The Web Design & Development Megathread

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Serious Hardware/Software Crap > The Cavern of COBOL > The Web Design & Development Megathread

«‹›361 »

The Fool: Oct 16, 2003

Empress Brosephine posted:

Whats the cheapest way to test out a website on a windows PC without having to buy a windows pc? Probably just rent a amazon server?

https://developer.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-edge/tools/vms/

# ? Feb 1, 2021 20:41

Adbot: ADBOT LOVES YOU

# ? May 13, 2024 15:33

Munkeymon: Aug 14, 2003; Motherfucker's got an
armor-piercing crowbar! Rigoddamndicu𝜆ous.

Vincent Valentine posted:

I've heard a lot of good reasons to avoid dependencies unless you really, truly need to. A few:

Installing a package means keeping that package up to date. Many teams will not have time to fix breaking changes caused by a package update, and those updates are required because security issues are updated in newer versions. I know from experience from all that poo poo I posted earlier, dealing with security in outdated packages is a nightmare.

When you install a package, you're installing every package that package has ever kissed. That means something going fucky in a dependencys dependency you didn't even know you had is a cause for concern, but you may not know it. Newer npm audit has helped this a lot, thankfully.

The Leftpad Incident™.

Bundle sizes may not matter to most people, but five percent or so people unable to reliably use your app is five percent revenue lost. This is particularly a problem for companies that create products or services for the poor or people in developing nations.

Remember that time that popular npm package installed a bitcoin miner on everyone's website and nobody knew?

And so on. The reasons are good, and strong, valid reasons to avoid dependencies. It's sure as gently caress not going to stop Personal Me, but it stopped my boss which means it's stopped Work Me. I think packages are great and The Future, but I really wish we could address more if the problems with them. Before it gets out of hand, again .

All bets are off with Dev Dependencies though. When it comes to those, gently caress it, go nuts.

I work for a company that mandates security reviews of dependencies that don't come from trusted vendors, so there's that, too.

# ? Feb 1, 2021 20:44

kedo: Nov 27, 2007

Empress Brosephine posted:

Whats the cheapest way to test out a website on a windows PC without having to buy a windows pc? Probably just rent a amazon server?

browserstack.com It's not free, but it's fairly affordable for the number of OS/browser combinations it offers. Way easier than dealing with virtual machines on your own system, imo.

I used to just run virtual machines for everything, but I got tired of trying to maintain them.

kedo fucked around with this message at 20:49 on Feb 1, 2021

# ? Feb 1, 2021 20:47

Empress Brosephine: Mar 31, 2012; by Jeffrey of YOSPOS

thanks everyone ill check out all the solutions

# ? Feb 1, 2021 20:51

frogbs: May 5, 2004; Well well well

Chenghiz posted:

If you have databases deadlocking each other, it's a technical problem and resources aren't going to fix the issue. Deadlocks (assuming you mean literal deadlocks) are caused by contending requests on tables or table rows that are locked by transactions, not by a lack of system resources, although a lack of resources can make deadlocks happen more frequently because the transactions take longer.

So we've continued to have these deadlocks that bring our entire public websites down, particularly when content is being published into the CMS (Kentico). The vendor in charge of this is now going to try "adding SQL table hints With (NO Lock) to each problem SQL query" the CMS uses to read content. I'm not a database guy, is this common practice? I've done a little bit of reading today and it seems like it's generally frowned upon.

# ? Feb 2, 2021 20:00

Tei: Feb 19, 2011

is not that something that can be solved by having master slave, with the website reading from any random slave?

# ? Feb 2, 2021 20:23

Bruegels Fuckbooks: Sep 14, 2004; Now, listen - I know the two of you are very different from each other in a lot of ways, but you have to understand that as far as Grandpa's concerned, you're both pieces of shit! Yeah. I can prove it mathematically.

frogbs posted:

So we've continued to have these deadlocks that bring our entire public websites down, particularly when content is being published into the CMS (Kentico). The vendor in charge of this is now going to try "adding SQL table hints With (NO Lock) to each problem SQL query" the CMS uses to read content. I'm not a database guy, is this common practice? I've done a little bit of reading today and it seems like it's generally frowned upon.

I'd say that's more a last resort if you couldn't figure out the real cause of the deadlock. I imagine there are situations where it'd be appropriate to do that but generally the whole ACID thing is a good property for a database to have.

# ? Feb 2, 2021 20:26

frogbs: May 5, 2004; Well well well

Tei posted:

is not that something that can be solved by having master slave, with the website reading from any random slave?

I'm really not a database guy, so apologies if i'm being dumb. Is this something you can setup at the SQL server level? The vendor talked about possibly transitioning our Kentico install to a 'web farm' configuration, where we'd have a staging Kentico install to which we'd publish articles, then sync that to our production/public instance. Is there a way to just do this only on the database side, or was their suggestion the same thing?

This was a non-starter with management on my side because it could increase, or possibly double our AWS bill. Maybe it's worth pushing harder for it.

Bruegels Fuckbooks posted:

I'd say that's more a last resort if you couldn't figure out the real cause of the deadlock. I imagine there are situations where it'd be appropriate to do that but generally the whole ACID thing is a good property for a database to have.

Thanks, I think they honestly have no idea what the problem is.

# ? Feb 2, 2021 23:06

smackfu: Jun 7, 2004

Is it common to turn off database locking to avoid lock issues? Yes! Do people who do it understand why databases have locks? No!

# ? Feb 3, 2021 13:13

frogbs: May 5, 2004; Well well well

smackfu posted:

Is it common to turn off database locking to avoid lock issues? Yes! Do people who do it understand why databases have locks? No!

Ok, so we added their 'no lock' hints, increased caching everywhere and the sites are still going down, even more than they were previously. The CMS vendor is now saying "I think you're being DDOS'd" with no proof. Typically CPU/RAM usage is under control too. The common thread is that we're publishing new content to the site using their system, but they just refuse to consider that as an option. Ugh.

# ? Feb 5, 2021 17:04

Bruegels Fuckbooks: Sep 14, 2004; Now, listen - I know the two of you are very different from each other in a lot of ways, but you have to understand that as far as Grandpa's concerned, you're both pieces of shit! Yeah. I can prove it mathematically.

frogbs posted:

Ok, so we added their 'no lock' hints, increased caching everywhere and the sites are still going down, even more than they were previously. The CMS vendor is now saying "I think you're being DDOS'd" with no proof. Typically CPU/RAM usage is under control too. The common thread is that we're publishing new content to the site using their system, but they just refuse to consider that as an option. Ugh.

I made the mistake of taking the word "deadlock" at face value in your post. "Deadlock" and "site going down" are related in the sense that a deadlock can cause your site to go down, but not everything that causes a site to go down is a deadlock. What might've happened was that someone semi-technical started using the word "deadlock" to describe the issue, and then the "tech" people zeroed in on that word and started googling "how to fix deadlock" without knowing how to verify an issue really is a "deadlock..." If they're saying you're getting DDOSed without providing evidence, you're probably just dealing with googlemancers here and are just screwed until someone with a brain troubleshoots the problem.

# ? Feb 5, 2021 17:44

Data Graham: Dec 28, 2009; 📈📊🍪😋

Bruegels Fuckbooks posted:

I made the mistake of taking the word "deadlock" at face value in your post. "Deadlock" and "site going down" are related in the sense that a deadlock can cause your site to go down, but not everything that causes a site to go down is a deadlock. What might've happened was that someone semi-technical started using the word "deadlock" to describe the issue, and then the "tech" people zeroed in on that word and started googling "how to fix deadlock" without knowing how to verify an issue really is a "deadlock..." If they're saying you're getting DDOSed without providing evidence, you're probably just dealing with googlemancers here and are just screwed until someone with a brain troubleshoots the problem.

Lol this is how like everybody at the client for my job has latched on to the word "false flag" when what they mean is "false positive"

Dude that is not what that ... you know what, never mind

# ? Feb 5, 2021 17:53

frogbs: May 5, 2004; Well well well

Bruegels Fuckbooks posted:

I made the mistake of taking the word "deadlock" at face value in your post. "Deadlock" and "site going down" are related in the sense that a deadlock can cause your site to go down, but not everything that causes a site to go down is a deadlock. What might've happened was that someone semi-technical started using the word "deadlock" to describe the issue, and then the "tech" people zeroed in on that word and started googling "how to fix deadlock" without knowing how to verify an issue really is a "deadlock..." If they're saying you're getting DDOSed without providing evidence, you're probably just dealing with googlemancers here and are just screwed until someone with a brain troubleshoots the problem.

Ugh, I wish I had a brain! Or at least knew more about the DB side of things.

Everytime there's an outage we have thousands of log entries from the CMS stating that 'x was deadlocked and chosen as the transaction victim', so we know that they're happening, but I don't think anyone knows exactly what's causing them, or if they're just a symptom of the outage and not the cause.

We pay this company alot of money for this publishing 'solution', so i'm trying to rely on them to fix it, but I think at this point we might need to bring in other people who are more experienced with Kentico, or are more seasoned MSSQL database admins.

# ? Feb 5, 2021 17:54

Bruegels Fuckbooks: Sep 14, 2004; Now, listen - I know the two of you are very different from each other in a lot of ways, but you have to understand that as far as Grandpa's concerned, you're both pieces of shit! Yeah. I can prove it mathematically.

quote:

Everytime there's an outage we have thousands of log entries from the CMS stating that 'x was deadlocked and chosen as the transaction victim', so we know that they're happening, but I don't think anyone knows exactly what's causing them, or if they're just a symptom of the outage and not the cause.

That's good enough evidence it's really a deadlock and the problem is in SQL server to me.

quote:

We pay this company alot of money for this publishing 'solution', so i'm trying to rely on them to fix it, but I think at this point we might need to bring in other people who are more experienced with Kentico, or are more seasoned MSSQL database admins.

Bringing in a sql server dba to take a look at this is probably a good idea, but generally the original vendor should know there stuff regarding the db work, and there usually would be SOMEBODY at that company (maybe not the guy you're working with) who could fix it.

# ? Feb 5, 2021 18:21

frogbs: May 5, 2004; Well well well

Bruegels Fuckbooks posted:

That's good enough evidence it's really a deadlock and the problem is in SQL server to me.

Bringing in a sql server dba to take a look at this is probably a good idea, but generally the original vendor should know there stuff regarding the db work, and there usually would be SOMEBODY at that company (maybe not the guy you're working with) who could fix it.

Thanks! My hunch is that the publishing action is super resource intensive for some reason. They're apparently using Kentico's REST API to publish, which doesn't do any sort of queuing. A standard article might have a few hundred KB of text, along with 10 or so images. I'm thinking that if it's sending full resolution images to Kentico to be resized that could be gumming things up. If there's like 5 articles being published at once across 3 different app pools maybe that's enough to cause problems, especially when contending with public traffic. You'd think this would be easy for them to look into, since you know, they designed it, but I guess not.

# ? Feb 5, 2021 18:52

Impotence: Nov 8, 2010; Lipstick Apathy

Everything about this Kentico stuff is absolutely enterprise-tier :psyboom:

to me because I have dynamic stuff doing millions of pageviews an hour on under $50/month

# ? Feb 5, 2021 18:56

frogbs: May 5, 2004; Well well well

Biowarfare posted:

Everything about this Kentico stuff is absolutely enterprise-tier to me because I have dynamic stuff doing millions of pageviews an hour on under $50/month

Yeah, I feel like we've maybe picked the worst solution possible, along with vendors who either don't know what they're doing, or just don't care. Kentico also has insanely high yearly licensing fees. It's nuts.

We specifically went with a hosting provider that 'specializes' in Kentico. They told us last month that most of the other sites they host get "like 50,000 pageviews per month", and that we're by far the largest they deal with (5-10million). Ugh.

# ? Feb 5, 2021 19:31

Tei: Feb 19, 2011

Bruegels Fuckbooks posted:

I made the mistake of taking the word "deadlock" at face value in your post. "Deadlock" and "site going down" are related in the sense that a deadlock can cause your site to go down, but not everything that causes a site to go down is a deadlock. What might've happened was that someone semi-technical started using the word "deadlock" to describe the issue, and then the "tech" people zeroed in on that word and started googling "how to fix deadlock" without knowing how to verify an issue really is a "deadlock..." If they're saying you're getting DDOSed without providing evidence, you're probably just dealing with googlemancers here and are just screwed until someone with a brain troubleshoots the problem.

I love this word, Googlemancer. Can I steal it?

# ? Feb 5, 2021 19:36

Bruegels Fuckbooks: Sep 14, 2004; Now, listen - I know the two of you are very different from each other in a lot of ways, but you have to understand that as far as Grandpa's concerned, you're both pieces of shit! Yeah. I can prove it mathematically.

Tei posted:

I love this word, Googlemancer. Can I steal it?

It's already in urban dictionary with a slightly different meaning, but go nuts.

# ? Feb 5, 2021 19:48

Sereri: Sep 30, 2008; awwwrigami

kedo posted:

Also "now you also put your CSS and your HTML into your JS" proved to be as much of a head scratcher as you'd expect.

"Did you just tell me to go gently caress myself?"

# ? Feb 5, 2021 20:04

smackfu: Jun 7, 2004

In my somewhat outdated database experience, the issue of �taking the site down� is usually when an update requires a row level lock which escalates to a table level lock, and then the table level lock blocks reads. Turning off the �blocks read� part can solve the problem but usually not the root cause.

# ? Feb 7, 2021 14:57

frogbs: May 5, 2004; Well well well

smackfu posted:

In my somewhat outdated database experience, the issue of �taking the site down� is usually when an update requires a row level lock which escalates to a table level lock, and then the table level lock blocks reads. Turning off the �blocks read� part can solve the problem but usually not the root cause.

I'm prettysure this is exactly what's happening. We've also figured out that the publishing action can take a really long time, like ~10 minutes for just 3 articles that only have like 5 images each. So it's locking things up for way longer than you'd expect.

# ? Feb 7, 2021 20:54

Empress Brosephine: Mar 31, 2012; by Jeffrey of YOSPOS

I need to put together a personal site for my little company but i'm a horrible designer. I don't really want to hire a designer because I know I could put something together but i'm wondering if any of you goons know of a good place to get some inspiration or want to share your own. I'd ideally like it to be pretty simplistic as I don't want to give the impression that i'm a designer, and i'd really use the site as a way to track invoices on the back end for my clients, but I want a front end that is a marketing site, so i'd like it half way decenlty look.

Hope that made sense. Thanks for help!

# ? Feb 8, 2021 03:32

LifeLynx: Feb 27, 2001; Dang so this is like looking over his shoulder in real-time; Grimey Drawer

I'd pick up a framework, the more opinionated the easier it will probably be to whip up something quick that looks good, even if it's very reminiscent of other things, like that one Bootstrap website, you know the one.

I like siteinspire.com for ideas, but some of them are a little too outside-the-box for most uses.

# ? Feb 8, 2021 06:52

CarForumPoster: Jun 26, 2013; â¡POWERâ¡

Empress Brosephine posted:

I need to put together a personal site for my little company but i'm a horrible designer. I don't really want to hire a designer because I know I could put something together but i'm wondering if any of you goons know of a good place to get some inspiration or want to share your own. I'd ideally like it to be pretty simplistic as I don't want to give the impression that i'm a designer, and i'd really use the site as a way to track invoices on the back end for my clients, but I want a front end that is a marketing site, so i'd like it half way decenlty look.

Hope that made sense. Thanks for help!

Wix site + quickbooks online for invoices

# ? Feb 8, 2021 15:12

Empress Brosephine: Mar 31, 2012; by Jeffrey of YOSPOS

That takes the fun out of it lol

# ? Feb 8, 2021 15:14

Lumpy: Apr 26, 2002; La! La! La! Laaaa!; College Slice

Then google "Free HTML5 templates" and download ones that look cool. Then kick yourself later for not using Wix / Squarespace.

# ? Feb 8, 2021 15:40

SimonChris: Apr 24, 2008; The Baron's daughter is missing, and you are the man to find her. No problem. With your inexhaustible arsenal of hard-boiled similes, there is nothing you can't handle.; Grimey Drawer

Empress Brosephine posted:

I need to put together a personal site for my little company but i'm a horrible designer. I don't really want to hire a designer because I know I could put something together but i'm wondering if any of you goons know of a good place to get some inspiration or want to share your own. I'd ideally like it to be pretty simplistic as I don't want to give the impression that i'm a designer, and i'd really use the site as a way to track invoices on the back end for my clients, but I want a front end that is a marketing site, so i'd like it half way decenlty look.

Hope that made sense. Thanks for help!

http://motherfuckingwebsite.com/

Once you've mastered that one, you can move on to the advanced stuff with http://bettermotherfuckingwebsite.com/.

# ? Feb 8, 2021 16:04

Data Graham: Dec 28, 2009; 📈📊🍪😋

Lmao at

code:

<!-- yes, I know...wanna fight about it? -->

on that guy's google analytics embed

# ? Feb 8, 2021 16:41

prom candy: Dec 16, 2005; Only I may dance

Empress Brosephine posted:

That takes the fun out of it lol

You know what's really not fun? Downloading an HTML5 template and trying to adapt it to your needs.

If you have some money to spend and are open to using Tailwind, TailwindUI has some pretty nice components for marketing sites https://tailwindui.com/components#product-marketing

# ? Feb 8, 2021 18:26

Empress Brosephine: Mar 31, 2012; by Jeffrey of YOSPOS

Oh I don't mind programming it, I just was looking for inspiration for the design of it. Tailwind is a good idea for easy components though.

# ? Feb 8, 2021 18:37

The Dave: Sep 9, 2003

If you just want inspiration you can check dribbble, behance, envato, competitor sites, etc.

# ? Feb 8, 2021 18:46

LifeLynx: Feb 27, 2001; Dang so this is like looking over his shoulder in real-time; Grimey Drawer

Edit: I'm dumb, don't look at ten year old articles while tired when looking up the best way of doing something in "modern browsers".

LifeLynx fucked around with this message at 07:21 on Feb 12, 2021

# ? Feb 12, 2021 07:15

Chumbawumba4ever97: Dec 31, 2000; by Fluffdaddy

This has been surprisingly hard to google:

I have an animated gif on a website that I made. I want it to re-play the gif (not loop, just re-play once) any time someone refreshes the page or goes to a different page on the site.

I found two different pages of people asking this, and tried both "solutions" someone posted, but neither worked.

Is there a simple way to do this with HTML or something?

# ? Feb 12, 2021 20:53

go play outside Skyler: Nov 7, 2005

Chumbawumba4ever97 posted:

This has been surprisingly hard to google:

I have an animated gif on a website that I made. I want it to re-play the gif (not loop, just re-play once) any time someone refreshes the page or goes to a different page on the site.

I found two different pages of people asking this, and tried both "solutions" someone posted, but neither worked.

Is there a simple way to do this with HTML or something?

Convert it to video, and put the autoplay and muted attributes to the video tag so that it plays automatically?

# ? Feb 12, 2021 21:27

MrMoo: Sep 14, 2000

Do you mean looping is baked in the GIF and you just want to remove it? Try any "GIF Optimizer" website, will usually have those options.

# ? Feb 12, 2021 21:28

Chumbawumba4ever97: Dec 31, 2000; by Fluffdaddy

It's a custom-made gif that I made in literally like 1999 so I don't have the source unfortunately; it would look pretty crappy converted to video. Looping is not baked into the gif. I want it to play once fully, and not loop. But I want it to play the animation again any time someone re-loads the page or clicks on a different page on the site that also has the gif. I guess it's stored in their cache which is why it does not replay. I want it to "re-load" even though it's in their cache.

The following code used to work for me:

(I had to screen shot the code because the forums blocked me from posting it)

but for whatever reason I can't get it working on the new site. It still works on the old site, but I am completely re-doing the site because the old Wordpress theme completely breaks if you update Wordpress and the site keeps getting hacked due to how out of date it is.

Not sure why the code works fine on the old site but not the new one. Maybe I am missing something elsewhere in the code? It's been so long since I've done this stuff, it has completely left my brain.

# ? Feb 12, 2021 22:24

Empress Brosephine: Mar 31, 2012; by Jeffrey of YOSPOS

Looping is imbedded in the gift itself so it should just naturally loop on every refresh so I'm stumped as you. Does it loop if you do a hard refresh (Ctrl and R at same time)

# ? Feb 12, 2021 22:28

Chumbawumba4ever97: Dec 31, 2000; by Fluffdaddy

I just tried it and it does not start the gif over if I do CTRL+R.

It works fine on the old site so it has to be some sort of code. It's even linked to the same exact gif URL. It definitely has nothing to do with the actual gif itself.

# ? Feb 12, 2021 22:42

Adbot: ADBOT LOVES YOU

# ? May 13, 2024 15:33

Impotence: Nov 8, 2010; Lipstick Apathy

quote:

It's a custom-made gif that I made in literally like 1999 so I don't have the source unfortunately

But the gif is the source?

# ? Feb 12, 2021 23:08

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Serious Hardware/Software Crap > The Cavern of COBOL > The Web Design & Development Megathread

«‹›361 »