drupal

Visualizing data using maps and other tools - NetTuesday Vancouver from Mack Hardy on Vimeo.

Mack Hardy, director of Affinity Bridge presents to the NetTuesday Vancouver community on methods for using maps and D3.js for visualizing data and story telling.

The first couple slides of this presentation were cut off, so the video starts mid sentence.

Hugh Stimson, of Geoecology.ca says a few words about the ethics and issues of using open and close sources of data, and the difficulties with presenting a representive message with the visualization and maps that are created.

Have you recently checked out your website on a cellphone, or a tablet, or another mobile device? You may have found yourself scrolling and zooming in and out in order to be able to read its content. All this headache can be avoided by adding a responsive design to your site, but what exactly is a responsive design?

What exactly is a responsive design?

Wikipedia defines responsive design as

...an approach to web design in which a site is crafted to provide an optimal viewing experience—easy reading and navigation with a minimum of resizing, panning, and scrolling—across a wide range of devices (from desktop computer monitors to mobile phones).

A nice technical definition, but what exactly does this mean? Well, imagine that we have the following set of devices: a nice big monitor with big resolution, a tablet, and a cellphone.

Affinity Bridge is primarily a [Drupal] shop. We've found Drupal to be a great tool for many of the problems we've been solving. Namely collaborating with non-profits and progressive organizations to build successful web sites. Whether it be data intensive mapping projects, group based collaboration systems, or just a simple brochure site, Drupal is a great tool for many jobs.

Recently we decided to explore some other technologies to get a taste for what is off of "Drupal Island". One technology that many of us here have been keeping an eye on is [Node.js].

The culture at Affinity Bridge invites innovation and self-education so that our team members can learn and challenge ourselves. We began looking for a project to work on so that we could learn more about Node.js. After some brainstorming we decided on a simple web app project.

We have several projects that involve processing large geospatial datasets (geo-data) and displaying them on maps. These projects present some interesting technical challenges involving the storage, transfer and processing of geo-data. This post outlines some of bigger challenges we have encountered and our corresponding solutions.

The challenge

In the past we have used the GMap and OpenLayers libraries and their equivalent Drupal modules on our mapping projects. They are effective solutions when you have a small or even moderately sized collection of entities containing some simple geodata (points, lines, polygons) that you want to present as vector overlays on a map. Unfortunately they tend to fall apart fast when you attempt them with larger datasets. There are two main reasons for this:

1. Geospatial data can be large, particularly as we tend to encode it in text-based formats such as WKT or GeoJSON when we are sending it to a web browser. The larger the data, the longer it takes to transfer from server to client.

2.

This post is part of our Abridged series, which aims to explain the basics of some of the more ominous yet awesome Drupal projects in simple and practical terms. We hope these posts will help demystify some of these projects for people who have been hesitant to try them out!

Here, we'll take a look at Boxes module, including a review of its history within the Drupal project, the current state of the module, how to start using it, how we use it at Affinity Bridge, and some resources. Special thanks to Tylor who recently did a sitdown (team discussion/learning session) on Boxes module, and wrote the technical sections of this post.

Background

Boxes module is a Drupal project that was originally built by Jeff Miccolis from Development Seed. It's been around for quite a while, but many people don't venture into using it, largely because it's not clear upfront what the benefits are over core Blocks.

At DrupalCon Chicago this past week, there was a "Core Conversations" session track, made up of sessions pitched by contributors to the core Drupal project. A wide range of topics were covered from the Butler project (a new system for context and blocks), to the built-in Help system, to Deployment strategies, to redesigning the issue queue. These sessions were shorter presentations followed by a discussion period for the attendees to give input on the topics.

It's already that time again, DrupalCon Chicago is on next week! We've got three members of the Affinity Bridge team attending the conference, looking forward to learning, sprinting, and presenting a few sessions.

Dave Tarc, our newest team member Katherine Bailey (welcome!), and I (Ariane) will be at the conference, and we've got a few events/sessions that we're working on and would love to see you at:

Tuesday, Mar. 8, 3:15pm: "Help Needs Help!" 

Big news in Affinity Bridge offices today! The announcement went out on Drupal.org this morning that myself (arianek) and Jennifer Hodgdon (jhodgdon) from Seattle have been appointed by Dries Buytaert as the new Drupal Documentation Co-Leads! 

This has been a long time in the making. It's really exciting to have the work I've been doing recognized, and also have the ability to leverage that work to improve documentation and help build a stronger Docs Team. On top of that, my community spotlight was also posted today, which is incredibly heartwarming.

This past weekend we attended the Pacific Northwest Drupal Summit and I gave an introduction to open data and beautiful maps. I talked about open data, covered the creation of a map in under 10 minutes, and discussed how to create beautiful maps using advanced techniques like custom tilesets. The video is already online thanks to the hard work of Justin Carlson, posted on his blog here and embedded below:

Tylor Sherman: Open Data & Beautiful Maps from Carlson Media on Vimeo.

It was an incredibly jam-packed weekend for Drupallers here in the Pacific Northwest, with the 2nd annual PNW Drupal Summit in Vancouver. The Summit is a weekend conference that is targeted towards people already working with Drupal (moderate to advanced level), and is done in a regional mini-DrupalCon style: pre-scheduled sessions/tracks, keynotes from Drupal 7 maintainer Angie Byron (aka. webchick) and Chapter 3's Josh Koenig (aka. joshk), and Drupal 7 code sprints (that resulted in bringing the Drupal 7 criticals count from 13 to 8 over the course of the weekend, HOOAH!)