Author Archive
Wednesday, January 11th, 2012
With the news that Microsoft’s Internet Explorer 6 has – finally – fallen to 1% of U.S. browser share, the modern internet is now turning to face a new problem from the folks down in Redmond.
Until recently, the technology to include fonts and also the permission to use them has prevented web sites from deviating beyond generic typefaces like “sans-serif” or “serif”. To get around this, many people banked on the popularity of Microsoft Windows to leverage their default font library. Which eventually came to include the famous and well entrenched “Verdana” font. Read more...
Tags: cleartype, css, freetype, Linux, microsoft, osx, skia, tco, web fonts, windows
Posted in Technology, Tools, Tips and Tricks, Web Design, Web Development | No Comments »
Tuesday, January 3rd, 2012
In dealing with various technologies and services on the internet, one thing that my experiences as a developer have taught me is that open is better. You can use this rubric for just about any online or IT concept, and you’ll find that in the long haul, you’ll be better served. Whether it’s by using open software, hardware that communicates using standards or using a service that isn’t afraid of letting your data get away from them. Examples are all around us and the majority of successful tech companies have banked on the quality and transparency of free software. Even Microsoft and Apple have leveraged the quality of free and open – despite what their marketing departments might want you to think about it! In the grand scheme of things, open solutions tend to be longer lived, easier to work with and overall cheaper. Read more...
Tags: facebook, open source
Posted in Random Musings, Web Development | No Comments »
Monday, October 17th, 2011
If you haven’t caught the buzz yet, Apple has made iOS5 available to everyone and anyone eligible to run it today. The next time you fire up iTunes, you should be prompted to install the new version of the OS.
I plugged in my iPad2 to get started with the upgrade but unfortunately got some errors. At first, the issue seemed to be with the backup process that Apple forces you to go through prior to the upgrade. But after some research, it turns out that the iOS upgrade “phones home” and because Apple wasn’t prepared for the upgrade, their servers became overwhelmed. The simple solution is to continue trying the upgrade until eventually you luck out and get an “okay” from Apple head command. Read more...
Tags: Apple, ios 5, ipad2, iphone
Posted in Just Launched, Technology, Tools, Tips and Tricks | No Comments »
Wednesday, October 5th, 2011
I recently encountered an issue where mobile browsers were not rendering our web sites with as much of the page in view as possible on first load. Looking at some of our earlier web sites, I could see that none of them were experiencing this issue! So, I ended up wondering: “What changed?”
At The Web Shop, we try to use as many tools and resources as we can to ensure that we are following best practices and not reinventing the wheel (or at least improving upon it!). One of which is the popular HTML5 Boilerplate project that includes a viewport meta tag. Read more...
Tags: html, html5, meta data, viewport
Posted in Web Development | 1 Comment »
Tuesday, September 27th, 2011
If you think about your experiences on the internet, you might find that some of the more deeply engaging ones haven’t always depended exclusively on the content you’re consuming.
It’s an elusive concept, that in the world of web development we refer to as metadata. Loosely described, metadata is information and insight into data and how it moves around. Metadata might be the time you visited, how many pages you went to during your visit, what country you’re from or which links brought you to each page. It doesn’t focus on the “what” and “why” so much as the “who”, “where”, “when” and “how”. As web developers, we typically focus on using metadata to return marketing information about visitors or to improve how well web sites are described for search engines. Read more...
Tags: data, development, meta, tags, Web
Posted in Search Engine Optimization, Web Development | No Comments »
Thursday, September 15th, 2011
If you haven’t caught the news yet, Microsoft has released a developer preview of their upcoming Windows 8 operating system.
Most regular users will want to avoid installing it, as it is not of release or even beta quality. But for developers and even enthusiasts, this is a great way to get a peek of the things Microsoft plans on changing as well as getting an early start on creating applications for Metro. Read more...
Tags: bootsect, efi, gpt, metro, mobile, preinstall, usb, windows 8, windows8
Posted in Technology | 1 Comment »
Thursday, August 18th, 2011
I recently found myself having to get some data from a SOAP service onto a Symfony 1.4 site. The data consisted of a simple title, location and posting date of the two most recent records from the service.
When accessing a SOAP service – especially when your API access is metered – it’s often a good idea to set up a local cache of the data. That way you’re not burning your page load times with server-side HTTP requests, using up precious request allotments or concurrent connection limits. Which means you have to mirror or abstract the remote inside of your app.
Initially my design consisted of creating a local Doctrine 1.2 data model, a handful of application configuration options and then adding some methods to the model and table classes to fetch locally and update the database with forced or timed expiries. Read more...
Tags: caching, component, json, netbeans, PHP, rpc, SOAP, soap-rpc, symfony 1.4, wsdl
Posted in Technology, Tools, Tips and Tricks, Web Development | 1 Comment »
Friday, June 17th, 2011
When your web site needs to uniquely identify its users, creating a simple authentication system often ends up being a chore. You have to create an inviting registration process as well as store and check passwords.
Even if you make your best effort to streamline the registration, there will always be users who decide to move along, opting out of your web site.
Why? Well, when it comes to registration, most of us on the Internet are just burned out. We’ve all had our fair share of forms asking us for names, birthdays, passwords and mother’s maiden names (or your favourite pet).
Thankfully, we have OpenID to improve conversion rates and ensure that users follow through to their unique experience on your web site. Read more...
Tags: authentication system, login, openid, password checks, PHP, registration, sfPHPOpenIdPlugin, symfony, Symfony App, symfony plugin, ui, user interface design, Web Development
Posted in Web Development | 2 Comments »
