Bobbis.com Blog

Pantheon Community Champion

jrearick — Sun, 27 Nov 2022 21:32:58 +0000

Pantheon Community Champion jrearick Sun, 11/27/2022 - 15:32

I was recognized as the Pantheon Community Champion for October 2022. It was a surprise that I was nominated and work seemed to have been happy about it. It was an honor. Thanks to those that congratulated me on the social medias.

New Job!

jrearick — Fri, 05 Feb 2021 22:31:58 +0000

New Job! jrearick Fri, 02/05/2021 - 16:31

Starting Monday, February 22nd, 2021, I will no longer be employed at Iowa State University. Just shy of 14 years full-time at the university and not quite 20 years affiliated with the university in some way, I will be starting a career as a Software Engineer at Principal working on the Principal.com website.

I had a great time and learned a ton while at Iowa State. The people on my team are excellent, and I hope to stay in touch with them after leaving.

I'm looking forward to growing my experience and career at Principal.

Bobbis.com is now Static

jrearick — Mon, 07 Dec 2020 22:26:29 +0000

Bobbis.com is now Static jrearick Mon, 12/07/2020 - 16:26

Only a couple of months after presenting on Tome at Flyover Camp, I finally made the switch to hosting this site statically as described in my presentation. I'm running Drupal 8 on Pantheon where I manage the installation and content, and publish static files to Netlify which now manages my LetsEncrypt certificate. All at no charge!

The inconvenience to having the Generate and Deploy my site after content updates is more than offset by the relatively low frequency of posting, the ability to not have to dash so fast to get updates installed, the performance of the site, and the hands-off system administration (SSL Certs, Hosting environments, etc).

We'll see how this goes.

Static Site Generation with Drupal and Tome @ Flyover Camp 2020

jrearick — Mon, 16 Nov 2020 22:05:51 +0000

Static Site Generation with Drupal and Tome @ Flyover Camp 2020 jrearick Mon, 11/16/2020 - 16:05

I presented "Static Site Genertion with Drupal and Tome" at Floyover Camp 2020.

I suggest you look at the Google Slides for the demo videos as the recording is not very high quality.

Google Slides

Metatag: Beyond Meta Description (June 2019)

jrearick — Sat, 15 Jun 2019 02:37:26 +0000

Metatag: Beyond Meta Description (June 2019) jrearick Fri, 06/14/2019 - 21:37

I recently gave a presentation at the Central Iowa Drupal User's Group on Metatag in Drupal. Below are the resources from that presentation:

CIDUG-Metatag.key (Apple Keynote file)

CIDUG-Metatag.pdf

Links and Resources from the presentation:

Metatag module
Metatag Schema.org module
About the Open Graph protocol
Possible way to get alt tag token on D7 is using the image_token_attributes module (untested)
Looks like I'm not the only one who ran into the token image issue on D8

Video

An Introduction to Configuration Management (Flyover Camp 2019)

jrearick — Sun, 02 Jun 2019 16:02:53 +0000

An Introduction to Configuration Management (Flyover Camp 2019) jrearick Sun, 06/02/2019 - 11:02

I presented An Introduction to Configuration Management at the first-ever Flyover Camp in Kansas City, MO. Below is an Apple keynote file and PDF with presenter notes as reference.

Flyover 2019 D8 config management copy.key

Flyover 2019 D8 config management copy.pdf

config_override_warn - If config is overridden in settings.php it will let you know if you try to change it in the UI.

config_readonly - Adds settings.php config to lock down config changes from the UI.

config_split - Alternate config for specific environments

45 Modules in 45 Minutes (Flyover Camp 2019)

jrearick — Fri, 31 May 2019 18:10:49 +0000

45 Modules in 45 Minutes (Flyover Camp 2019) jrearick Fri, 05/31/2019 - 13:10

I presented 45 Modules in 45 Minutes at the first-ever Flyover Camp in Kansas City, MO. Below is a Apple keynote file and PDF with presenter notes as reference.

45modules.key

45modules.pdf

Using "I'm Feeling Lucky" to Find Drupal Modules Fast

jrearick — Wed, 29 Feb 2012 02:18:21 +0000

Using "I'm Feeling Lucky" to Find Drupal Modules Fast jrearick Tue, 02/28/2012 - 20:18

I often can't remember the name of a Drupal module I want to download and use. For example, I can never remember if I need to go to drupal.org/projects/google-analytics or google_analytics or ganalytics or whatever. I am also not satisfied with the search provided on drupal.org. So I figured out a way to put together a Search Engine in Google Chrome to do an "I'm Feeling Lucky" search on site:drupal.org/project. Here is the search string I used:

https://www.google.com/search?q=site:drupal.org%2Fproject+%s&btnI&sourceid=navclient

The query parameter btnI sepcifies you want to do an "I'm Feeling Lucky" search that will automatically take you to the first result. So, in this case I just type "dp google analytics" in my URL bar and it takes me directly to what I want http://drupal.org/project/google_analytics. I'm sure this is useful in other places as well; such as searching the Drupal API documentation or replacing the search for any site that doesn't provide a decent search for itself.

Marketing with QR Codes

jrearick — Wed, 08 Feb 2012 02:49:01 +0000

Marketing with QR Codes jrearick Tue, 02/07/2012 - 20:49

I've seen QR codes popping up in the last few months. When I first encountered it in the wild, I saw a 2-D barcode and thought why it was so prominent on the advertising. I've seen 2-D barcodes on other things such as my at&t bill that turns out to be some sort of reference number. Being a geeky person, I decided to see if there was a 2-D barcode reader for iPhone and actually see what data was encoded in these codes.

Turns out an app I had that scans regular 1-D UPC barcodes could also scan QR codes (I had to enable QR for RedLaser by going to the Settings app). The first code in the wild I scanned was at Jeff's Pizza. I figured it might be a coupon or some sort of interesting information. I was disappointed that it was just a geo-location that brought up a non-mobile version of Google Maps. Not really a good experience.

Later I received a flyer in the mail for Cyclone basketball. On it was a QR code to scan to win a pair of tickets to a game of my choice. I won, but the experience of filling out the information on my mobile browser was not optimized for a mobile device (thank god it didn't require flash).

There are so many things you can do with QR codes. If done right, it can be a positive experience for the user. Since an encoded URL is not really seen by the user on the print, you can easily embed campaign codes to better track your advertising effectiveness. It also makes it much easier for the user to get additional information and engage the user in your message. However, if it is not done right, it may be confusing or even be a detriment a person's opinion of your message as it was for my first experiences with QR codes.

I've put together a few notes that might help people implement QR codes effectively:

Since a lot of people don't know what a QR code is, perhaps offer instructions and a link to download a scanner somewhere near the code.
Make sure you label your code with a call to action so the user knows what scanning the code will get them. "Scan this for today's coupon!". Just throwing a QR code up because it's the hip thing to do is not going to be effective.
If you are linking to a website, make sure it is mobile optimized. You want to make it as easy as possible for your user to find the information they are looking for. If they have to zoom, scroll, and navigate to get the information they are looking for, you are going to lose them.

I'm sure there are other things that can make using QR codes easier and more fun, but following the points above will put you well ahead of most of the implementations I've seen so far.