Frank Robert Anderson

Prestigious operator of commplicated auto-complete.

Farewell to the burgundy

Written on August 27, 2026

Last week I wrote a list of everything I need to update. Second item: personal site. Here is what has been sitting at www.frankrobertanderson.com this whole time.

The frankrobertanderson.com homepage: a dark burgundy background, olive header bar, and a typewriter-font nameplate

Look at that footer. © Copyright 2009.

That site is old enough to drive. It was built on Drupal 6, with a theme I wrote myself. I still have a soft spot for the dark burgundy background and the typewriter-font nameplate. The contact link is broken – it is supposed to point at the contact form on my Drupal.org profile.

Moving on

Written on August 18, 2026

After more than ten years, my time at Clarity Innovations has come to an end. I was laid off.

I want to say up front that I enjoyed working there. Ten years is a long time to spend anywhere, and I would not have spent it there if I had not wanted to.

Nobody’s fault

This was not my fault, and it was not theirs.

An enormous amount of money was poured into education technology over the last decade. When that kind of money stops, things do not just go back to the way they were – it leaves a vacuum. That is the economy we are in right now. A lot of good people are getting the same news I got, for the same reasons.

Content gatekeeping in a GenAI world

Written on May 10, 2026

Let me start with a bit of history. It might seem like a hard thing for today’s generation to understand, but content used to cost money – especially novel or reliable content. In order to keep up with the latest in science or tech, one needed to subscribe to journals or magazines. An encyclopedia set was an expensive necessity before the age when almost all written content became free.

It was in this time that the foundations of the World Wide Web were being laid in the internet protocol that would become http – the protocol that serves web pages and other hypermedia to the world. And that is why HTTP has had a provision for “Payment Required” responses that has gone unused for 30 years.

Add a JSON API to Any Static Site Generator

Written on April 23, 2026

Static site generators output HTML, but they can output JSON too. Here is how to add a JSON API to your Hugo site, and why the technique works with any SSG.

Getting XDebug working with the Zed editor, starring Claude

Written on January 5, 2026

The Zed editor is one of the more interesting new projects in a long while. The only problem is I use PHP and Zed sucks at PHP. One thing that sucks is Xdebug support. I finally got Xdebug working with the help of Claude. Notice, however, that I didn't say Claude got Xdebug working.

A Suggested Order for Watching TOS with Your Kids

Written on December 16, 2019

Thirteen essential episodes of Star Trek: The Original Series, picked and ordered by a coworker who knows his Trek. A curated list for introducing your kids to the franchise.

How to play gloom with a 52 card deck

Written on March 30, 2018

I played the Edward Gorey inspired card game Gloom the other day. The game and mechanics are fun, but if the dark humor of the game isn't for you then try these rules on a standard 52 card deck.

Why DrupalCon

Written on February 20, 2018

Contributing to Drupal allows us to ensure Drupal remains the best and most flexible general purpose Content Management System. Contributing to Drupal is the job of the Drupal Community.

Rearchitecting for Drupal 8; a DrupalCon Session

Written on February 15, 2018

This is an export of my session from DrupalCon Baltimore 2017. This is here for posterity. The least effort possible was put into transcribing it from presentation format to a web page.

Lets take a look at webVR with AFrame

Written on October 24, 2016

I should continue my series on Machine Generated text or Composer or Drupal, but this just looks like too much fun. WebVR with AFrame.

a new simple reading rogue like

Written on September 30, 2016

With everyone's kids being so smart it is a wonder that we don't have machine generated children's book already. This sounds like an oversight to me because computers are already raising our kids.

Semantic Git

Written on May 27, 2016

Using git-flow as a workflow for semantic versioning. This is a circular dependency that is good.

What if the bullets cost money?

Written on December 23, 2015

Every "learn to make games" tutorial hands you the same space shooter. I want to make a different one — built around a question instead of a high score.

Add an API to Your Jekyll Blog

Written on October 25, 2015

Without adding any non-Github pages approved plugins, build a RESTfull api for your blog by adding a json endpoint.

Reflecting on Elixir and Phoenix

Written on October 9, 2015

I reflect on what I have seen at ElixirConf 2015, what does this mean for Drupal, and Why use Elixir or Phoenix instead of Drupal or Jekyll.

Modern Drupal7 Site Building Tools

Written on September 22, 2015

With Drupal 8 on the horizon, it is tempting to write off Drupal 7. Don’t. The module ecosystem for Drupal 7 is mature, battle-tested, and – for site builders specifically – more powerful than ever. What follows is my curated list of the modules that let a site builder with some front-end skill create complicated sites with little to no custom module code.

Why build a site with Drupal 7

Drupal 8 is nearly out making Drupal 7 look like it isn’t an appealing choice. However, Drupal 7 is still a contender for the conveniences in site-building crown. The module ecosystem for Drupal 7 is mature and, specifically for site builders, it is a very exciting time for Drupal 7.

Step One on replacing Jekyll, make yaml work

Written on July 26, 2015

As you might remember in my post on replacing Jekyll with Gulp (and my post on Jekyll). YAML will be a large part of getting this working.

YAML Parsing

First am trying to use npm-yaml. Simple installation, npm install --save-dev npm-yaml. And it works great with the _config file that holds general site information. So I try it with the html.

gulp.task('test-index', function() {
  var config = gulp.src('./index.html')
    .pipe(yaml({ space: 2 }))
    .pipe(gulp.dest('./gulp-dist/'))
})

With that I get a big fat …

I like Jekyll, but is it necessary?

Written on June 15, 2015

Jekyll solved my blog problem: it is fast to set up, free to host, and I actually write content on it instead of endlessly rebuilding the platform. But now I am wondering if I even need Jekyll, or if I can replace it with Gulp and cut out the Ruby dependency entirely.

One of the first “Content Management Systems” I ever wrote was a perl script that took flat text files and wrapped templates around them and gave me html. I cobbled this thing together and thought, huh, it worked. At the time everything was changing and I hardly ever wrote content. So a script that did this wasn’t extremely useful to me. It was more of an academic experience – especially because, at the time, I wasn’t a professional web developer.

Setting Up Jenkins on 12.04

Written on May 19, 2015

In this post Frank walks through the basics of setting up Jenkins to run on Ubuntu. This is a simple step by step with links to more information.

Back from DrupalConLA (A postmortem)

Written on May 18, 2015

I have been in LA again for DrupalCon. To my surprise this was not the first year of a DrupalCon Stabbing.

I lived in Long Beach for around 7 years. Every time I had some regular obligation. I did my due diligence and checked to see if I could take public transit to wherever I was going, whenever I need to go there. Be it school, or work, or church. I was never able to find a reasonable commute on public transportation. Every time I found a 20 mile commute would lead to a 3 hour and 5 transfer bus route. It was simply a fact that nowhere that I needed to go was a place the bus wanted to take me.

Drupal or Wordpress? Why not Jekyll.

Written on January 27, 2015

Are you fed up with the offerings of Drupal, Wordpress, and other big CMSs? Then maybe a return to roots is in order. Let's look at Jekyll

WebGL with three.js

Written on November 15, 2014

Did you know that 3D is possible on the web with WEBGL? You did? Oh, well, go checkout Three.js then.

Creating screen-reader friendly read more links

Written on May 6, 2014

Over the course of my career I have worked on more than a fair share of higher-education sites. When dealing with a universities website there are many challenges. One of the biggest challenges is in dealing with the accessibility standards. I am writing about WCAG. The WCAG, or Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, is a detailed list for how accessibility should be done on the web.

I might write about the problems with WCAG at some point, but this article is about strictly an incompatibility between what the designer/UX people want and what the WCAG says about “READ MORE” links. Specifically WCAG 2.0 SC 2.4.4. This states that any link needs to have context.

Creating Auto Submitting Forms with Drupal's Form API

Written on November 26, 2013

Sometimes you need a form to submit itself. A select list changes, the page reloads with new options, no extra clicks required. Drupal’s Form API has an #ajax handler for this, but it can be overkill when all you want is a simple page reload on change. Here is a lighter approach.

If you are unfamiliar with building forms in Drupal, please view Patrick’s post on the various options for building forms in Drupal. I will be focusing on forms built with Drupal’s Form API (or fapi).

Support should not be based on Marketshare

Written on October 6, 2013

Some general thoughts on the how and why of Graceful Degradation and Progressive Enhancement. No tutorials here, more philosophical than functional