Blogs

Animating a gif on hover

When a page has many gif images, you’d prefer to play them upon certain user action: over the image, click on the picture or some button, slider scroll, etc. There are several possible options on how to implement this. Let’s take a look at the most popular ones:

1. Image substitution.
The idea here is to promptly substitute a static image with the animated gif upon some event. Let’s assume we use image click event.

Here’s the code:

Same thing for the “hover” event:

Note that in our example we use jQuery 1.9.1.

2. Using a third-party library.
A quick and simple way to animate a gif upon some event is to use an appropriate library. I personally prefer freezeframe.js https://github.com/ctrl-freaks/freezeframe.js.
There’s a detailed instruction with samples available there.

Our module was published on Drupal.org!

Hooray!
We've finally made through the tough contribution process at drupal.org and published our module - popup forms.
This module provides an easy way for developers to display any Drupal form in a popup (through jQuery UI dialog).
Hope it help the Drupal developers community to build even better sites!

Creating the requirements, or What a provider needs to know to deliver what you need?

Target Audience: those who want to have an application developed, not having enough experience in elaborating the requirements specification.

The world is full of bright people who strive to make our lives better and easier by introducing new great services and products. If you're the one inspired by some great idea and looking for ways to bring it to life, you might have already noticed that to make something real you need to have a very clear vision of it, especially when you're planning to hire a team to implement your idea. Now here comes the moment of creating the requirements for the prospective application. You have to understand that making the requirements document is one of the most important stages of project implementation. If the document fails to represent all the system’s details it may lead to dire consequences. A decent developer never starts working until provided with satisfactory requirements, and this need is fully reasonable, not just a caprice. Moreover, creating the requirements gives you a better notion of the desired result.

How to test your Drupal site

Target audience: Drupal site owners and administrators (with no professional Drupal development skills).

So, your contractor has finished working on your site and now you would like to evaluate the quality of the work done. Everything seems fine at the first glance: the site works as expected, no PHP errors are popping up, and the front end does not fall apart. But it does not mean that you have no problems. You may have overlooked something and the errors might appear in the future – with the first site visitors, after module/core updates, or when moving the site to a new platform.

You are not a professional and have no clue in programming and front-end development. How can you estimate is the site is working correctly, without using third-party audit service?

The following modules are required for this task:

MusicGearGeeks.com success story

This brief article highlights the performance optimizations we implemented for one of our customer's Drupal sites - musicgeargeeks.com (note: the site appears to be unavailable now; this article was originally written in 2012).

Initially, the site faced serious performance issues, with page load times reaching up to 30-40 seconds. To address this, we began by profiling the code. Our analysis revealed that more than 90% of the loading time was consumed by HTTP requests to third-party servers. After further investigation, we discovered these requests were directed to Amazon.com, retrieving product information displayed on the site.

Although the Amazon module had its own caching mechanism, the high volume of requests remained puzzling. A deeper dive revealed several underlying issues:

Cool hardware & mobile project completed

We've just completed an unusual project which involved assembly of some hardware and building an Android app that interacts with it via Bluetooth.
The hardware device is rather simple - basically it just pairs with Android device via Bluetooth and buzzes when user clicks a button in the app.
It's rather simple yet very cool!

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