steve's blog

I recently had (good) reason to embed a complex web page into another page using an iframe. Unfortunately this caused the well-known problem of the iframe stealing focus, which meant that on page load suddenly the browser scrolled down to where the iframe was embedded. After doing some searches and many years of various and complex solutions, I came up with this simple fix: don't display the iframe until it's loaded. Like so.

My HTML looks something like this:

The D8 toolbar is great, but often gets in the way of layouts that also have fixed/static headers. I just whipped up a very quick solution to how to hide the Drupal (D8) admin toolbar. It works well enough for the project I'm working on right now; maybe you can do something similar that suits your needs.

By default, Drupal's Ubercart module renders its cart display as a table, which means it displays terribly on small screens. There aren't a lot of easy ways around it (and they don't conveniently use a view, like Drupal Commerce does).

AKA, How to upgrade a complex Drupal site to D7

So Drupal 6 reaches end of life on Februrary 24. If you're like many of my clients, only now are you getting around to making that upgrade happen. Accordingly, I've done a bunch of D6 to D7 upgrades recently, and wanted to share the recipe I now follow to make things go as smoothly as possible.

This process has worked out extremely well even for moderately complex sites, for instance e-commerce sites using Ubercart.

Views is a very powerful query builder, but it can be challenging to make it solve specific problems that it wasn't intended to address.

Recently I've had some clients come to me because their previous developer just kind of dropped out of sight. This happens every now and then when you rely on one-person shops. It's also also familiar to me on a personal level: a vanishing dev is largely why I got into this line of work again in the early 2000s, after a few years' hiatus. The problem in these recent cases was complicated because not only did this dev build the sites, but also hosted them. This meant that, for one (live) site, no much-needed code or template changes were possible, and another (dev) site couldn't launch.

I’ve been a Thinkpad user for many years now. I love my mid-2000s T60 with an irrational passion. So much so that, when I cracked the case a couple of years ago, I hit up eBay for an identical replacement rather than try something new. (I’m pretty confident that at least some Thinkpad owners will be nodding in understanding right now.)