Robert Carr's blog

Rhetoric - Flexible Content

The internet is full of junk. A staggering amount of junk: 1 million websites launched each day; billions of packets of content also tweeted, bookmarked, shared or otherwise thrown into the bubbling cauldron of human endeavour. Apparently, there are even 2 million ways to unlock a sink. OK, there are 2 million websites that claim to show you how to unblock a sink. Some do. Most don't.

Drupal Hosted on Google

Google App Engine (GAE) now supports PHP. This means that sites built on platforms such as Drupal or Wordpress can be hosted within the massive Google infrastructure. GAE charges by CPU usage instead of instance hours so, for sites with low traffic, hosting can be much cheaper. And if your site suddenly gets hits from lots of users, the load is spread across the Google's vast vast computing cloud so your users still get their pages served quickly.
The only current problem is that GAE is not quite an out-of-the-box solution for Drupal: there's an excellent tutorial on installing Drupal on GAE at Boombatower.

DrupalCamp Scotland 2013

Quick reminder for the main Drupal event in Scotland this year: Drupal Camp Scotland 2013. To be held in the IET Teacher Building, in St Enoch Square, Glasgow on Saturday 20th April. Early bird (£15) registration closes on 5th April.

Rob is hopefully presenting on flexible content too.

Full details at http://camp.drupalscotland.org

Drupal Scotland - Business Day and Camp

In a few weeks, Scotland's premier Drupal event for 2012 will take place at the University of Edinburgh, and we're going to be there. Rob is helping to organise the Drupal for Business day and community Drupal Camp, due to be held 25-26 May at the Informatics Forum. He'll also be taking on both days, with a brief case study on Friday (applying Drupal in a university environment), then a few more technical talks on the Saturday.

Creating Web Apps in iOS

Lots of ways to make your website/application run as a full screen iOS 'app.' Google the subject and you'll be spoilt for choice.

The biggest problem I had was after I'd finished the basics: created a homepage icon, set the website to be full screen capable (etc). The front page of my web app opened full screen, but as soon as you click on a link (internal or otherwise), mobile Safari is opened for the target page and all the full screen, app-like goodness is gone.

Embedding Phone Numbers with HTML5 for iOS

Snippet to embed contact data in a web page so that an iOS device can recognise text as a phone number or as contact data. Use the 'itemprop' attribute, although you can also wrap the div in a 'vcard' class, and setting the class of the phone number span to 'tel' seemed to do funky things too:

<div itemscope>
  <span itemprop="name">Rob Carr</span>
  <a class="nowrap" href="mailto:rob@google.com" itemprop="email">rob@google.com</a>
  <span class="nowrap" itemprop="tel">+44 1234 567 890</span>
</div>

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