Web Designer / Developer - Page 13

Regardless of the industry you happen to work in, we can all agree on one thing: keeping customers happy is hard, doubly so if you run a high-traffic website with …

Continue reading “5 Stellar Options for Setting Up Live Chat on Your Website”

Building a website is easy nowadays. However, what about building a site with all the right pieces and information? Not so much. Many people fall into the trap of creating …

Continue reading “6 Pages Every Website Needs: a Privacy Policy, Disclosure, and More”

One-third of all businesses fail within their first two years of life – that’s a fact, and small businesses aren’t the exception. We’re not going to sugarcoat things – that …

Continue reading “6 Features Your Business Website is Missing”

There are thousands if not millions of people who make a living online nowadays – many of them in the fields of web development and design. So it stands to …

Continue reading “How to Outsource Web Design & Development (& Not Get Ripped Off)”

Khan Academy has released a new accessibility testing plugin called Tota11y. It’s a JavaScript plugin that can go in any web page and help you identify accessibility issues with your website. It will not only help you identify the problems with your site, but offer suggestions on how to correct the problems. Some of the categories that Tota11y will look at include:

We all have written code that we later look back at and cringe. Sometimes you’re in a hurry, working too late into the night against the hours and your standards begin to slip. Or if you’re new to a language or a framework, you may not know the best patterns and stumble your way into a spaghetti-like monstrosity. Whatever the cause, we have all been there. There’s a lot of things that can be done to keep your code under control. I’ll just touch on a few of them here.

PHP and JavaScript both have a similar, C-like syntax. This can be both a help and a hindrance to PHP developers who are beginning to write JavaScript. The familiarity can both help and lead them astray. I thought it might be useful here to compile a list of some stumbling blocks to avoid and practices to adopt in order to ease the transition into writing JavaScript.

For anyone who doesn’t know, Shellshock is the name of a particularly nasty vulnerability in Bash, the standard shell for most Linux distributions (and other Unix-like systems.) As of press time, new vulnerabilities due to this bug are still being discovered. Some distributions have only released patches that fix part of the problem, and a vast number of Internet connected computers are unpatched and vulnerable. There’s bound to be some negative outcomes from a security problem like this, but let’s see if we can scrape out some positive results.

Anyone who has experience developing a Single Page Application (SPA) with naked jQuery or raw JavaScript knows that doing so involves a lot of work for basic UI functions like keeping your Model and View in sync. You end up with hundreds or even thousands of lines of JavaScript devoted to basic functionality, before you can even begin writing your application logic. This is why teams of developers have put tremendous effort into making a variety of JavaScript application frameworks. You can take your pick from BackboneJS, EmberJS, AngularJS and others. Each has its own advantages, but for this post I’ll just be talking about what AngularJS brings to the table.

Every developer has had content that needs to be listed out line by line. Usually that means there is or will be a lot of it. Whether it’s a list of past entries in your WordPress blog, a list of nodes in your Drupal site or a list of items for sale in your favorite shopping software. It used to be there was only one right answer of how to deal with this kind of content; pagination. You’d choose some number (or let the user choose) of entries to display per page and then list off the number of pages, letting the user navigate through as needed. Perhaps if you felt sophisticated you’d allow filtering and sorting.