Ian Luckraft - Software Engineer

Adapt Authoring Tool Hello World

April 29, 2020
Elearning
Adapt, Adapt Authoring Tool, elearning

I’ve created a small series of blog posts showing how you can create a simple Adapt elearning course using the Adapt Authoring Tool{.aioseop-link}. These posts assume you have already installed the Authoring Tool. If you have not then please follow the very comprehensive installation instructions{.aioseop-link}. To start off we will create a storyboard{.aioseop-link} that will guide our development of the course. Further posts will cover Creating the course with introductory text{. ...

Arduino Indoor Outdoor Temperatures

April 14, 2020
API, Arduino
Arduino

There has been many times that I’ve left the house and noticed the difference in temperature between inside and outside my home. I thought a fun project would be to combine an Arduino reading the inside temperature and the outside temperature. I had a couple ideas on how to do this. The first involved two Arduinos, one inside and one outside, both using TMP36 sensors to monitor the temperatures. The second was a single Arduino inside that recorded the temperature using the sensor and then using the Open Weather Map API{. ...

When to use a custom search solution

January 22, 2019
Uncategorized

This post also appears on the Headscape site. Website search can often be a thorny subject. Expectations of search capabilities have been set very high by search engines. The default search offered by content management systems (CMSs) is often a bit basic by comparison. For example, the results are often not the most relevant to the search term used because the CMS is only offering a simple “does this page contain this word” method. ...

Blogging, Completed It Mate

September 8, 2018
Uncategorized

Oddly enough I’d had this post in mind over the summer and then some gentle encouragement from Paul Boag on an episode of The Boagworld Podcast convinced me to finish writing it. Towards the end of last year I had several ideas for blog posts rattling round my head. I made a conscious decision I should actually finish the blog posts instead of leaving them as “Draft” and thinking “I’ll finish that soon”. ...

Today I am Not Working From Home

March 27, 2018
Uncategorized

I’m a full time remote worker and have a room at home set up as an office I can shut myself away in. As I’ve talked about before I love working from home but this week for the first time I decided to try remote working from a public space. I choose a local Wetherspoons as it seemed to tick all the boxes and was a short walk from home. ...

Fractal – A Backend Developers Perspective

March 20, 2018
Uncategorized

One of the great thing about attending conferences is attending a talk and learning about something you didn’t even realise you wanted to know about. During DrupalCon Vienna I saw a talk by Anton Staroverov and Tassilo Groeper from Wondrous titled Decouple your Twig from PHP and make Frontenders happy! In the talk they showed a tool called Fractal which has been developed by Clearleft. After seeing the presentation I felt this would be a very useful tool so set about looking into it further. ...

The Importance of Real Data

March 13, 2018
Web Development

At the start of a project there are many different objectives and everyone involved has their own sense of priorities or tasks they wish to a tackle first. For me that is generally sorting the backend into a nicely organised structure that will allow flexibility in the output both now and in the future. A big part of this is getting real data in so the front end output is as close to final content as possible. ...

Drupal 8 Workflow Notifications with Rules Part 3

March 6, 2018
Web Development
Drupal, drupal8, Rules, Workflow

In previous posts I’ve covered enabling and editing a Workflow and then sending an email when a new content moderation state has been saved. In this post we will complete the loop by sending emails when a content moderation state has been updated. In this example an editor will publish the node and the rule will email the node creator to tell them it has been published. Head to the Rules admin page /admin/config/workflow/rules and click Add reaction rule ...

Changing the Default Content Moderation State in Drupal 8

February 27, 2018
Web Development
Drupal, drupal8

I have been working with the Content Moderation module in Drupal 8 and one slight niggle we came across was the default option for the Moderation state. If the current state was In Review we would like the Change to option to also be In Review rather than Draft. This means the default is to keep the entity in it’s current state rather than switching to a new state. ...