On a site I am working on, the theme is Acquia Prosper. The Primary Menu for the top navigation uses Superfish dropdowns if you turn them on. If you want a menu item to have a dropdown, you need to make sure that menu item is set to Expanded.

However, in many situations, you will also use the Primary menu for local navigation, so users can easily see what section of the site they are in, what page they are on and what other menu items are in that section.

One of the most important new techniques in web design is responsive design, which was introduced by Ethan Marcotte, an unstoppable robot ninja and one of my favorite people working on the web.

Since I work primarily with Drupal, I have struggled with how to integrate these new techniques with Drupal. Thankfully, Jeremiah Davis of Advantage Labs gave a presentation on “Responsive Design and Drupal” at Drupal Camp Twin Cities 2011.

Here is the session description:

Let me just start by saying that I really don’t believe I should be blamed for the very odd experience I had when I tried to use the restroom at the restaurant we were at tonight; I certainly was not trying to scare a 90-year old woman, and I did not deserve to be lectured by her daughter.

Also, I think there is a funny analogy to web accessibility in this story.

I have been a big advocate for web standards since I first read Jeffrey Zeldman’s Designing with Web Standards, well, let’s just say a while ago.

Here’s a quick Twitter productivity tip in Firefox 4!

Firefox 4 allows you to pin web app tabs so they are always available right when you login. Once you are logged into a web app, just click and drag on the tab to the left side of your tabs. Now, instead of a big long tabs, you’ll have a nice snug tab with just the favicon appearing, rather than the page title.

This works well with Twitter, email web apps, whatever.

Want to see my tweets on your web page? With just three lines of HTML?

No problem!

Step one

<div id="twitter_div"><ul id="twitter_update_list">&nbsp;</ul></div>

Step two

<script type="text/javascript" src="http://twitter.com/javascripts/blogger.js">&nbsp;</script>

Step three

<script type="text/javascript" src="http://twitter.com/statuses/user_timeline/MarcDrummond.json?callback=twitterCallback2&count=5">&nbsp;</script>

I just saw The Social Network, so once again, my love/hate relationship with Facebook is on my mind (or more accurately, my modicum-of-interest/hate relationship with Facebook).

As an aside, The Social Network is a great movie. May or may not be entirely accurate, but if you’re an Aaron Sorkin fan (and who doesn’t love the West Wing), you’ll love it. The story it tell does give some insight into how Facebook got off the ground, with some caveats that the tale is told from a certain point of view. Not an entirely one-sided point of view, but all the facts may not be on display.

This past week I attended, and was an organizer for, the annual conference for the National Association of Government Webmasters (NAGW). The first session I attended was an extensive pre-conference workshop, a “Social Media Boot Camp,” led by Adriel Hampton.

If you ask any given web designer what frustrates them most, my guess is most will tell you IE6.

We know the extra development time and costs that come from dealing with IE6 and other misbehaving older browsers. We know the feeling that it’s difficult to move forward when older browsers hold us back.

If you’re using Drupal for your blog, and you have the default “recent comments” block displaying, you may have discovered that it swiftly fills up with comments with the subject line of “Pingback.”

I found this annoying: I want to see real people comments, not computer comments.

Luckily, this is a pretty quick fix.

Assuming you’re using Views (and who isn’t?), a comments_recent view should be listed as disabled. Enable it and edit it.