Archive for the ‘Web Development’ Category
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 »
Monday, January 9th, 2012
“It’s a little skinny, can we make it wider?”
More and more these days our clients are coming back to us after viewing a new design mockup on their modern high-res, wide-screen 16:9 displays, and have a common simple request. Make it wider. We are big fans of the 960.gs grid system here at Canada’s Web Shop, and often recommend against heading out into areas wider than 960. Read more...
Tags: 960, browser, clients, design, grid system, viewport, w3schools, wider, width
Posted in Web Design, Web Development | 2 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 »
Thursday, December 22nd, 2011
Google’s PHP client library for their GData API hasn’t received as much love as their client libraries for other languages. Despite the lack of high level service classes for Google Analytics’ Core Reporting API it is possible to work with it using google-api-php-client.
The below is a quick and dirty self contained example based on a Google+ example to get a report. Before you get started go to the API Console and enable access to the Analytics API and generate a client id, client secret, and to register your redirect uri. Read more...
Tags: google, google analytics, Google API
Posted in Web Development | 2 Comments »
Wednesday, December 21st, 2011
Here at the Web Shop, we like to take advantage of existing tools, whether they’re free or reasonably priced. One tool that we opted to not roll on our own is a site search. From time to time clients require them and the first third party search tool so used was Google Custom Search. It’s pretty expensive considering how much traffic site searches tend to get and it behaves oddly, especially with sites that aren’t well indexed. Read more...
Tags: bing, Google Custom Search, yahoo
Posted in Web Development | No Comments »
Monday, December 5th, 2011
If you’ve been keeping up with the latest and greatest in web design, you’ll probably have heard of the Responsive Design (http://www.alistapart.com/articles/responsive-web-design/) trend that’s been picking up steam the last couple of years. Personally I think it’s a great concept, and I’ve been looking forward to the day it becomes standard practice in web design for quite awhile now. However, each time I express my enthusiasm to fellow web designers, I am greeted with blank stares and total apathy. Read more...
Tags: design, Web, Web Design, Web Development
Posted in Web Design, Web Development | 2 Comments »
Thursday, November 24th, 2011
I was recently tasked with creating e-commerce sites for countries where dollar signs don’t apply. Symfony’s I18N support was great for translating strings but proved to be inadequate for formatting currency. Having only used our e-commerce software to display currency in either American or Canadian dollars I had to first remove all hard coded dollar signs from our templates and invent a generic way to display currency for different regions.
Symfony’s format_currency() almost gets the job done, so I created a helper which augments its output. There’s nothing fancy here. You can add a currency indicator on either the left or the right of the currency, and if neither a left or right currency indicator are configured, we default to showing a dollar sign. Read more...
Posted in Web Development | No Comments »
Tuesday, November 1st, 2011
Remember a few years ago when a basic SSL Certificate cost you $300? It’s different now. You can get them for $10, sometimes even less. A few of my peers consider the whole SSL Certificate authority situation a bit of a racket. We were paying them $300 per year for them to tell your browser that we are who we say we are. You can pay them even more money for them to make a certificate that works for all your subdomains. The last one I setup was in the order of 8 times more expensive for that privilege. On their end, it’s not any more technologically expensive to create you a wildcard certificate, or a normal certificate. Read more...
Posted in Technology, Web Development | No Comments »
Tuesday, October 18th, 2011
Having multiple servers feeding a single load balancer has big advantages: fault tolerance, SSL Offloading to name just two. But with the performance comes extra complexity. There are a few things you need to keep in mind when setting up your web application to “play nice”:
SSL Offloading and Apache’s point of view
In a typical SSL Offloading setup, your load balancer (or web proxy) serves all of the certificates to the public facing IPs, so Apache doesn’t need to know anything about SSL. This simplifies web-server setup, which is especially valuable when you’re managing a cluster of them behind a load balancer. Because the load balancer is the point of contact to the outside world, Apache is unable to handle a few things that are normally simple in a standalone setup. Read more...
Tags: apache, PHP, shttp, ssl
Posted in Web Development | No Comments »
Friday, October 14th, 2011
This is just a quick heads up if you haven’t been following the jQuery blog. jQuery has added two new functions: .on() and .off(). We’ve seen this syntax before in other libraries like YUI and it’s clear and concise. These new functions infer whether to use .delegate(), .live() or .bind() based on the parameters passed to it.
From the jQuery blog: Read more...
| Old API |
New API |
| $(elems).bind(events, fn) |
$(elems).on(events, fn) |
| $(elems).bind(events, { mydata: 42 }, fn) |
$(elems).on(events, { mydata: 42 }, fn) |
| $(elems).unbind(events, fn) |
$(elems).off(events, fn) |
| $(elems).delegate(events, selector, fn) |
$(elems).on(events, selector, fn) |
Tags: javascript, jquery, js
Posted in Web Development | 1 Comment »
