The Web Design & Development Megathread

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

Nebulon Gate: Feb 23, 2013

I'm very close to writing a book on Laravel myself. I am not pleased with Code Bright.

# ¿ Jun 18, 2013 08:06

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# ¿ Apr 27, 2024 09:33

Nebulon Gate: Feb 23, 2013

thegasman2000 posted:

One of my clients sites...

Safari - 42.17%
Android Browser - 17.27
Chrome - 16.87%
IE 6 - 14.68%

Really???

No, not really. IE6 is the agent reported by crawling bots. The web, at this point, is loving unusable with IE6.

I'm of the opinion that if Google drops IE8 support, I do too. I'll generally throw in selectivizr and modernizr for posterity's sake, but I don't bother testing it anymore, and I make hotel websites. IE8 requires a steep fee for me to support, at this point.

Nebulon Gate fucked around with this message at 22:38 on Jun 18, 2013

# ¿ Jun 18, 2013 22:34

Nebulon Gate: Feb 23, 2013

Those of you who DO use Laravel, should I write a book, what would be some good topics to cover?

Bastard posted:

I hate making HTML mails. I have always hated them. I will always hate them. I hate the clients that request them. I hate the project managers that approve them. I hate the designers who make them. I hate the 1001 email clients that have a 1002 ways to render the HTML. I will crush the designer's hand that created that dropshadow effect around the rounded corner with overlaying ribbon. I will spit acid in the face of the project manager who said it could be done in an hour and then went home for the day. I will burn down the client's agency building, and bask in the glory of their eternal screams.

I am a webdeveloper who had a lovely day, and this is my creed.

Goood, goood. Anyone who doesn't use Mailchimp's et al. predefined HTML mails deserves to die in a loving fire.

# ¿ Jun 19, 2013 21:50

Nebulon Gate: Feb 23, 2013

Thermopyle posted:

Does anyone have any experience with mediaboxAdvanced and have anything good or bad to say about it? Are there any alternatives?

I've got a lot of links to various types of video files and I'm looking for the easiest way to reliably play them. Most of them are urls directly to video files, but it'd be nice to be able to do embeds from places like youtube and Vimeo with it as well.

Personally, I'd be doing a combo of FancyBox integrated with jPlayer via AJAX.

# ¿ Jun 20, 2013 22:37

Nebulon Gate: Feb 23, 2013

the_lion posted:

Hey guys, I'm hoping someone can point me in the right direction.

I found this javascript library thing that interests me quite a bit. It's called Hyperlapse, and it is good at creating time lapse movies with movement from Google Street View.
Here's an example video, it's pretty impressive.

https://vimeo.com/63653873

I have pretty much zero coding abilities. I briefly did html web design chopup work with tables in the mid 2000's, but that's as far as it goes.

The code for it is up on https://github.com/TeehanLax/Hyperlapse.js . What i'm hoping to do is make a few videos of my hometown. (I sometimes miss it)
How hard is it to get something like this running? Is it out of my reach?

I'm on OSX, but do have access to Windows 7 if that matters.

There's a front end for it.

http://hyperlapse.tllabs.io/

Map your route, and when you want to record (you're gonna have to use some type of screen capture software) and remove the controls, type this in the address bar:

code:

javascript: jQuery('.overlay, #logos, #controls').css('display', 'none');

to undo this, type:

code:

javascript: jQuery('.overlay, #logos, #controls').css('display', 'block');

# ¿ Jun 21, 2013 20:17

Nebulon Gate: Feb 23, 2013

Flaggy posted:

Cool, I really appreciate you pointing me in the right direction though. Thanks!

I've sent you a message.

# ¿ Jun 24, 2013 17:02

Nebulon Gate: Feb 23, 2013

So, I figured out you can make a working column grid without needing margins by using text-align: justify. Anyone interested?

# ¿ Jun 24, 2013 20:51

Nebulon Gate: Feb 23, 2013

Lumpy posted:

I read that article last week too.

http://www.barrelny.com/blog/text-align-justify-and-rwd/

Hmm, never read it before. Interesting to see I wasn't the first, though. I came up with it through trying to figure out how to use media queries on a grid to allow for different column sizes while still having de-facto margin spacing. e.g. column width is 100% in mobile, six columns in tablet etc.,

http://jsfiddle.net/5mATa/

Nebulon Gate fucked around with this message at 21:34 on Jun 24, 2013

# ¿ Jun 24, 2013 21:20

Nebulon Gate: Feb 23, 2013

Heskie posted:

I've been dealing with CSS' inadequacies for so long I forget half of the techniques I use are actually workarounds.

Flexbox layout will solve grid layout and vertical positioning issues. Unfortunately, as IE9 doesn't support it, it could be some time before we get to actually use it.

http://flexiejs.com/

More and more, I am willing to say "gently caress you IE" and just load up a Polyfill.

# ¿ Jun 25, 2013 23:05

Nebulon Gate: Feb 23, 2013

Heskie posted:

Just saw this on Twitter.

http://neocities.org/blog/making-the-web-fun-again

I like this concept, it gives me warm fuzzy feelings about the 'good old days' of being 12 and building terrible Dragonball Z fansites on Tripod. If it gets more people like Eleanor into building websites then its A Good Thing in my opinion.

Ah, DBZ websites. So many ripped-off pages and so much stolen content claimed as my own. This is all that remains of my first:

http://web.archive.org/web/20041116092014/http://vegetadall.tripod.com/

Made in 2001 I believe.

Anyway, I was weirdly thinking about how the final products of web design are so much more complicated than in the late 90s and early 2000s that it must seem like an insurmountable task to newbies.

# ¿ Jun 29, 2013 04:49

Nebulon Gate: Feb 23, 2013

Oh My Science posted:

Has anyone used Zepto.js in production? I'm hesitant because it doesn't support anything older than IE10 but I could provide a fall back to jquery like they suggest.

It's basically exactly like jQuery, but faster, and more suited to mobile platforms. I recommend it, and just provide the fallback, as said.

# ¿ Jul 7, 2013 23:36

Nebulon Gate: Feb 23, 2013

Oh My Science posted:

Has anyone else pissed off family before? My brother wants to to make his website for free because "It would be good for your portfolio" and I told him to gently caress off.

He just bought a giant 55" TV too.

I made a website for my seedy step-brother's granite company. Best logo I've ever done as well. We worked it out to be literally 20% of my rate, and a ten page website with a full design and custom quoting system ended up being $1500. He paid me $200, then did some seedy poo poo on his partners, and I never got the rest. I am no longer speaking to him. I kept the website up, and it was the top result for "{my city's name} granite", and I crunched the numbers of the quotes, as I had them sending to my email. Assuming he did all of them, he'd have made a cool million in revenue in under a year.

So, yeah, family doesn't exist in the business world as far as I am concerned. I recommend you take the same approach.

# ¿ Jul 17, 2013 04:57

Nebulon Gate: Feb 23, 2013

http://macaw.co/peek/

So this is loving impressive.

# ¿ Jul 24, 2013 03:50

Nebulon Gate: Feb 23, 2013

Well, looks like I'm back to Firefox. If they got their drat resource reviewer up to par, I see no reason to continue using chrome. I loving loathe a lot about it.

# ¿ Aug 16, 2013 08:32

Nebulon Gate: Feb 23, 2013

Turkeybone posted:

Hi thread,

I need some assistance in writing a proposal for a freelance webpage with a university. I'm a student in college, major in hospitality and minor in InfoSci.. last year I put together a tiny Java app for one of my hospitality professors -- basically a working demo of a class exercise that was typically done with pen and paper, where students would have to correctly choose what reservations to take and which not to. It worked fine but it was very crude.

This year I said "Well a java thing is pretty clunky, but I've taken some web-design so I can just turn this into an interactive webpage so it'll look nicer and be more accessible." My professor said I should put together a proposal for the university, since it'll just be a flat fee rather than being charged hourly. I thought this would be some "oh I can do some programming just give me like $60, whatever" but when I said this number my professor said "Um, did you mean to say $600? I told my boss (the asst. dean) that it would be between $500 and $1,000, and the university wouldn't really care so long as it was less than like $5,000.

TL;DR: My $60 "whatever" webpage just became a $600 "University Thing," and I need help in drafting an appropriate and professional proposal for it. I google'd and see there is a variety of templates and contracts, but I've literally never done this before, so I don't know what makes sense. Thanks!

Charge more. The full $1000. Welcome to freelance. And beer money.

Basically, you're gonna want:

Project summary
Project features
Timeline for completion
Payment schedule and terms

Make it look nice, no lovely Times New Roman or anything. Other than that, you're set.

# ¿ Aug 20, 2013 23:28

Nebulon Gate: Feb 23, 2013

kedo posted:

Generally speaking in ya'lls experience, how reliable is geolocation data for people on traditional internet connections (ie. everything that's not going through a cell tower)? I have a "find the nearest location" function on a site I'm building and am wondering if I should hide it for no-touch users.

I ask because on my work connection instead of finding my actual location it just plops me right in the middle of DC, and at home it plops me up in Maryland somewhere. Granted both are business accounts with static IPs and other weird stuff that most normal users won't need to worry about, so not sure how much that has to do with it.

Good enough, not like GPS or anything. Always of course supply an option to supply the location, and use the geolocation as a default.

# ¿ Aug 23, 2013 03:12

Nebulon Gate: Feb 23, 2013

gmq posted:

I have had awful experiences with people claiming to be front-end developers with a subpar knowledge of HTML/CSS just because they can 'use' bootstrap. It's a great framework but it can be very easy to hide enormous holes in knowledge by using it and the resulting code can be awful.

This has reached the point where our junior front-end dev is not allowed to use bootstrap and I'm very suspicious of any developer that includes 'Bootstrap' in their resume.

I generally use "Familiar with a variety of front-end frameworks" and leave it at that for this reason.

# ¿ Aug 29, 2013 05:23

Nebulon Gate: Feb 23, 2013

I'm a PHP programmer by trade, and if using a framework like Laravel, it becomes nearly on par frameworks that don't still have cryptic error messages in Hebrew. It's also been around forever, so you can pretty much find a solution to any issue. Couple that with the shitzillion plugins on Composer, and it's pretty drat good.

# ¿ Sep 4, 2013 22:43

Nebulon Gate: Feb 23, 2013

Anyone have any recommendations for an intro to programming math book? My math aptitude is probably at a 10th grade level now that I've let it go to poo poo.

# ¿ Oct 3, 2013 04:11

Nebulon Gate: Feb 23, 2013

kedo posted:

Looking for general ideas about how to approach this problem. Throwing ideas against the wall to see what sticks.

I'm working on a site that's really two sites designed to appear as one. One is running WordPress, the other is running Ambra, an open source "journal management and publishing system." Basically it's a CMS designed specifically for academic journals. My issues is delivering content from the WordPress site into the sidebar of the Ambra site.

Right now I'm doing this with RSS and a JS RSS feed loader which works fine, but I'm worried about extensibility. I already had to hack something together to add support for <media:content> elements (which doesn't work with lte IE 8), but my client is also hinting at wanting to include video, slideshows and other more complicated content in the future.

What I'm thinking about right now: creating a new page on the WP site that just spits out formatted content based on a URL query, grabbing that as a page fragment with ajax and popping it into the sidebar. However the client has already stated he's worried about content pop-in, so I'd probably need to cache stuff somewhere as well.

Does this seem logical, or am I approaching this rear end backwards? Can anyone think of a better solution?

Yeah at this point I'd just be looking at the Wordpress JSON Rest API.

# ¿ Jan 21, 2014 19:26

Nebulon Gate: Feb 23, 2013

PlesantDilemma posted:

Anyone dealt with getting hover-activated menus to work on a touch screen? Our main navigation uses hover to bring up a sub menu. I listen for mouseenter, mouseleave to show/hide the menu, and click will also open/close the menu.

On touch screens you get a combo of those events when someone taps on the screen. On FF/Chrome it will send mouseenter then click when you tap an element. Tap that place again to get another click, tap somewhere else and it sends mouseleave to the original element. IE always sends mouseenter, mouseleave, click everywhere you tap.

Everything I've googled up tells me that our best bet is to ditch the hover concept and go all click-based for opening menus, but I doubt the boss will like that.

Ran into this a while ago. Install modernizr, and look into jQuery Mobile.

# ¿ Feb 27, 2014 02:53

Nebulon Gate: Feb 23, 2013

quote:

Can you go into more details about how you got it to work with these? modernizr has a lot of stuff that I wont need and it's not clear how I'd use it for this. And jQuery mobile is a big library but this is actually a desktop site that I need to make work with tablets and new touch-screen laptops.

The only reliable way to detect if a screen is a touch screen is detecting screen size with user agent and touch capability.

Basically, you load modernizr, and it adds a bunch of classes to the HTML tag. jQuery mobile is a big library, but is probably your best option. You selectively load it based on the results generated by modernizr (it detects touch, which most browsers have) with the useragent and the resolution of the screen. In general, if the device meets these requirements, you then selectively add a class to the <body> tag and add your event listeners, usually displaying a menu on touch/click and so forth.

jackpot posted:

Haha, just found out IE10 doesn't support conditional statements. gently caress those guys, seriously. They've gone from being lovably incompetent to downright hostile.

Edit: And to answer your question, no, so far I haven't found any reason to use them (yay!). But I've needed them for every other goddamn IE release going back to IE6, so I don't see why 10 will be any different.

Yeah we're back to user-agent sniffing and possibly CSS hacks. A'int it loving grand?

I suppose the upshot is that the web has gotten so cross-platform that we're all not getting outsourced anymore, which is nice.

# ¿ Feb 27, 2014 23:10

Nebulon Gate: Feb 23, 2013

Xarb posted:

We changed from a CSS:hover menu to a click menu and I was surprised how many users mentioned how much they liked the new menu system.

Downward/right facing arrow needs to go beside the elements, however. Otherwise they never know. The hotels I work for have gotten a ridiculously higher amount of business when I implemented this mobile setup:

http://www.garfieldsuiteshotel.com/

(rezize your window)

That little cross icon made all the difference.

# ¿ Feb 28, 2014 05:15

Nebulon Gate: Feb 23, 2013

I'm rather curious: those using SublimeText, what is your FTP solution?

# ¿ Mar 1, 2014 04:52

Nebulon Gate: Feb 23, 2013

My primary company's (I'm a contractor) model is one of the few where a deployment situation is actually just cumbersome, oddly.

Bastard posted:

I am so, so sorry for you

Yeah can we start some charity drive for this dude or something? Jesus.

Nebulon Gate fucked around with this message at 03:04 on Mar 2, 2014

# ¿ Mar 2, 2014 02:57

Nebulon Gate: Feb 23, 2013

So, I am currently making a web application, specifically, a live auction site with associated chat room, and I've run into a bit of an issue as to how to store the data for each individual auction data (specifically, bids for each item in the auction) and chat messages, which will be displayed and updated in real time. Multiple auctions/chats will be running simulatenously. Is there a better solution than just storing them in a MySQL database? Any ideas?

My biggest caveat would be exporting the data from an individual auction--specifically, who won the auction, the price bid, and so forth--to the permanent database so it can be logged and the buyers can go through the paying motions and so forth.

Oh, and one last thing. I'm new as hell to NodeJS and ExpressJS and so forth: how the hell is one supposed to prototype quickly with this poo poo? I've got a server running, and each time I update it I have to kill the process then reload it. This can't be the best solution.

Apparently Node Supervisor is the way to go.

Nebulon Gate fucked around with this message at 21:58 on Mar 2, 2014

# ¿ Mar 2, 2014 20:28

Nebulon Gate: Feb 23, 2013

substitute posted:

The benefit for us would be one agreed upon standard, with ANY sort of documentation, that jump starts development and solves many common problems up front (like still supporting IE8, and I don't know why IE7). Currently it's the wild west up in here from site to site.

From the designer's explanation email though, the system he's devised is not a grid system at all. It may look like it, but it's completely different, and based on the "group model". I don't know what that is, I guess because I'm a server-side developer?

Here are the packages he sent in the email to compare against, with several points on how they're wrong: Golden Grid system, Responsive grid system, The Square Grid, Less Framework, 960 grid.

http://goldengridsystem.com/
http://www.responsivegridsystem.com/
http://thesquaregrid.com/
http://lessframework.com/
http://960.gs/

I only know of 960 from that list, but again I'm a developer.

Well it has "responsive" in the title, but that's all I'm giving away in an open forum.

What the gently caress? What were this chucklefuck's points exactly?

# ¿ Mar 4, 2014 20:37

Nebulon Gate: Feb 23, 2013

substitute posted:

To sum up, they all have some combination of the following problems:

* IE specific fixes like 
* Pseudo elements like :before / :after / :first-child
* Uses float for alignment
* <div class="clearfix"> after every row
* Hard coded break points

* Not mobile first
* Not responsive

Which the last two if this were explained in a meeting (with our manager(s) present) would have me cutting this person off to say "Then why did you even look at any of these systems after realizing that?"

Some of these are valid (though do any use clearfix at *all* anymore? We kind of had that wrapped up years ago with :after or even just plain old 'overflow: hidden'), most are not. You can adjust the breakpoints in the grids at your leisure. It's not like they're loving DRMed or anything. What the hell is his issue with pseudo-elements? Is he doing the .span-1-last poo poo?

I also assume he's using 'inline-block' and probably using the -4px margin-left trick and acting like he's a superstar, right?

I'd just like to know his argument for not using Bootstrap or Foundation's grid. You can, in fact, do that quite easily without any CSS pre-processor.

# ¿ Mar 4, 2014 21:10

Nebulon Gate: Feb 23, 2013

kedo posted:

Theoretically you could use a third party service like Mandrill for the email bits, but then you'd have to expose your API key in the code somewhere. I doubt they'd be super happy about that.

e:fb by one drat minute!

Technically node.js is Javascript, so they could then pass it to the server, heh.

# ¿ Mar 20, 2014 17:46

Nebulon Gate: Feb 23, 2013

You'd do well to check out the Frontend thread. AngularJS or Ember sounds up your alley.

# ¿ Mar 21, 2014 05:37

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# ¿ Apr 27, 2024 09:33

Nebulon Gate: Feb 23, 2013

For my icons, I just use

http://fontawesome.io/

# ¿ Aug 29, 2014 21:33

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