Recent Posts | Andrew Benbow

Drupal As A Service: A Year In Open Source

It's been about a year since I started building and maintaining the Drupal service integration for NixOS, and the next nixpkgs stable release is comming up this May, so it seems like a good time to take stock and talk about what has been going on with this project in that time.

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Thoughts From The Impending Android Lock In

Let me preface by saying I wish I didn't have to use any smartphones at all, let alone make choices about the kinds of software I'm allowed to put on them.

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Using Drupal with NixOS

I recently contributed to NixOS and nixpkgs to help bring Drupal, my favorite web platform, to NixOS, a staggeringly complex, declarative, reproduceable Linux operating system. Here's what I learned along the way.

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Using Bottles to Run Windows-Based Electron Apps on Linux

I recently got a hold of a piece of software that I had been eagerly awaiting the arrival of for some time. It came in the mail via USB flash drive and proudly advertised that it would only work on Windows and Mac OSX. Knowing a thing or two about computers, I (perhaps, over-) confidently ignored these instructions and set out to make it work on Linux.

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Lazy Loading CSS Background Images

It is easy enough to set loading to "lazy" for HTML image elements. This make the images load only when the user is about to see them. But how do you get similar performance gains for images that get loaded onto the page using CSS?

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Sensible Alternatives: Web Browsers

"Lost in the sauce" is largely how I would describe my whole digital life. Instead of wallowing in the sweaty nerd energy of it all, what if I talked about it?

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Books My Family Wishes They Could Re-Read For The First Time

This Thanksgiving, my family was asked to bring a book (or a title of a book) that they wished they could read again for the first time so they could swap books with another person.

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Cartes Noires: A Creative Writing Exercise For Mystery and Detective Fiction

Cartes Noires is a creative writing exercise to help you craft the plot for a mystery novel in about 30 minutes using only a standard deck of playing cards and your imagination. With it, it is possible to make an elaborate, whodunnit story on the fly.

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What is Holorhyme Poetry?

I made this experimental poem by reading the alphabet aloud forward and backward. It is also what 2000's era chat bots sounded like when they talk to each other.

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Beau Presents & Big Ol' Crusty Books O' Magick

In college I experimented with a constrained writing system called the beau present. This is an experimental poem often prepared as a wedding gift. The names of the betrothed serve both as the title of the poem, and as a challenge to the writer.

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