Customized Suzuki Intruder in French village
Photo: Copyright © 2014 Eelke Blok

Preparing your Drupal 8.3 site with Media for Drupal 8.4

If you have the Media module for Drupal 8 installed (not a requirement to use media with Drupal 8, so this post may not apply to you), you need to remove it before you can upgrade to the latest core version (8.4). Unfortunately, there are a few gotchas involved with the process. This blog post is about getting rid of the old contrib Media module, so the site can be updated to Drupal 8.4 in a subsequent step. This is based on my personal experience. YMMV, as they say.

Code Review Etiquette

Another good one for the responsible coder. Code reviews are a tricky thing. They can improve software quality tremendously; two know more than one, obviously. However, it is all too easy to invoke bad feelings in the reviewee (if you think, "They should just grow thicker skin, it's not personal", this is especially for you). The simple fact of the matter is, coders are people too, and following some easy tips when doing reviews can go a long way to improve (or at least not reduce) the moral of the team and thus the code quality.

Hyphen, en dash and em dash

Just now I was looking for how to type an emdash on the Mac (and also, whether my intended use was actually correct). I found this great little article.

En and em dashes are of­ten ap­prox­i­mated by typ­ing two or three hy­phens in a row (-- or --- ). Don’t do that—it’s an­other type­writer habit. Use real dashes.

Goodbye WordPress, hello Drupal 8

It's been in development for literally years, now, from well before Drupal 8.0.0 was released (having kids has this severe effect on the amount of spare time you have for this sort of thing). In the same vain as I have always developed this site, this time I wanted to get some practice with Drupal 8 under my belt* (the blog has been om Joomla for the same reason, and the move to WordPress seven years ago had the same background). So, goodbye WordPress, hello Drupal. This feels a bit like coming home.

Bring back the keyboard shortcut for Responsive Design Mode in Safari 11

Yesterday, I tweeted:

Seems like Apple removed the keyboard shortcut for entering responsive design mode in the latest Safari update.

— Eelke Blok (@eelkeblok) September 21, 2017

Today, I wipped out my favourite search engine (DuckDuckGo, obviously) and found out you can actually define your own keyboard shortcuts from the macOS Keyboard System Preferences.