The Web Design & Development Megathread

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Scaramouche: Mar 26, 2001; SPACE FACE! SPACE FACE!

Have a weird CSS question for you eggheads. I've got a setup like this:

code:

<body>
  <div class="headerContainer" style="background-image:url(/blah.jpg);background-repeat:no-repeat;background-position:center 0px;">
    <div class="headerContent" style="background-color:#101010;">
      Stuff
    </div>
  </div>
</body>

My problem is that I would like the background image in headerContainer to be 'on top' of the background color in headerContent, but z-index and !IMPORTANT don't seem to do anything to the sorting. The 'real' solution would be to have the background image inside headerContent, but headerContent is much smaller than the background image, and a background image can't exceed the size of its container. Is there a way to force the headerContainer to sort higher than the headerContent while maintaining this structure? Or am I doomed to having to use an IMG tag instead?

# ¿ Jul 10, 2013 02:29

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# ¿ Apr 28, 2024 21:39

Scaramouche: Mar 26, 2001; SPACE FACE! SPACE FACE!

Thanks for the feedback guys; the more I look at it I think I may have been wrongheaded in how I was approaching it. I'm having to adapt an existing layout, so was kind of mentally 'stuck' with how it was constructed originally. I ended up doing what Kedo suggested originally by splitting the child divs.

As for inline styles, I wasn't actually using them 'for real', I just thought it would make things easier to communicate in the example I provided since it would all be in one place as it were.

DaveP:
I've been working in ecommerce for the last 7 years so I know my way around it quite well, though we've developed our own internal platform instead of relying on third party ones. However I've transitioned people from many platforms to ours so I do have some exposure to them. The biggest question I think, is how big is the site and how much volume is expected? If the answer to both is 'low' then you can probably modify something off the shelf like shopify. There is also a simple wordpress shopping cart for paypal:
http://wordpress.org/plugins/wordpress-simple-paypal-shopping-cart/

It also depends on your friend's merchant set up and how they want to handle payment processing.

# ¿ Jul 10, 2013 21:14

Scaramouche: Mar 26, 2001; SPACE FACE! SPACE FACE!

Diabolik900 posted:

It still seems like yesterday that we were waiting to drop IE6 support, so the fact that we're now talking about whether or not to support IE8 makes me feel good.

I remember forcing people to upgrade to IE4 for better table support...

# ¿ Jul 11, 2013 19:41

Scaramouche: Mar 26, 2001; SPACE FACE! SPACE FACE!

I'm having an odd problem with Firefox where it's having trouble with the nyroModal floating window. What makes it more frustrating is that the client is experiencing this problem, and not me, and I haven't been able to duplicate it. The floating window is meant to be a shopping cart. This is what is should look like approximately:

That is, a nice little window floating over the greyed out background. This is how it works for me and everyone else I can test.

The nyro call is pretty straightforward (despite having custom in the name this is a minified version of the most recent nyroModal, same with jquery.min.js):

code:

<script type="text/javascript" src="/js/jquery.min.js"></script>
<script type="text/javascript" src="jquery.nyroModal.custom.min.js"></script>
<link rel="stylesheet" href="nyroModal.css" type="text/css" media="screen" />

(bunch of code)
<div><a class='nyroModal' rel="nofollow" 
href="add-to-cart.aspx?productid=blahblah&qty=blahblah&etc querystring stuff">
<img src="/img/btnAddToCart.jpg" /></a></div>

This is what it ends up looking like on the client's computer (they've sent me screenshots):

The shopping cart doesn't 'float' over the page at all, it takes up the entire page. The white background is the contents of the modal being stretched to fill the entire screen. It's almost like the browser is rendering "add-to-cart.aspx" in the main window and ignoring all of the nyroModal directives.

I >have< made it look like this, but to do so I disabled Javascript entirely. The customer claims they have javascript enabled, but are still having this problem. They are running FireFox 22 on Windows 7 32x Home Basic.

So my questions are:
- Anyone ran into this? I scoured the nyroModal github and google code areas and can't find someone having an equivalent problem.
- Am I barking up the wrong tree by thinking it's a nyro problem at all? The behavior just seems to be that it's not popping the nyro modal when clicked, instead loading it in the main frame. Is there a way for someone to have configured a Firefox browser to cause this other than Javascript disabled?

EDIT-Editing to say that nothing strange shows up in the development console, which is why I didn't post this in the jQuery thread.

Scaramouche fucked around with this message at 00:40 on Jul 24, 2013

# ¿ Jul 24, 2013 00:13

Scaramouche: Mar 26, 2001; SPACE FACE! SPACE FACE!

Scaramouche posted:

I'm having an odd problem with Firefox where it's having trouble with the nyroModal floating window. What makes it more frustrating is that the client is experiencing this problem, and not me, and I haven't been able to duplicate it. The floating window is meant to be a shopping cart.

Son of a @#$$#@@#$!@#!@#!!@##!@#@!. Some bright spark added another jquery script (1.4) definition to the master page when I wasn't looking. Guess it was a jquery problem after all.

# ¿ Jul 24, 2013 02:13

Scaramouche: Mar 26, 2001; SPACE FACE! SPACE FACE!

So uh, anyone just dropped in RC3 on a live project to see how much is broken yet?

# ¿ Jul 29, 2013 22:22

Scaramouche: Mar 26, 2001; SPACE FACE! SPACE FACE!

I'm doing some page speed optimization for someone because they've freaked out on Google using mobile performance as a metric, and after Google overhauled the page speed output page. So far relatively simple, I've sprited up some stuff, minified some others, etc etc. One thing that keeps coming up though is this, from the Facebook Like button:
"Compressing the following resources with gzip could reduce their transfer size by 99.5KiB (69% reduction).
Compressing http://static.xx.fbcdn.net/rsrc.php/v2/yh/r/9Fgi3KsB6QZ.js could save 99.5KiB (69% reduction)."

The problem of course being, it's on a Facebook CDN, and I can't make them compress it (nor find an alternative way to get it). Am I just screwed, or is there another method to render a Facebook like button that I haven't found?

# ¿ Aug 9, 2013 21:07

Scaramouche: Mar 26, 2001; SPACE FACE! SPACE FACE!

Yeah, it's not a matter of when it loads (first, synchronous, asynchronous) but rather the total amount of kb loaded and whether it's compressed or not. The weird thing is I googled around and can't really find anyone talking about it, which is weird in that I assume there's some page load perfectionist out there who would be bitching about it.

# ¿ Aug 9, 2013 23:04

Scaramouche: Mar 26, 2001; SPACE FACE! SPACE FACE!

Probably a bit basic for most of us but I came across this neat little site:
http://webflow.com

Basically a web based layout/design tool. Might be useful for fast prototyping.

# ¿ Aug 21, 2013 19:42

Scaramouche: Mar 26, 2001; SPACE FACE! SPACE FACE!

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.

I don't find it super reliable to tell the truth. Depending how you're doing it (e.g. simple WHOIS) you're only going to get the registered block for the owner. So in the case of the mega bigs it's not that useful. For example, roadrunner/comcast/aol/etc. will generally show either their corporate headquarters, or maybe their NOC the next state/city over if you're lucky.

For everyone else, I had a question:
Have any of you dabbled with rich data snippets and/or Google Highlighting? I've just implemented both on an ecommerce site and it's kinda... neat? The problem being I have no idea what it will actually accomplish. For product pages I've communicating product name, image, url, price, stock, and review ratings where applicable. For informational/article pages I'm communicating title, url, author, date published, etc. I've even put in breadcrumb rich snippets for site navigation. The impression I get is that this will have almost no effect whatsoever except on how the actual organic Google result is displayed, if Google decides to use the information. Has anyone here implemented it and have any success/failure stories to share?

# ¿ Aug 23, 2013 01:01

Scaramouche: Mar 26, 2001; SPACE FACE! SPACE FACE!

kedo posted:

Well I'm using the geolocation API which is usually pretty reliable, but what you're talking about sounds similar to the issue I'm having. Luckily you can check for accuracy with the api. I tested it out on both my work connection and home connection and both came back with a 43km radius (loooool), while on my phone or on a neighbors normal cable connection the accuracy was about 25 meters.

Oh sorry, (you and others) I thought you were doing it solely on geoip and not device reporting as well. That'll definitely be more accurate as Jusion said.

Well no one answered about structured data / rich snippets but I'm already seeing some pretty cool stuff. I've wired up a test site for a small company every which way (products, articles, authorship, hcard, reviews/ratings) and it's starting to show fruit. The most surprising to me was it may have helped Google decide to create a Knowledge Graph entry for the company name, which is kinda cool. None of their (much larger, more established) competition have that and I've already noticed an increase in click through rate for searches for the name, though it was already quite high. Still not sure what 'concrete' is accomplished by doing it but I'm guessing there'll be some interesting synergies.

# ¿ Aug 23, 2013 23:34

Scaramouche: Mar 26, 2001; SPACE FACE! SPACE FACE!

This might be coming at it from the wrong end, and feel free to disagree with me everyone else, but generally I find if you're relying on z-index to render a 'normal' layout properly you are probably doing Something Wrong. I've have CSS elements layered 4 deep and never had to rely on it, and every time I've 'had' to use it, it didn't work and I ended up re-doing things so I didn't have to.

# ¿ Aug 26, 2013 23:45

Scaramouche: Mar 26, 2001; SPACE FACE! SPACE FACE!

http://wordpress.org/plugins/static-html-output-plugin/
?

# ¿ Aug 29, 2013 23:40

Scaramouche: Mar 26, 2001; SPACE FACE! SPACE FACE!

Oh My Science posted:

Let's talk about eCommerce solutions.

A month or so ago I was speaking with a print shop looking to improve their online sales. Unfortunately the platform they use isn't that great and they want to move away to something a little more modern and customizable. At the moment they have no control over design, and dislike how promotions and products are displayed. They sell standard print shop goods, including business cards, postcards, door hangers, etc... and are not looking for a "design your card online feature", just upload a file and go deal.

My Requirements:

Somewhat easy to customize
Extendability - addons to save time in development or future improvements
Decent Community

Nice things to have:

I would prefer they offer some kind of hosting solution, no need to patch the backend myself.

----

I have looked at the usual suspects Shopify, Megento, BigCommerce, etc. but don't have enough experience using them to make a good decision. Right now I'm leaning towards shopify because I have used it in the past.

What platform are they currently on? I integrated a multi-branch print shop with PrintScience (web platform specifically for printers), and if you don't mind working on a dead technology they actually were not that bad. Everything is template based but if you're not afraid to get your hands dirty digging in the guts of it you could customize just about everything.

That said, the things they were charging for were relatively basic and could easily be replaced by a 'normal' storefront with upload and file management capability. Based on what you're saying Magento/BigC aren't a good fit for this at all, being at turns overpowered and/or overpriced. Shopify is a nice little flexible platoform but you'd have to roll your own file management (using Box's API would be a good fit for this).

It's an interesting problem because of the variability of print products (paper stock, canvas, size, binding, web press versus digital, etc etc). Given my druthers I'd just write something from scratch, but I've been working in ecommerce for the last 8 years and have written several storefronts in my time.

# ¿ Aug 30, 2013 07:36

Scaramouche: Mar 26, 2001; SPACE FACE! SPACE FACE!

Oh My Science posted:

They currently use http://www.onprint.com/platform/ and pay about $250 a month to keep it running. The driving force behind finding something new is that customers simply do not use the 'design your card online' feature and 95% of his customer base uploads a file or has the in house designer do it. OnPrint doesn't pay for itself, and moving over to something similar would have the same problem. Now this may have been bad marketing on his end, but I can't remember the last time I really wanted to browse through a hundred pre made designs online instead of just uploading my own.

The challenges I face with this job are time & money. This particular client thinks a complex eCommerce site can be done In a week, and cost him next to nothing ( both in development costs & monthly fees ). I would love to use spree as a starting point and tailor it to his needs, but going with an existing solution which eliminates maintaining a server & reduces dev time would be ideal.

You brought up file managment as a possible problem, I'll be more aware of that as I look for a good solution.

How long would it take you (who knows what he is doing) to implement a shop with those basic requirements?
How much would you charge?

Deadline is the end of September...

Hey sorry about the delay on this, I generally read CoC when I have downtime and that commodity mysteriously disappeared in the last little while. Given what you've said above I'm guessing the fastest approach would be would be shopify + ring fenced upload section. There's even plugins that allow it (e.g. http://apps.shopify.com/user-photos) but if you know your way around the Shopify API I'm guessing it'd be trival to make your own.

# ¿ Sep 3, 2013 21:40

Scaramouche: Mar 26, 2001; SPACE FACE! SPACE FACE!

LP0 ON FIRE posted:

I need a solution that's preferably more dependable and does more than HTML5's application cache. This would need to be website that if there is no internet connection, would need to read an offline version. When there is a connection, it would load the online version and automatically update (or the option to) update the offline version. The problem that would probably come up with HTML5 application cache is that it would not dependably store all the large videos that need to be on this site. This is an enterprise website, so there's the possibility of installing something on the company's computers. Since there is a backend with a database, many of the pages would probably made in php.

I have no exposure to HTML5's application cache at all, but couldn't you prepend pageload with a javascript that pings something (to see if network exists) and then branch what your page does depending on that?
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4282151/is-it-possible-to-ping-a-server-from-javascript

So I'm thinking (psuedo code)

code:

If (PingerFunction()=True)
 {
  urlPrefix = 'http://www.livesite.com/';
 }
else
 {
 urlPrefix = 'file:///C:/local/'
 }

# ¿ Sep 25, 2013 18:49

Scaramouche: Mar 26, 2001; SPACE FACE! SPACE FACE!

This is kinda weird. I'm trying to be very specific with link colors in a CSS selector, but it's being applied greedily to elements not even contained within it. I've got a setup like this:

code:

<div class="col1">
 Stuff consisting mostly of my category menu
</div>
<div class="col2" id="maincontent">
 Primary content area
</div>

And the CSS generally looks like:

code:

.col1 { stuff; }
.col2 { more stuff; }
#maincontent > a, a:link, a:visited { link stuff; j}

However, links within the col1 class are displaying the behavior defined in #maincontent, even though they are adjacent to it instead of descended from it. What's going on, is it not possible to be specific with the a psuedo-classes, and once defined they are set to be page wide?

# ¿ Sep 26, 2013 20:04

Scaramouche: Mar 26, 2001; SPACE FACE! SPACE FACE!

cbirdsong, Depressing Box, A MIRACLE posted:

You are an idiot

Yep, that's got it sorted. Don't know why I was thinking that the descendant would be inherited; too much hierarchical database work lately I think. Thanks guys!

# ¿ Sep 26, 2013 21:20

Scaramouche: Mar 26, 2001; SPACE FACE! SPACE FACE!

glompix posted:

What's the consensus on broadly denying the less-useful HTTP verbs like OPTION and DELETE? Our apps aren't RESTful or anything, just GET/POST. I thought this would generally be a bad idea, but I'm not sure if my idea is valid anymore. I certainly don't like the idea of denying HEAD.

I don't know your specific application but I do know that PCI Certification/McAfee Secure/etc. will insist that you get rid of verbs like TRACE, DEBUG, and OPTIONS before they'll clear you for security certification.

# ¿ Sep 27, 2013 19:17

Scaramouche: Mar 26, 2001; SPACE FACE! SPACE FACE!

bawfuls posted:

I believe so, yes. He does it all in a basic html text editor and uploads static files to update the site. Tables get copy/pasted from Excel somehow.

If he doesn't mind saving his Excels as CSVs this plugin could be useful (assuming Wordpress):
https://wordpress.org/plugins/wp-ultimate-csv-importer/

I've used it in the past, it's pretty robust. Only downside is the style info (e.g. the green background) would have to set in the theme, but if he's hand-tweaking HTML already he can probably figure out how to that.

Wordpress supports categories / tags so he could easily maintain his Location - Year structure.

# ¿ Sep 26, 2014 23:06

Scaramouche: Mar 26, 2001; SPACE FACE! SPACE FACE!

ha ha! Wow. That is somethin somethin. drat.

I figured out how he gets the html in at least:

code:

<!--The following information was generated by Microsoft Excel's Publish as Web
Page wizard.-->

And it's full the garbage html office generates like "<col style="mso-width-source:userset;mso-width-alt:4022;width:83pt">"

It'd take some work, but you could set up a CSS that would mimic the coloration. It'd have to use either php or js to 'tell' the page what the value is. Something like <td class="2col Dgrade">D</td> and then it'd know to automatically apply "poo poo brown" to cells that contain D, that kind of thing.

# ¿ Sep 27, 2014 01:23

Scaramouche: Mar 26, 2001; SPACE FACE! SPACE FACE!

Withnail posted:

Anyone know what IIS setting (I assume it's IIS) would send a 401 for an httpwebrequest (works fine in IE). The same request works fine to our dev server which also uses ssl and only allows windows authentication.

Code looks like this:

code:

            var url = new Uri("https://productionserver);
            var req = (System.Net.HttpWebRequest)System.Net.WebRequest.Create(url);
            req.AuthenticationLevel = System.Net.Security.AuthenticationLevel.MutualAuthRequested;
            req.AllowAutoRedirect = true;
            req.CookieContainer = cookieContainer;
            req.Credentials = CredentialCache.DefaultCredentials;
            ServicePointManager.ServerCertificateValidationCallback += new System.Net.Security.RemoteCertificateValidationCallback
(ValidateServerCertificate);

I don't know, but you might be better off asking in the .NET thread.

# ¿ Oct 6, 2014 00:52

Scaramouche: Mar 26, 2001; SPACE FACE! SPACE FACE!

I'm not entirely caught up on new web technologies (I stopped paying attention after learning jQuery/JSON), but the way I learned JS et al was find something cool on the internet, save a copy to local, get it working, and then totally tear it apart. Change colors, hover states, event wireups, whatever. Then after I was relatively solid on that, try to make my own version of something similar. Back when I was learning JS was kind of folded into this ambiguous mess called 'DHTML'; I think I started with someone's JS version of Outlook Express and ended up with a bad version of Cribbage.

# ¿ Nov 3, 2014 20:58

Scaramouche: Mar 26, 2001; SPACE FACE! SPACE FACE!

I actually stopped using mailto: for the very reasons described; no guarantee of a mail client, inconsistent handling of it depending on OS etc. But now actually might be the time to bring it back, especially since on mobile you have to have an email client/address working to have any kind of other functionality.

# ¿ Nov 24, 2014 22:05

Scaramouche: Mar 26, 2001; SPACE FACE! SPACE FACE!

Man all this talk about deployment tools. I remember when you had HTML, the javascript was inline, as was the CSS (assuming you didn't use built in things like <TD ALIGN="LEFT">).

# ¿ Nov 25, 2014 20:30

Scaramouche: Mar 26, 2001; SPACE FACE! SPACE FACE!

Would this be something that has to be completely internal (which it sounds since you said hospital), or could be hosted externally?

The problem with checkboxes/text/forms etc. is that it's easy to make static HTML pages so people can load that page. What gets harder is making a server component that 'records' all the input they've put in. And what happens to that input? Does it go to a database? An excel file? Are there HIPAA considerations?

# ¿ Nov 26, 2014 03:15

Scaramouche: Mar 26, 2001; SPACE FACE! SPACE FACE!

I've only done 'vanilla' bootstrap, this might help:
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/10451317/twitter-bootstrap-customization-best-practices

# ¿ Nov 27, 2014 00:37

Scaramouche: Mar 26, 2001; SPACE FACE! SPACE FACE!

epalm posted:

Hello, web design champions!

My shop writes mostly desktop software, but we're pushing our reporting module out to the browser. We're using ASP.NET to generate and display half a dozen reports. Currently the html is bare, just an <h2> here and a <table> there, filled with rows from our database. We're looking to pay someone to make it pretty (for some measurement of pretty), because we lack the knowledge and/or gumption to do it ourselves.

Should I be looking to work with a photoshop guy to design the looks, give me a psd, and then take that to a pdf-to-html shop? Or am I looking for a guy who can both design it and write the html/css themselves (and what would his job title be)? Where are some good places to look for such people?

I know it's totally outside what you're doing, but maybe take a look at http://www.geckoboard.com . We replaced probably 90% of our internal reporting with some well set up Geckoboards, and even if you don't use it you can steal the style/appearance.

# ¿ Dec 4, 2014 00:12

Scaramouche: Mar 26, 2001; SPACE FACE! SPACE FACE!

thegasman2000 posted:

So another project has landed in my lap... My new job is shoehorning a completely unsuitable software solution to bend to its will and its causing me headaches...

Its a simple use case. We collect your vehicle and pay you for it. So I am looking for the easiest way to develop an online app (current one is not online) where we, and the customer can add their details and book a collection. Now I can do it in php from scratch, my last project went that way and works fine, but wondered if their is a boilerplate for this sort of thing? Some features we need are:
sending job to drivers smart phones, only allowing a certain amount of booking a day, separated by AM/PM, driver can upload image with proof of ID on it and we can store this. So any ideas?

Don't know if your scale is appropriate to it, but maybe check out Schedulicity: https://www.schedulicity.com/
It looks like a directory, but you can embed their booking button on your site/app and control booking intervals, availability, etc.

If you're googling around for existing code to adapt, the most common scenario I've seen for this is in hair salon bookings. A quick run at sourceforge ("appointment management") found me this:
http://sourceforge.net/projects/wass/?source=directory

You could probably find others on GitHub

The 'heavy' work is going to be the scheduling/conflict/availability, so it's understandable you'd want to avoid re-inventing the wheel on it unless you don't have to.

# ¿ Dec 4, 2014 22:37

Scaramouche: Mar 26, 2001; SPACE FACE! SPACE FACE!

nintendo65 posted:

Can anyone recommend a good php based free storefront that is customizable and trustworthy? I hate magento, I've tried zen cart but its pretty cheesy, and I'm not 100% sure I can trust open cart... I'd appreciate any suggestions before I go crazy and make my own. Only caveat is that it has to support paypal.

If you're desperate you can try OSCommerce; note that I'm not recommending it, but I do know that it 'works' based on a client consults in the past. Shopify and Wordpress/Woocommerce are nice if you aren't dealing with millions of products and/or deep categorization.

# ¿ Jan 5, 2015 20:40

Scaramouche: Mar 26, 2001; SPACE FACE! SPACE FACE!

Thermopyle posted:

So, what do I need for a web app with paid accounts?

I mean, the technical side is no problem, but I have no clues about credit card processing. Surely there's services that handle that, that I can communicate with via an API or some such poo poo, I just don't know what to look for to find something good.

It's a django backend served off of heroku right now if for some extremely stupid reason that matters.

It depends almost entirely on who your payment processor ends up being. Paypal has a different implementation than Chase Manhattan than Litle&Co etc etc. They're all going to consist of basically the same thing:
- A gateway address with associated credentials (usually username/pass but can include one time token, GUID, etc.)
- Submit payment info to said gateway, via PUT/cURL/XML/etc.
- Response back that you have to interpret as either 'good', 'guy's a deadbeat' or 'didn't work don't know why'

Django has a bunch of plugins but I've never even touched it so I can't vouch for any of them:
https://www.djangopackages.com/grids/g/payment-processing/

# ¿ Jan 6, 2015 00:30

Scaramouche: Mar 26, 2001; SPACE FACE! SPACE FACE!

Thermopyle posted:

Wow, Stripe is sweet stuff.

I mean, I've got a whole hour (I'm an expert!) of Googlin' under my belt and it certainly seems like there's close to zero reasons to use other payment processors unless you can work out the convoluted math to figure out fees and they're significantly lower for some other processor.

At the entry level basically all of those guys are going to be about the same price unless you can tie your merchant processing to a high volume account of some kind (e.g. brick and mortar going online and using the same account); for large volume I'd suggest holding out for one of the bigs like Chase, Litle&Co, NCR, Monex, etc. If you're doing less than $100,000/mo Stripe/PayPal/Braintree are going to be as good as you're going to get. We're stuck with PayPal because of years of history/volume but if given a choice to start over (which we might this quarter actually) I'd switch to Stripe in a hot minute, and that's probably how long it'd take to code too.

If you go with stripe they have a JS library that handles encryption/submission/etc all on-page and in-session, meaning that you don't have to store any PCI-sensitive data which is kind of handy.

# ¿ Jan 6, 2015 01:07

Scaramouche: Mar 26, 2001; SPACE FACE! SPACE FACE!

If it's not a single serving website that has a clear distinct purpose (e.g. http://www.didtheblackhawksgetashutout.com/) then that design sucks.

# ¿ Jan 9, 2015 01:26

Scaramouche: Mar 26, 2001; SPACE FACE! SPACE FACE!

gmq posted:

If any of you work in a web shop / agency, how do you deal with responsive design?

We are still having problems with that in my job, our designers design for a 1080p screen and then it's our job to make it work for everything else (which sucks, because then we get complaints from our clients that it looks different from the comps they looked at full screen).

There's a dev team and a design team so any 'design in the browser' plan would be doomed from the start.

What's your workflow? Do the designers hand you PSD files and then you guys do the rest, or are they giving you relatively complete static HTML/CSS/JS? If the latter then you can at least get basic responsive/viewport stuff done by them in the CSS with not too much extra training/braining.

# ¿ Jan 10, 2015 00:11

Scaramouche: Mar 26, 2001; SPACE FACE! SPACE FACE!

Golden Bee posted:

One in ten leads coming across my desk is for web scrapers, ones that are in most cases a direct "Hey, I want to scalp every Adidas sneaker on the market" or something.

Besides commercially available, off the shelf stuff, is this even a viable model? The people who run any site worth buy-relist-selling have enough developer $$$ to be well aware of this poo poo and hardcoded against it?

I mean, if there's a market to be had pointing people to Mozenda, why not, but it seems pointless.

The only thing that will kill this is the eventual ubiquity of APIs. Say you're a new ecommerce player, you want to sell say Adidas shoes. Since you haven't done any research and are probably following some 'ecommerce made EZ 30 e-z steps for an EAZY BUSINESS!' sleazy marketing ebook you barely have any idea of what the market's like. Instead, you can scrape someone who >is< successful, and get things like: What sells the most? How are they being priced? How are they being described? (all of these usually solved by 'scrape Amazon'). Combine that with a large variety of categories and you get endless scraping jobs.

# ¿ Feb 19, 2015 04:49

Scaramouche: Mar 26, 2001; SPACE FACE! SPACE FACE!

ItBurns posted:

I'm maintaining a handful of sites on our company intranet, and one thing I've noticed is that people aren't always receiving new versions of pages when I update them. Is there such a thing as best practice for getting new builds out in this situation? Lately I've taken to changing the file names for linked css/js/json resources with new builds, but I've run into problems where the html (e.g. company.com/intranet/index.html) isn't even being refreshed. Our web server is probably a stock-ish IIS (nobody seems to own it) so anything server-side is probably a non-starter anyways.

I believe that most people get around this by putting a unique query string on the end of the resource, e.g. main.css?v101 . Not sure how viable that is in your environment though.

# ¿ Mar 6, 2015 06:05

Scaramouche: Mar 26, 2001; SPACE FACE! SPACE FACE!

revmoo posted:

Anybody have Firefox poo poo the bed on SSL? I have my FF set to clear all cookies, cache, everything on shutdown, and yet if I load up a fresh instance of FF and browse to a number of sites I get untrusted connection error. I've had other people verify with their copies of FF and it only happens with my copy.

Do you have Fiddler running? This happens a lot and I always forget it's because I have Fiddler going.

# ¿ Mar 7, 2015 01:46

Scaramouche: Mar 26, 2001; SPACE FACE! SPACE FACE!

iwannabebobdylan posted:

I'm wondering what the best tool, or the proper framework, would be for this scenario:

User inputs 4 ingredients that he has in his fridge and the website returns all recipes in a database that feature 3 or 4 of those ingredients.

I keep running into website ideas (and scenarios in life) where databases like this would be helpful. I've started with Wordpress and the tagging system (because it's easy), but that only accounts for 1 match, and it isn't the best at inputting the info. Is there a simple 3 word answer to this that can get me headed in the right direction? Or does this database tool exist?

To do this you'll need a 'real' database. A basic structure would be:
Recipes Table (RecipeID, RecipeName, PreperationTime, etc etc.)
Ingredients Table (IngredientID, IngredientName, etc etc.)
Recipes_Ingredients Table (RI_ID, RecipeID, IngredientID, Amount, etc etc)

Then pull a query like
SELECT * FROM Recipes WHERE RecipeID IN(SELECT DISTINCT RecipeID FROM Reciples_Ingredients WHERE IngredientID IN(1,2,3,4)) -- Assuming 1,2,3,4 were the ingredients specified

The SQL isn't optimized but you get the idea

# ¿ Mar 25, 2015 04:26

Scaramouche: Mar 26, 2001; SPACE FACE! SPACE FACE!

I'm thinking of posting an ECommerce developer thread where I can bitch about Shopify, WooCommerce, OSCommerce, OpenCart, 3dCart, X-Cart, Volusion, NetSuite, Magento, etc etc.

ECommerce is also a bit weird because it's combination of database ETL, SEO, CRM, Cloud services, "traditional" HTML development, Marketplace interactions (Amazon, eBay, etc), and graphic design, often in the same developer or group of developers. Would you guys be interested in that, or has it already been tried and sunk without a trace? I looked for one but couldn't seem to find anything (Looked back to 2014). I've been posting some in the Wordpress thread, but it doesn't seem to move very quickly there, and also a lot of these platforms aren't actually on WordPress.

# ¿ May 13, 2016 21:04

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# ¿ Apr 28, 2024 21:39

Scaramouche: Mar 26, 2001; SPACE FACE! SPACE FACE!

v1nce posted:

I think it's totally OK to bitch about it here. I don't think anyone posts about e-commerce it enough that a whole thread would stay visible.

Also you missed off Prestashop

Ok, then let me get my bitchy pants on. Ah yeah, nice and smooth.

Shopify: Really really smooth implementation of a general "one size fits all" shop for relatively low SKU counts, especially for white box internally branded/self-made goods. Don't fit inside that mold? Well too fuckin bad for you. Example: Brand/Manufacturer. Sure they exist... kind of... as a repurposed "collection" object. But it's so butt-fuckingly stupid how they do them. Want to define all your brands ahead of time before doing an import? Sorry, a Brand can only exist if a product has been created that uses it. Create a collection named after a brand anyway? Congratulations, now you have two of them, except the second is almost completely useless. Want to delete a Brand? Sorry, you can only disassociate all products from it and then it magically disappears. Collections themselves are weird in the same way; you can have a collection that has members based on either A)regex style rules (e.g. if ProductTitle CONTAINS "Ford F150") or B)by manual assignment (e.g. check a box that says this "Ford F150" belong to Collection X at the product level). Want to change to regex style from manual or vice versa later? Too loving bad. Delete the Collection and start over.

It's like they decided they wanted to get away from spreadsheet style classification and just make it "easy", except it isn't easy, it's incredibly stupid. It's comparable to PHP style weak evaluation; if you import a collection/value that's off by one character (e.g. Ford Trucks versus FORD Trucks) there's no error. There's just two collections now. And good luck telling them apart! Oh you want to combine them? You can't. Delete the "bad" collection and start over. Every single goddamn thing happens with clicking on things, usually at the granular product level. I'm not some super genius, but when you're dealing with more than a dozen products you want some kind of "power" tools to do taxonomy, classification, minor edits, etc etc. And here you can't, instead its just a grinning idiot web-based GUI that will happily let you click your arm off defining and assigning things when you could do the equivalent for thousands of products with a single line of SQL.

That's not even getting into very basic things that have be handled by external "plugins". Jesus christ man, this is a paid product. And all the plugins are on a $/month model. Want to be able to charge customers on a monthly/subscription model? That's an extra $20/mo please. I've written over 20 different custom payment gateway integrations; it's often just 4-8 extra lines of friggin code if the payment provider supports tokenization! A good "theme" costs more than twice what a good wordpress theme costs and it does less, just because it's all in liquid bullshit instead of php.

Shopify is so good at the marketing, order handling, basic config, and management but completely drops the ball on any kind of product configuration beyond "here is a picture and a price" it's not even funny.

# ¿ May 16, 2016 03:10

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

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