Archive for the ‘Web Development’ Category
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, 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 »
Thursday, August 11th, 2011
Today is a very exciting day: HTML5 Boilterplate v2 came out and I discovered that transparent PNGs don’t have to be massive.
There was one change from h5bp from v1 to v2 that would be easy to overlook: “We feel tools like imagealpha and pngquant, and techniques like using 8-bit PNGs are more useful than using stopgap fixes like belatedpng.”
What’s this? pngquant? Huh? It turns out pngquant is an OS X only GUI for pngnq. What is pngnq? From the pngnq website: “Pngnq is a tool for quantizing PNG images in RGBA format.” I don’t know what that means but it sure can make a difference in your transparent PNG’s file size. Read more...
Tags: belatedpng, Compression, HTML5 Boilerplate, ImageMagick, OptiPNG, PNG, pngnq, pngquant, Quantizing
Posted in 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 »
Tuesday, April 19th, 2011
Your website is being viewed on a huge variety of resolutions, whether your design is ready for it or not. Every day mobile devices are becoming more connected and commonly used to browse the internet. In the past, website owners would strive to have their website displayed the same on as many screens as possible. As smaller and larger screens become more common, it’s becoming important to have your website display in a way optimized for the screen. The question remains: How do we give each size screen its own optimal user experience without creating multiple designs for each project? The answer is through Responsive Web Design. Read more...
Posted in Tools, Tips and Tricks, Web Design, Web Development | No Comments »
Friday, February 18th, 2011
Implementing forms in 2011 is still a challenge, even with a framework like Symfony helping you along. sfForm is great for defining widgets and validators but it sucks at outputting practical markup.
Practical Markup
For me, the ideal markup for a form field looks like:
This gives me a lot of flexiblity for styling. Unfortunately I was never able to find a way to acheive this using formatters, and so I continued on writing very verbose forms. Luckily I grew weary of this and decided to see if I could create a helper to ease the output of forms. The following is what I cam up with: Read more...
Tags: forms, symfony
Posted in Tools, Tips and Tricks, Web Development | No Comments »
Monday, November 15th, 2010
Curiosity killed the cat, right? I bet if the cat had anything to say about it, his mindset was still worth it.
I was recently thinking about what drove me to become a programmer when I was asked if it’s hard to write code. I realized that the range of understanding necessary to stop any career from being akin to magic is narrow. With some basic understanding of something, you can start learning the rest of it. I came to the conclusion that programming was one of many occupations that could be a natural good choice for my curious personality. Read more...
Posted in Linux System Administration, Random Musings, Web Development | 1 Comment »
Friday, October 15th, 2010
While developing a UI that makes heavy use of use of JavaScript I found myself sending and receiving Doctrine_Record‘s as JSON. It became tedious making URL’s available for various Symfony actions in JavaScript so I sought to find a way to create a helper like Symfony’s url_for() in JavaScript. This post describes how I made Symfony’s routing available in JavaScript. Read more...
Posted in Web Development | 3 Comments »
Friday, October 8th, 2010
Several of my colleagues at the Web Shop have recently independently stumbled upon a couple of articles that talk about an innovative concept: Designing websites right in the web browser. The topic managed to find its way into several conversations here over the last little while, and I thought I would keep the conversation going, and bring it online to potentially include a larger number of people in the conversation. Read more...
Posted in Tools, Tips and Tricks, Web Design, Web Development | 3 Comments »
