Why You Should Not Use WYSIWYG Website Editors

Before:

After:

Oh the humanity!!

I built a perfect, beautiful, wonderful website using the Drupal CMS, Amason S3 and CloudFront for Atipa Technologies. Everything worked flawlessly and looked amazing. After I left the company, they decided to duplicated the work of a real web developer with one of those WYSIWYG website editor (Adobe Muse by the looks of the source code). The result, as you can see, is pitiful. An uninspired child could make a better website than that. For shame... (the URL is www.atipa.com but I don't expect this iteration of the website to be up for very long).

Lets go over some flaws with the website built with the WYSIWYG editor:

The quote form doesn't do anything! Of course not, there's no server code to process it.
That favicon though...
Pretty sure whoever made it was color blind or drunk
Nothing is lined up correctly
The menu is completely inconsistent
I can not...

Alright, that's enough fun for now.

How to Create an On-Demand Feature for Your Alexa Skill

As 2020 was coming to a close and 2021 was just around the corner, I was finishing development of a new version of our skill for the Alexa smart speaker. It was a total re-write, and it changed the skill from being able to perform only a single intent (play our live stream) to providing a dialog-based menu of many intents to choose from. With the new skill, listeners can choose to either play our live stream, play our HD2 live stream, play the latest newscast recording, or play an on-demand. (One day I would like to add another intent: make a donation.)

How to use versioning with AWS Lambda and Alexa Skills Kit (ASK), a step by step guide

I learned a valuable lesson on the morning after submitting my latest Alexa skill for certification. I had an email from the Alexa certification team letting me know that their tests had failed. I thought that was odd because everything was working perfectly fine when I left work the previous day. I was using AWS Lambda to host the back-end code (within a Node.js environment) and hadn't set up the versioning system because I didn't know about it. [update: I'm now using the AWS CLI to locally host my code and push it to Lambda, which is what I recommend.

Migrating from Drupal 7 to Drupal 8: my experience, the many obstacles, and their solutions

You can't really call yourself a Drupal developer if your site is still on Drupal 7. Right? So it was high time for me to upgrade Dannix from D7 to D8. Here's how I did it, the problems I ran into, and what I did to overcome them.

Make your own conditional fields in Drupal 7 by "hacking" the hook_form_alter() function with JavaScript injection

When I needed a conditional field for a Drupal 7 content type, of course I just googled "drupal conditional fields" to see if a module exists. One did exist, but its D7 release came with a big, red flag warning any would-be downloaders that it's not supported any longer and is vulnerable to security issues. Instead of risking it on the entrerprise-level website, I decided to code up a solution myself. And I would use JavaScript inserted by the PHP code. Easy!