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The challenge: help newcomers connect to the information they need According to the 2015 Vancouver Immigrant Survey, 1 in 3 newcomers remain unaware of the services and resources available to them. With 153,000 newcomers living in Metro Vancouver, this means thousands of people haven’t had access to the essential information they need about health care, housing, money, employment, transportation and more. While there are a lot of social services dedicated to newcomers, there has been no central repository for this information. This reality is what lead PeaceGeeks – along with support from...

This week I had the pleasure of attending my first Hope in Shadows awards ceremony held by Megaphone Magazine for their 2019 calendar. I am fairly new in Vancouver and this is my first week as a Project Manager at Affinity Bridge, so I didn’t really know what to expect when our CEO Mack Hardy invited me to join him. As a sponsor of the calendar, we were invited to attend and present an award. Like me, you have probably seen the Megaphone Magazine being sold for a couple of dollars in the streets of Vancouver and Victoria. It is a monthly publication developed by professional designers and...

Soup-up your dev environment with Fast CGI process Manager: PHP-FPM! Say you have already set yourself up with a web development environment following Andy Miller’s macOs dev setup guides part one and part two. However one can grow tired of pulling that daily PHP version switch. The question is: Is there a way to run multiple instances of PHP side by side? Yes! There is a way. Let’s find out how: Standard Firstly, a quick recap on how things are currently wired up and how apache is capable of rendering a php file using x-httpd-php, and mod_php. The apache_core enables apache to map the...

Docker is gaining traction in the software development industry at such a phenomenal rate that more and more teams are adopting it into their processes. Keeping everyone on the same page with technology stacks has become increasingly difficult as the technology itself becomes more complex. There are countless technical articles on Medium extolling the virtues of Docker and how it can help mitigate these types of problems. Now that I have been using Docker as a local development environment for over a year, I’d like to talk about the pros and cons of making the switch. Pros Docker on Mac and...

Anything speeding up or taking the tedium out of routine development and management tasks is goodness. If you're creating and managing WordPress sites here are five ways the WordPress command line interface (WP-CLI) can make your work faster and easier. 1. Database Backups Backups are incredibly important and incredibly tedious. The simpler they are to do, the more likely they are to happen. This one liner creates a database backup: $ wp db export backup-filename.sql $ wp db export - | gzip > backup-filename.sql.gz Likewise, loading a backup is equally as simple: $ wp db import backup-filename...

Affinity Bridge is an innovation and software development agency focused on creating positive social change in the world. We support a wide variety of clients working on social justice, environmental sustainability, education, and health and safety. Affinity Bridge is seeking a someone who enjoys meeting with clients/stakeholders, understanding their business needs, and designing solutions which will engage their audiences. We're looking for a progressive, highly-organized individual who understands technology and and can apply it to our clients project outcomes. You don't need to be a web...

When we are asked if we can build mobile applications (we can and do!) I like to enquire about the reasons behind this request. Often the solution is better suited as a Progressive Web App. Progressive Web Apps (PWAs) are websites that use features available in modern web browsers to provide functionality similar to native applications. A PWA has these defining characteristics: Reliable: Network-independent; application is usable regardless of whether your device is online or offline Linkable: You can share a link to a specific page or content, just like a website Progressive: Provides full...

Step 1: Know your environment I used Drupal 8.2.7 for this blog post demonstration. You need to find out which CKEditor version your Drupal is using in order to download the appropriate version of the plugin. There are several ways to find out your CKEditor version: Find the ckeditor.js file inside Drupal code and search for "version." You will find it beside the "timestamp". Go to a page on your site that has a CKEditor, open your browser inspector, and find the ckeditor.js file as shown below: Step 2: Download your CKEditor plugin Update: Please read first Managing CKEditor plugins using...

We have a long history of partnering with First Nations clients on web and development projects and our work happens on the unceded traditional territory of the Musqueam, Squamish and Tsleil Waututh First Nations. But when we paused to consider our role in Truth and Reconciliation, we suddenly didn’t feel equipped to address the findings of the Report or the Calls to Action. It was an uncomfortable realization.

Photo by Will Scullen, CC BY 2.0 At Affinity Bridge we start new projects with a Discovery phase. We can’t possibly know enough about you or your project based on the request for proposal or project brief you sent us, but we want to help you succeed at your goals. The first step to that is defining what those goals are, and how we can build something to help you reach them. But what does the Discovery phase entail? For us, it means working closely with you to refine your goals, site users, a design direction, administration workflows, content strategy, and an information architecture. Design...