News

A blog about Dave Gatchell.

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    I am a big fan of the Modern CSS blog. Whenever there is a new post, I schedule some time and dig in. It's easy for me to get into a comfortable groove/rut with CSS and Stephanie Eckles's blog gets me out of it every time. It's a great place to level-up your CSS skills.

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    I saw in a blog post somewhere about a search engine Kagi Search where you pay $10 a month and it is completely ad free. They offer a free trial version so I signed up to check it out.

    I used "1000s of cats" as a test search in Kagi Search, Duck Duck Go, and Google to compare the results. It was very jarring...very jarring.

    With Kagi Search, I got a ton of links I've never seen before or haven't seen in a long time. Felt like I was  doing a search on a library computer.

    With Duck Duck Go, I got a lot more links I haven't seen before or in a while. Felt like Google of old.

    With Google...yeesh. Felt like I was in a shopping mall after searching with the other two. Not a good experience when you compare it to the other two at the same time. It's just missing the random smell of pretzels, cologne/perfume, and some generic dance music.

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    A client who has multiple locations needed an Appointments contact form where people can select a location. The form submission then needed to go to that location.

    We had luck getting it to happen with our Drupal sites. Not sure if this is the best way but it worked for us.

    We have a Place content type with an email field with a unique email address for each Place. We set up a View with an entity reference with all the Places. In that entity reference, the two fields are Title and Email (which is hidden).

    In the Appointments contact form, you need to set up a new contact email (/structure/contact/manage/appointments/emails). There is a selector for Recipient Type which should be set to "The value of a specific field in an entity reference". There will then be a selector for Recipient Reference which you set to "Place: Email (field_email)" or whatever you named your Email field.

    Your forms should now send to the correct location.

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    I just turned off auto-capitalization on my Macbook. It is wonderful.

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    I got a count working on the tags for the genres and labels happening this morning. As I add an album I listen to the genres and labels automatically sort themselves.

    It isn't a contest to see which genre or label is winning. For me it's the opposite actually. When I see a genre or label in "last place", it makes me want to bump it up in the list. Kind of like music guide rails.

    [example at bottom of the page]