Writing

Periodic musings and tips on design, strategy, and general topics.

Free Your Ideas and Process—By Starting on Paper

Given the plethora of ever-expanding digital tools available today, a compelling case can be made to start projects there. Granted, there’s great promise in some offerings, but, in my experience, none come close to offering the creative freedom of…

Design, Process

Tech Notes

Notes on technical subjects and techniques. Due to the rapid pace of change, this content is of a fleeting nature.

Converting Older Drupal 8 Sites to 8.8 and Preparing for Drupal 9

Due to the quick change of pace in Drupal, documentation can sometimes struggle to keep up. Here’s an abbreviated method for updating an older install of Drupal 8.x that uses drupal-…

Drupal, 8.x, 9.x, Web Development, Composer

Using Drupal Core Media Enhancements

Great strides have been made in the Drupal core Media Initiative, which promises an improved authoring and content management experience. What used to require a number of…

Drupal, Content Authoring

Code Highlighting with Prism in Drupal

If you find the need to display code snippets in your content, it's relatively easy in HTML5 to display this content as <code> elements. Beyond basic styling, though, usable code highlighting is often best accomplished with Javascript frameworks…

Web Development, Drupal, Coding

Setting up a Drupal 8 Local Build

Drupal underwent a sea change moving from 7 to 8. Although the stock administrative interface and site building concepts will look familiar to long-time users, much is different beneath the surface. This requires a different approach to site building…

Drupal, Web Development

To RAID or not to RAID

With the expanding options available for cloud data storage, it’s tempting to avoid offline options altogether. While this may be advisable in some cases, there are other factors to consider. These include hosting costs, data access/pricing, security…

IT, Data, Storage