Is blogging necessary? This is a question that tends to spark quite some debate, not only among marketers, but also among business owners. Countless times, I’ve been in a meeting where concerns have been raised at the mention of blogging. “That’s not for our industry,” or “We don’t have time for that,” as well as “I don’t see how it will help my bottom line.” These are among some of the most common objections I tend to hear. The question of blogging being a necessity becomes irrelevant once we learn of statistics such as, 81% of people conduct online research before making any purchase.

Hello again! Now that we have setup selenium on your machine, let's talk about what value it actually gives us. If you think about it, or if you decide to look up their website, all that Selenium does is it just automates your browser. The tests, the functionality, and the code hookups are entirely up to you. This is structured this way to cater to people who are new to the product, as well as go all the way to the seasoned veteran. You can use and configure selenium to personalize your needs and wants for your projects.

This video will take you through how we construct sites on Drupal 8 using dependency managers on top of Docker with Vagrant. In this video we discuss tools such as: Ansible, Bundler, Composer, Bower, NPM, Yeoman, and Drush make. Don't forget to share or comment if you like this video!

Now that the release of Drupal 8 is finally here, it is time to adapt our Drupal 7 build process to Drupal 8, while utilizing Docker. This post will take you through how we construct sites on Drupal 8 using dependency managers on top of Docker with Vagrant.

We recently were introduced to a website testing tool called Shoov. Shoov is a visual regression tool using webdrivercss and we are going to show you how to get it running on your site.

Pre-production is tough. I’ll be the first to admit it, grabbing your camera and jumping straight into filming not only feels natural, but is also an extremely easy thing to do. Unfortunately the end result normally speaks for itself, when you’re left with a video that is at best sub-par. Some of the most successful things we do in life are normally strategically planned and intentionally executed. Your videos should be no different. Though you may “wing it” and produce decent results from time to time, chances are that you will be disappointed and have to spend more time re-shooting / re-editing, or even worse, re-doing the whole project.

Shoov.io is a nifty website testing tool created by Gizra. We at ActiveLAMP were first introduced to Shoov.io at DrupalCon LA, in fact, Shoov.io is built on, you guessed it, Drupal 7 and it is an open source visual regression toolkit.

So, you think you're using Facebook to it's fullest potential huh? Well, think again. When it comes to using Social Media to promote your business, there are definitely some major rules for success that not many small businesses are following. For instance, if the last thing you posted was self promoting (like a sale) you totally missed the mark. If you are using Facebook (or any other social media for that matter) merely as a billboard to talk about yourself, you're missing out on a whole world of possibilities for business growth.

In this blog post, I am going to look at Selenium, the tool of choice every QA engineer has in his toolkit. It is a web framework that runs assertions, that answers true or false questions, based on which assertions were used. This gives the developers and the QA engineers a better picture of how the user interacts with a site, thus making debugging simpler and more efficient.

Running headless Drupal with a separate javascript framework on the front-end can provide amazing user experiences and easy theming. Although, working with content editors with this separation can prove to be a tricky situation. This is why we came up with the solution... Preview of the article on a separate front-end (Ember) application without ever saving the node!

How do you explain the feeling of achievement when you meet a goal you have worked so hard to accomplish? It's an indescribable feeling that charges you up to aim for and fulfill extravagant aspirations. We have that energy flow here are ActiveLAMP. It's electrifying!

A little over a year ago the ActiveLAMP website had undergone a major change -- we made the huge decision of moving away from using Drupal to manage its content in favor of building it as a static HTML site using Jekyll, hosted on Amazon S3. Not only did this extremely simplify our development stack, it also trimmed down our server requirements to the very bare minimum. Now, we are just hosting everything on a file storage server like it's 1993.