How (and Why) Google Needs to Invest in Open Source
As more and more people start using the internet, and as websites get increasingly full featured Google continues to see growth in its userbase. For all of the interactions that happen with other...
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Second Class of MTU
If you missed our first class, you can read up and watch the video here.We completed the second class of Metal Toad University last Thursday. It focused on tools that we'll use to create sites...
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Beer, booze or bytes: Make your own Homebrew!
What is Homebrew?The term "Homebrew" is defined by Webster dictionary as "beer or other alcoholic beverage made at home." This definition which is the most commonly used would refer to the making of...
View ArticleCelery Periodic Tasks: From Installation to Infinity
This is a quick example of how I got Periodic Tasks to work using Celery without Django. There are lots of examples out there for creating tasks and loose documentation on how to start Celery and...
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Top 5 Blog Posts of 2012
What an awesome year! Even though we are almost a month into 2013 I still can’t help but look back at 2012 and at all the great content that came out. If you are the nostalgic type (or the busy type...
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ChickTech High School Workshop
All developers know the feeling of accomplishment that comes with completing a tricky section of code. To me that feeling is a distant second to the accomplishment felt when teaching someone else the...
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How to Improve Your Reputation as a Drupal Service Provider
If you are as Drupal service provider you have a distinct advantage over many peers in the web development arena. With Drupal you are using the power of tens of millions of dollars worth of software...
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Open Source is the New Microsoft
When I was starting out in the web industry (back before the turn of century), open source options were available but were often ruled out as risky business investments. At the time, they were...
View ArticleDeveloper Flow and Coming Up For Air
Developers shine when they get into flow, but we must be active participants in the mechanisms which make flow possible in an active organization.Managing Developer Attention is a Whole-Organization...
View ArticleLeading with 'Why'
When clients come to Metal Toad, they're looking to get something done - improve or add features, upgrade their site or perhaps build something new all together. As a result, our conversations with...
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Drush pm-download and pm-update: When and Why to Use Each
Drush is a Drupal developers Swiss-army knife. Of course there are the favorite commands that you probably use every day: drush sql-cli, drush pm-enable. Drush pm-download and drush pm-update are...
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ToadCast 014 - Everyone's got a phone and a toilet
DownloadJoining me for our 14th ToadCast is Chris Trahey where we talk about doing what is right for your clients and the benefits of developers as technical sales. We also discuss notification...
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What's in a Brand?
People often ask me where the name for my company came from. That's something I'll answer a little later on, but reflecting on this left me thinking about what is in a brand and why do we care about...
View ArticleMetal Toad University #8: The Wolf Theme
This session had us finding new images to create a new theme for our site. Once our new wolf images and patterns were created and exported, we went about with the theming. I added one class to the...
View ArticleWriting a simple Sublime Text plugin.
For the most part I like to keep my code editors as light and vanilla as possible. Some of the basic features that I like to see in my editor include auto indentation, syntax highlighting and ability...
View ArticleMetal Toad University #9: Going Live
This week we took our site live, but before we did that one of our students Lewis Notestine had created a new theme for our site: Space! We used Git version control to merge his changes into ours, then...
View ArticleMetal Toad University #10: Real Time Word Press
In this episode our intrepid adventurers embarked on a quest to install WordPress. I have to admit, this was quite easy and didn't take nearly as long I expected it would. Since I was also new to...
View ArticleQuick Tip: Receiving Git Attribution for Your Drupal.org Patches
If you contribute patches to the Drupal issue queues, you often spend a lot of time and hard work getting that patch through the review process. Even though we do it for the good of the community, once...
View ArticleFixing "no such file" error in Capistrano upload()
upload via sftp failed on metaltoad.com: Net::SFTP::StatusException (Net::SFTP::StatusException open ...releases/20130408223054/drupal/ sites/all/themes/boilerplate/css/compiled/default.css (2, "no...
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ToadCast 015 - ECommerce
DownloadJoining me for Toadcast 15 is Tom Martin to discuss ecommerce. That's right, a show all about a single topic!ToadCast can be found on iTunes. Check us out and give us a review/rating.We have a...
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