The Aten Blog

The Aten Blog

We have things to say about design, process, and code. Read about them here, subscribe to our feed, or follow us on twitter.

We're looking for a talented UI/Interactive designer

If you, or someone you know, is an awesome user experience/interactive designer, and is interested in working on exciting projects for awesome clients with an excellent team, take a look at our job post and get in touch!

Express checkout with Drupal Commerce

Drupal Commerce is a robust, flexible e-commerce platform. Wading through its several pages of configuration options isn't always easy, though. That's why we've put together a cheat-sheet for configuring a clean, simple express checkout with Drupal Commerce.

QwertyTown: Keyboarding Lesson

QwertyTown is an online community that teaches kids to type. Our goal was to create an interactive experience that makes typing fun. The keyboarding lesson is a flash module where kids learn to type. The client gave us an outline with levels as main categories, then individual lessons for each level. Each lesson covers a specific key set the student needs to learn. We wrote the ActionScript and built the back-end architecture that makes the keyboarding lesson work.

Random Hacks of Kindness

This weekend, more than 1,500 self-proclaimed "hackers" are gathering in cities around the world to work on technology solutions for world problems, including advance warning for severe weather situations, tracking lost children in large-scale emergencies, real time climate data comparison, and more than 60 others. The "hackathon" events are part of a global initiative called Random Hacks of Kindness, founded in 2009 in a partnership between Google, Microsoft, Yahoo!, NASA and the World Bank.

We had the incredible privilege of working with the RHoK team to redesign and rebuild RHoK.org in Drupal 7.

jQuery Cycle FTW!

When it comes to web development, it would hurt my feelings if you called me a one-trick-pony. However, for the majority of projects I've worked on, there has been a need for a slideshow and/or rotating content. For a number of years, SlideShowPro (a flexible Flash slideshow), was my goto for slideshows.

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Test-Driven Sitemap Design

We spend significant time and effort in the information architecture phase of projects, during which our principle goal is to create an effective sitemap. As with other steps in the process, we pitch an initial recommendation, solicit feedback, host discussions, make some changes, rinse and repeat. Also similar to other parts of the process, it is critical to establish metrics that define a particular final product as successful. With sitemaps, this has proven particularly important.

Choosing the Right Mapping Tools

Data on the web is increasingly location-specific. Between the rapidly expanding mobile web and the new geolocation API in browsers, it's easier than ever to attach locations to users and the content they create.

It's less easy to display location data in a way that is usable. There are plenty of free mapping tools, but which to use?

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Drupal 7 (and Seven)

The Denver Drupal 7 release party was an amazing evening of food, drink and Drupal fun. We'd like to thank Examiner.com and Growing Venture Solutions for co-sponsoring the event with Aten and extra thanks to Elevated Third for not only co-sponsoring, but hosting the party as well.

December Denver Drupal Meetup Recap

Despite the cold and the holidays, the Denver Drupal users group still met a few days after Christmas to discuss a few general web issues in addition to Drupal specific topics.

Capability Testing

The web is generally designed to route around damage, to fail quietly. From failed TCP/IP packet delivery to invalid HTML to invalid CSS, we rarely notice what doesn't work. Servers and browsers work it out and give us the best results they can come up with given broken input. The major exception to this is JavaScript. When JavaScript fails, it fails big. Browsers don't continue on running the parts of the JavaScript that still work, like they do with almost every other web standard.

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