSpace and concreteorange, we've been keeping ourselves pretty busy. So has the crew @ Brightwhite, where I have an office set up. We share a really awesome space, but it's tight. The g, reat news is that Jeff at Brightwhite is hiring a new designer. This perpetuated me to seek out a prior office opportunity in an amazing location in Halifax. So, I'm moving, too! This is a space which is a pretty good size (pictures to come). I'm going to paint and clean things up as it's not in the best state of repair.

This will afford me an office sharing experience for subcontractors and team members as I work through projects with them. It will also afford me the luxury of growth as time permits. I'm pretty excited. Change is one of those things which is most welcome in the dead of winter. As the mercury dropped today, I was shaking hands with my new landlord - and an old friend.

When setting out to do anything, I find that a little planning goes a long way. Since we're a web development shop specializing in Drupal, there were a few givens.

• we'd be building in Drupal
• easy to build, populate and maintain
• good showcase piece
• all the bells

I wanted to build a site which is easy to navigate. For that, I chose to leverage Drupal's menu model. I've got some custom modules which help me to split the primary from the secondary and tertiary menu system. It has been honed to a point so that each active menu knows about highlighting itself. It also leverages Drupal's theming layer so any customization you would like to do before presentation can be done.eshoreli

I wanted to implement some nice administrative features so I could use this site as my example when sitting with clients. You'll notice the sexy little javascript menu up in the top bar which only contins items that the current user is allowed to access. That's build leveraging the Administration Menu module for Drupal. For users who like the key features right there at their fingertips, we implement a simple push button interface. Of course, these items are only seen by authorized users.

So - in working with creative designers, we've had the need to design some pretty intricate search boxes. In a site I just completed for Jeff at Brightwhite, he used a jQuery text replacement with some slick visuals. The result left me in a bit of a mental pinch! The issue : When I was doing this, I was getting an error from the Drupal system Validation error, please try again. If this error persists, please contact the site administrator. Drupal needs to know that a form it's processing has been submitted by the system, therefore with a search request, comes a validation token.

My solution (and I borrowed much of it from "The Agaric Way") was to implement a module which hooks the _form_alter for the Search form and Search themed forms and simply tell it not to bother validating the token. Simple, eh? That's only part of it. Part 1 was to create my search template file. I created a file called block-search.tpl.php and drop it in my theme folder.

There are a couple of important things to note. First: the form action. That'll be the same for all of your search forms. The first two inputs (text and button) are the text field and the button.

It's important to note the names of these controls. That's it. The ID, Class, Values should be changed to match your template code. The really important ones to note are the last two hidden fields. You can simply paste these two in as well as the line of code for Form Action.

With the rebirth of Shoreline comes a whole new slew of software trends to absorb. In the past three years of hiatus from freelance work, the web has evolved to a level of acceptance where people have just begun to realize the potential of a powerful tool which can be leveraged to suit so many personal and business needs. Many of today's businesses operate with philosophies that are often dated, ineffecient and archaic. With the tools available today and the knowledge to manipulate these tools to suit client needs, Shoreline is taking control of businesses and helping them reach their goals. Whether it be taking your business website to a level where you can now truly own the experience or helping you tailor and create business software processes which make lives easier, Shoreline is up to the task.

We're currently working with local talent to deliver quality solutions to the Nova Scotia Government, Old Creel Canoe and Kayak, Prime Insurance, Performance House, Canadian Women in Business, Origin Buimed, Nova Scotia Gaming Federation and many more clients. Each project is unique and requires a special amount of attention and working with the client.

ex·pe·ri·ence

Spelled Pronunciation[ik-speer-ee-uhns

noun, verb, -enced, -enc·ing.

–noun

1.a particular instance of personally encountering or undergoing something: My encounter with the bear in the woods was a frightening experience.

2.the process or fact of personally observing, encountering, or undergoing something: business experience.