I mentioned in a previous post that we're working on interactive e-book for the Women on the Road to Health project. Here I'll outline a simple system for authoring ePub 3 content.

We needed bulk editing in our project management tool, and this post outlines how we've taken advantage of some of Django's built-in functionality to achieve this.

This post sketches out a process for developing activities in an ePub-style environment.

When I've found it necessary to make changes to the npm libraries I'm using in React, the process isn't well-documented and I've found some guidelines through trial and error.

The expectation that all basic webservers will behave similarly with the same static content has some limitations. Between Apache, Nginx, and S3/Cloudfront, there are plenty of opportunities to discover discrepancies around directory indexing, authentication, 404 handling, compression, and caching. Static site generators are a tool, not a silver bullet.

At CTL, we've been using smoketest for several years now. It is a standard part of our stack now and has helped us prevent numerous issues from making it to production as well as simplified and sped up the identification and fixing of production environment issues.

Here at the CTL, we are passionate about delivering high quality code that adheres to community standards. Our quality control arsenal includes unit tests, code reviews, static analyzers, style checkers, and continuous integration. Our recent adoption of webpack for JavaScript interactives required a fresh approach for unit and client-side testing complexities.

This post outlines some of the technologies involved in putting together a video juxtaposition tool for Mediathread. The primary technology I'm focusing on is React, which is a framework for building highly interactive user interfaces on the web in JavaScript.

At CTL, client-side interactives enrich many of our serial-learning web applications. These discrete JavaScript blocks challenge students with quizzes, animations, case studies, calculators and games. Many of our interactives carry enough context to stand on their own statelessly. We recently explored ways to package these interactives for wider distribution.

In the past few years, a web standard called Content Security Policy has come up that allows web developers to restrict how media and code can be accessed on their website depending on where the assets are being served. GitHub and Mozilla both have further explanations of CSP.