September 2008

You may already be familair with the concept of a captcha - essentially a little code for site users to enter into a field before submitting nodes or other forms to your website. Well, Drupal's had some good captcha options for a while now - including images, math questions and ASCII art.

Lately I've been noticing tons of sites on the web using reCaptcha and was happy to just come across a reCaptcha module for Drupal; you can grab a copy for 4.7x, 5.x *and* 6.x!

We're now using reCaptcha on this site so you can see it in action.  As for why its better than other captchas - not only is it a secure way to ensure human form submissions, you can feel good using it as the project was setup to improve Optical Character Recognition technology.

The conventional approach for rounding corners on websites has always involved creating images to position creatively via CSS at the top/bottom/etc... of div's or other html elements (table headers or columns and so on).

That convention is painstaking and not the most agile solution to creating rounded corners - for example, when you want the curve radius to be say 5px instead of 10px you've got to jump into photoshop and roll new images etc...

Well, I came across the Rounded Corners module for drupal recently and *love* it!  Install the module, (& I recommend updating the javascript that powers it to ensure x-browser compatibility) then simply create rules from the admin side for particular css rules et voila!

Something to remember; the background color for the corners will be auto-set to the background of whatever layer is directly above the rounded one in the CSS hierarchy for your site.

Apple's renovating its flagship Toronto store and instead of closing the location, keeping the smallest possible space open to operate out of and renovating around it.. An interesting approach yet:

same # of staff + same # of customers + tiny space = ouch

Funnily enough, I just came across this neat little site via an ad on Facebook (I guess they *do* work! :) )  Dripbook is basically an online portfolio host.  Once you sign up, you can fill out a profile and then add collections of images to your scrapbook - essentially a gallery system.

They've gone with a simple interface using lots of whitespace but when you land on the frontpage it all feels a little crowded - with 36 thumbnails that have static pagination.  So at first glance, I questioned how well the people behind it may have thought out dripbook, however as soon as you jump to a scrapbook (second photo in this post) you see that the sit eisn't there to introduce people to new photographers, graphic artists etc...

Dripbook is an excellent way for visual artists working with still images to showcase their work, without dealing with the fuss of creating their own website.  In fact (this is interesting) - they even have a feature to export a full flash website created dynamically from your portfolio/scrapbook!  Pretty cool - apparently their site will power the content in the one generated for you... so you just use one interface for maintaining your content!

I highly recommend checking out dripbook for any still-image visual artist looking to get online with something snazzy - why not with prices starting @ just $10/mo?

For more convincing, check out their top 10 reasons to join up...

10 years ago there was no doubt in most web professionals' minds that an essential stage in creating a website was to sketch out the Information Architecture (IA) using a series of wireframe diagrams.  To be honest, I've always disliked making them but back when websites were static and tons of html pages needed to be created for them, it was useful to have a map of how they would all fit together.

Now that web development is so sped up and flexible because of Content Management Systems like Drupal, it seems to me that there are better ways to spend your time than drafting up wireframe diagrams... Recently I stumbled upon a new web service called JumpChart - which is a groovy service in allowing clients to login and create pages & menu items.  In fact, I was quite excited when I found it as clients can login to your JumpChart account and essentially build out the core IA of a site, but really fails in only exporting static XHTML files!!!  

Ultimately the purpose of planning IA is to let the developer and client get on the same page about the main content and navigation of a site and well, if your client is savvy enough to jump onto a site which may look bare-bones and un-themed, its good to just get them into the site and familiar with making pages and menu links from the getgo.

This is just one of the many reasons why we use killer Open Source Software to build sites - their power and simplicity let us start building a site with our clients and they immediately see how its coming together, within an aesthetic framework that flushes out as we theme the site - overall, much more effective than explaining the difference between IA and design mockups and rebuilding them into a site once we're done in OmniGraffle and Photoshop ;)