Bluecadet Interactive

Thousands of nerds flock to Austin every March for the SXSW Interactive festival to learn about emerging technology, see grumpy cat in the flesh, and check out the best new digital works and innovative ideas. This year, Troy and I were two of these lucky nerds. Here are some highlights:
 

Disruptive Innovation (The Low-End Theory)

Bluecadet producer Victoria Jones and I recently attended a great weekend class organized by Girl Develop It, hosted at Indy Hall. The group can be found on meetup, and is organized in Philadelphia by Yasmine Mustafa. We attended Elise Wei's intermediate class on HTML5 and CSS3.

Starcraft II screenshot by God Mode

Building a website with a CMS is beneficial as it allows you or your clients to create and maintain content with limited or no knowledge of HTML or the underlying site structure. However, when your site is at the front line of an international social campaign or unexpectedly featured on the front page of Reddit, all the backend logic that makes that all possible suddenly starts to work against you. It takes time for your CMS to render a web page and as your first visitors are waiting for the site to render, additional visitors can start to overwhelm your server.

photo by artnoose on Flickr (CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)

One of the things that makes Drupal so powerful and flexible is the ability to use its “hook” system to override/extend items as they are assembled, before they get sent to the browser. If you know where to look, you can modify how a particular piece of content is rendered in markup. That means that if you want certain items to be marked up a certain way, you can go beyond the default Drupal display settings and craft you output so that it looks exactly how you want it to. Want to make sure that every image on your site has your CSS “fancyborder” class? You can do that using a hook. If this is new to you, I suggest you check out Themery’s excerpts from The Definitive Guide to Drupal 7, which cover how Drupal’s theming/rendering process works.

We’ve been working on a site with fairly deep navigation, and we wanted to add “level” classes to the unordered lists: menu-lvl-1, menu-lvl-2, menu-lvl-3, and so on. I’ve compiled the template functions referenced here in a gist.

Poptech holds an annual conference in Camden, Maine that "brings together a global community of innovators from many fields to share insights and work together to create lasting change." I think of Poptech as a mini TED with a twist. In addition to the speakers on stage at Poptech were 22 Fellows -- people who are spearheading new ideas in science or social change. Below are some of our favorite experiences and presentations from the conference.

Pilobolus

UP: The Umbrella Project

Have you ever participated in a spontaneuous, collaborative, live public art project? It's a lot of fun. The modern performance company Pilobolus enlisted several hundred volunteers to participate in a live performance using umbrellas fabricated with multi-colored LED lights created by the MIT Distributed Robotics Laboratory. The performance was simultaneously projected onto a large screen. Read More

Bluecadet will be hosting a free happy hour and open house as part of this year's DesignPhiladelphia festival. Each year DesignPhiladelphia's festival highlights creative work from every part of Philadelphia's vibrant design community.

Our happy hour will be featuring our latest interactive touchscreen exhibits, websites, and apps, as well as delicious Underdogs hot dogs. Come grab a drink and a dog, and check out what's new. Vegan dogs and gluten free buns will also be available.