Composing Code

Before I get to the bulk of this thread, I’d like to preface it with a little bit of background about myself. My college education is in music, with a BM from the Eastman School of Music in Viola…

Is a JAMstack right for your site?

When tasked with refreshing the brand website of Emergence, an iconic venture capital firm, we realized the framework on which it was built needed a makeover, too. We turned to the JAMstack, a modern methodology that matched the project’s…

Choosing a JAMstack for a flexible static site

In Part 1 of this series, we determined that we’d migrate our client’s website from WordPress to a JAMstack. We now needed: A static site generatorA headless CMSA hosting provider 1. Static site generator: Gatsby The first thing we needed…

In the trenches with Gatsby + Contentful + Netlify

Check out Part 1 and Part 2 of this 3-part series on migrating a WordPress site to a JAMstack. This is the most technical post of the series: you’ll get details on everything from content models to GraphQL queries. Click here…

Turning the Dials in Elasticsearch

I’ve spent the last few months working on a project that depended in large part on Elasticsearch. I’m a fan and so are lots of other people — Elasticsearch is the biggest name in open source search (with Solr…

Like pigs hunting down a truffle

There are countless ways to find a good place to eat in a city. Yelp, Trip Advisor, and Google Reviews have that market near cornered. The problem is, there are also countless reviews on those sites. Well, not literally countless.

Nudging Editors in the Right Direction

You and I can both tell when a headline is too long. Too many line breaks make the copy difficult to digest and the main content gets pushed down below the fold. However, when web editors are typing up a…

How to build a web kiosk with a Raspberry Pi, some cables, and a TV

For the recent Upstatement Tankathon hack days, our team worked on something we call Garbage Plate. The idea was to build something that could bring some of our digital inspiration into our physical studio, getting things off of our individual…

Stream Manager and the Power of Curation

There’s a simple choice that comes up over and over again in the business of building content-publishing websites: curation vs. automation. When I say automation I’m talking about things that just work on their own: social media feeds…

Reach out and touch the Web

This is adapted from a recent talk at CASCADE Boston, a CSS and front-end design meetup we host. Come to the next one! The Photon in its box. This thing is tiny! We’re always looking for new and exciting…