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What is so bad about OpenCart? I nearly got a project done with it before the principal got bored with it or whatever and stopped responding to emails, and it didn't seem abjectly terrible. What manner of bullet did I dodge?
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Ape Fist posted:I love it when you walk in on someone else's gigantic minified CSS file and the original unminified version is long gone. Also when it's like 1MB even with minification and you're like "what the gently caress have you done here???" lovely wordpress themes, I'm looking your way...
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Jan 28, 2018 16:44
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The Fool posted:Also look at Squarespace as an alternative to Wix, but you are otherwise on the right track and it really only affects how much work you want to put in to maintain the site after launch. Do not look into Squarespace, it makes absolutely zero sense because it tries to be too flexible, in a very obtuse way because trying to replace things that you could do in three lines of code with a bizarre and ill-conceived GUI makes things much easier, right???
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Mar 12, 2018 19:58
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Munkeymon posted:Except Wix is that, too? If you're going to have a nontechnical person doing updates, it doesn't really matter how many lines of code it would be. To them, it's hours of learning or drag some stuff around until it looks OK and hit save. Except it's also incomprehensible to them, so they inevitably ask me to do something and I can't figure it out without a lot of work on my end. Maybe Wix is just as bad, I can't say I've used it. Wordpress, though awful, is far better in this regard, and Shopify is a dream to work with by comparison. Both allow reasonably simple bypasses of the "basic" system to allow pros to accomplish things efficiently.
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Mar 13, 2018 16:23
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rt4 posted:The global state that governs the API, the database schema around meta values, the hand-rolled "prepared statement" system, having files besides index.php executable by the web server, no Composer, the refusal to fix any of these because it would break backwards compatbility... Exactly. It's a nicely usable system from the front end, but the architecture is garbage and as a result there can and have been security problems, efficiency problems, and certain common tasks are a nightmare to figure out. Overall, though, it's much much nicer than many alternatives. A lot of people also try to use it for things that really are a bit more complicated than what WordPress was originally intended to handle, and it ends up becoming a web of plugins and weird poo poo that's nigh-unmaintainable, but that's not 100% WordPress's fault.
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Mar 13, 2018 17:21
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Nolgthorn posted:I am having difficulty believing Wordpress is still king of this castle Well, it really depends. It's not the best at anything, but occasionally you just get sick of arguing and telling people they should get something other than the $2/month slow-rear end garbage shared hosting plan that only supports PHP, and you decide to tell the client what they've convinced themselves they want to hear. It's good enough that it's frequently the path of least resistance. Munkeymon posted:If you're working with a client who's willing to pay to avoid doing the work, I think you're probably not in the SquareSpace/Wix market, then, sure. I believe the question was about a good product for someone nontechnical to set up their own online store and manage it themselves without paying someone to do it for them. I seem to repeatedly run across people who want to avoid paying, but also want to avoid doing the work because they cannot handle the complexity of something like Wix or Squarespace. There is no limit to how computer-illiterate people can be.
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Mar 14, 2018 14:21
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caberham posted:What do you guys think of a Django deployment for a business website with sporadic updates? I use this for a few of my clients and it works very well, although depending on the deployment it can be a little less flexible, so you have to make sure you spend adequate time gathering requirements. The big advantage is that the data can all be structured, and then you can take care of the presentation aspects of it, so whoever's in charge of maintaining the website doesn't have to worry about formatting, and you don't get a bunch of inconsistencies as a result. EDIT: Looking at Wagtail, that looks pretty good, and probably would've saved me a slight amount of work on my past projects without sacrificing any flexibility. I'll have to try it out. PT6A fucked around with this message at 15:38 on Mar 14, 2018 |
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Mar 14, 2018 15:17
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Is there a good way to explain to people that, sometimes, it's just not possible to crack the top 10 in a google search without spending money on advertising? I have a client in a fairly competitive business, and I feel that there's just a limit to what I can possibly do to get him a good spot on Google without advertising and/or a massive increase to the content creation budget. He's definitely top-10 for certain brands that he carries, but generic terms are getting a mid-second-page result and there's just gently caress all I can think to do about it at this point. We've tried advertising on google and facebook, and it is at least driving traffic to the website if not the actual physical location, but he doesn't think it's worth it. I don't know how else I can explain to him that all the other businesses in his industry are doing roughly the same things (but with a much bigger budget and customer base), and no one "deserves" a top 10 position just because they'd like more customers.
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Mar 23, 2018 23:20
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Capri Sun Tzu posted:Organic SEO is great but you absolutely need to be doing paid search too if you want real traffic. Yeah, I know, I've told him but he just won't listen because he doesn't want to spend money. Also, coincidentally, the same reason that we can't really do much more for organic SEO. He keeps talking about wanting to be "more creative" in finding ways to market and I'm just thinking, "gently caress, I'm not a goddamn wizard, I can't conjure customers out of thin air for you for free."
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Mar 24, 2018 19:37
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melon cat posted:On the SEO talk- I'm going to vent a bit, here. Despite what anyone claims nobody has 100% "figured out" SEO (Google doesn't make this easy). It's constantly changing. But there are all of these "marketing and communications" companies out there that make dubious claims about "SEO optimization" and make bullshit claims about being able to make you #1 on Google Pagerank for the low, low cost of $800 a month or something. So people are just throwing money at these companies, many of which are run by complete hacks, with really mixed results. And depending on the role of the site, getting search results doesn't mean poo poo all for the clickthrough rate, and a good clickthrough rate does gently caress all to actually get customers to visit your business. That's the other thing that's frustrating to explain. Even if you can get all the SEO metrics pumped, there's only so much that will actually accomplish for the business.
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Mar 25, 2018 18:05
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Grump posted:So if I want to teach myself Python and learn how to write REST APIs simultaneously, should I start with Python or just dive into one of these frameworks? I always find learning a language without some sort of project is frustrating, so I'd dive right into a framework. django-rest-framework is good as gently caress if you don't care intensely about learning everything from the ground up and want to focus mainly on the business of writing a functional API.
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Mar 28, 2018 21:45
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Capri Sun Tzu posted:Better! The empty progress bar is confusing, maybe hide it until the first question is answered. I would ditch the "press enter to submit" label since you also have it as a placeholder. Another idea is to have a "press enter to submit" tip pop up if the user enters a response but doesn't do anything else within some amount of time. That way you're not bothering a user who knows what to do, but helping someone who might have missed the placeholder.
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Mar 30, 2018 22:27
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CarForumPoster posted:I have this same question and I'll give an example. Look into Flask, it basically takes care of all the web-specific overhead without doing too much other stuff on its own. All you'll need to do is figure out how the information is passed in through Flask, and then instead of saving the result as a file (or, you can save a temporary file on the server), you'll use a Flask response to return the graph as image data to the client. Apart from the input and output steps, and making sure Flask is set up properly, your application should work exactly the same as it currently does.
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Apr 15, 2018 17:55
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CarForumPoster posted:Would this be the same if my web framework of choice is django? No, in that case Django would replace Flask. They aren't related projects, but Django's featureset is essentially a superset of Flask's. In addition to handling things like routing, gathering input and returning a response, Django also includes an ORM system, user management, more advanced templating tools, form validation tools, etc. You can use Django without touching any of those things if you want, but since they're all there it may take a while longer to get used to Django compared with Flask. In essence, though, it would work the same way. Your Django app would receive a request from the server, with all associated data, and it would be up to you to use that as inputs to your existing code. Then, after the image/graph is created, Django provides methods to return it in the form of an HTTP response to the client.
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Apr 15, 2018 18:47
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Ugh, I'm dealing with the reverse of the usual "what do you mean the print design won't work for the website???" My client has decided that he needs printed copies of the e-mail campaigns I've done for him and does not understand why it won't fit his requirements of being on a single 8.5x11 sheet of paper. I dunno... maybe because there's no earthly reason to constrain an e-mail to the same dimensions as a piece of paper?
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Sep 10, 2018 21:50
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As long as you read and understand what the solution is doing, the mechanics of getting it into your own code are irrelevant. Typing it manually may help you ensure you actually understand what's going on, but there are other ways to do that too.
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Oct 1, 2018 18:34
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Munkeymon posted:"Hmm, I don't like the way that table header looks - I'll just inspect it and mess with the CSS real quick... gosh that's taking a while to render! Wonder how many elements it's dealing with." If you have a better way of laying out a website than using hundreds of thousands of table cells, I'd like to hear it! 
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Oct 19, 2018 20:54
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oh... OK then"
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My other general rule is that computers/browsers (with a few exceptions) are pretty goddamn overpowered for displaying your average website, so if there's a choice between a method that will be easy for you to maintain, and a method that will be slightly more efficient for the computer, it's best to make your life easier and let the browser pick up the slack. This changes slightly if you're doing server-side stuff, especially if you're expecting large amounts of traffic, but it still applies to a point. Figure out how much it would cost to throw more computational resources at the problem, and compare it to how much it would cost to optimize the problem away to the point more resources are unnecessary, remembering that you may need to make changes in the future and you have to take into account maintainability. Unless you've left some really low-hanging fruit in terms of optimization possibilities, chances are that computational resources are less expensive than developer time. This isn't to say you should be lazy and give no consideration at all to efficiency, just to remember that the search for efficiency does, itself, have a cost.
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Nov 11, 2018 14:56
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The Dave posted:Sounds like a bad approach for mobile network considerations? I'd argue the opposite. Where mobile network bandwidth and latency is a primary concern, it's best to use the local resources of the smartphone and do as much as possible client-side, rather than worrying about how efficient the page is on the browser itself.
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Nov 11, 2018 15:41
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drainpipe posted:I'm a fairly competent hobbyist programmer (I've coded in c, go, ocaml, python), but web development is a big hole in my knowledge. I'd like to learn both front and back end stuff. I did some light html/css/javascript over 10 years ago, but I imagine that's probably all out of date. Is there a good resource for learning web development? From looking around, I see Freecodecamp and The Odin Project as some recommended free courses. Anyone here done them, and are they any good? Nothing you did 10 years ago is going to be completely useless, but there are exciting developments in old versions of IE dropping off the face of the earth like they deserved, so there are a lot of new things you can do with CSS that you couldn't realistically do before. HTML is... mostly the same? It's essentially the foundation that everything else works on top of, so apart from a few semantic elements in HTML5 that you might not be familiar with, everything works in a very similar fashion. Very few people use raw Javascript any more, but again, a passing familiarity with the language isn't going to hurt you because a lot of new poo poo is built on top of it. Backend-wise, if you feel comfortable with Python, I'd recommend playing around with Django. It's really flexible and I haven't found much backend-y stuff that it hasn't been able to handle. If you're just looking for things to play around with, it'd be a good starting place for backend stuff because it can handle quite a variety of things with some add-on packages. The usual mark against it is that it does require a fair bit of competence with coding compared to, for example, loving around with WordPress plugins, but if you feel fairly competent as a programmer, I think it's a great deal more useful and less likely to make you want to curse God and existence itself.
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Dec 17, 2018 04:22
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NtotheTC posted:As the freelancer section isnt ready yet in the op does anyone have any good resources for figuring out pricing / estimation? I'd like to start doing a few side gigs but its a tricky area to start in while trying to avoid making elementary mistakes Never do a fixed-price contract, and avoid being too "certain" about anything. You can work with averages, but inevitably someone will have an idea for a "very simple" must-have component for the website that of course takes hours and hours to do properly, and blows the whole estimate out of the water. Ask if they have a budget for the project, then tweak the project proposal to work within that budget, and have frequent conversations about the progress of the project against the amount of money you expected it would take to get that far; adjust the specifics of the project as necessary to remain within budget.
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Jan 2, 2019 03:40
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uncle blog posted:So, what are peoples naming conventions for CSS? That's more or less the way I do things, but for the sake of readability and maintainability in that case, I'd put color:#D4D4D4 in .label.m-light or some equivalent class, so only the things common to all .labels live in the style for .label.
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Feb 28, 2019 16:03
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Write it in such a way that when your client calls and wants you to look at a code base you haven't touched in two years, it will not create a strong urge to invent a time machine to go back and strike your past self upside the head 
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Feb 28, 2019 19:38
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The Fool posted:If I was capable of writing code that way I wouldn't need the time machine. It depends. I often look back on code I've written and bemoan the fact that I didn't do something that I learned I should do between then and now, but there's no use getting mad about that. It is worth getting mad about having written borderline-unreadable, uncommented bullshit because you wanted to shave a few minutes off a few years ago and figured it would be obvious enough/"self-documenting".
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Feb 28, 2019 19:55
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Depending on how simple the template is (one template, changing content in the main section of every page), you can probably write a Python script to accomplish that build process. I think the reason that there's no one great solution to that problem is that it's simple enough for any one case, but it'd be very difficult to write something general-purpose that would cover the peculiarities of all projects it might be used for.
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Mar 1, 2019 05:00
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The Merkinman posted:I knew drag and drop always gave me a bad feeling. You can lead a horse to water, but you can't do a goddamn thing if it decides it would prefer to drink its own piss.
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Mar 3, 2019 18:11
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Roadie posted:You may also want to look at a more boutique CMS that can act as like a halfway step between the Wordpress world and a full top-to-bottom-custom site in Django or Rails. One good example is Craft CMS, which manages all the database stuff for you but lets/requires you to write the whole frontend, using templates + custom PHP plugins for any really weird stuff. If you want to eventually transition to Django more completely, Wagtail is also a pretty fun CMS.
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Apr 7, 2019 02:31
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Trying to do anything with Wordpress that Wordpress does not want to do? It does not spark joy, I'll tell you that. Even when I think I have a case for using/recommending Wordpress these days, there's always one or two special requests that I realize would take me hours to figure out in Wordpress, when I could just bite the bullet up front and use Django/Wagtail.
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Apr 10, 2019 14:59
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Tei posted:But what if we create a json wrapping the value with a random number, something like this { r:4342342444, v:true} , then two values will be different, even if they encrypt the same value. I'm not sure if this is the most efficient possible way of accomplishing what you want, but I see no reason why it wouldn't work.
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Apr 22, 2019 17:51
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Part of the problem with Wordpress is that people are using it for things that it was really never intended to do. It started off as a blog system, and it was decent at that, but at some point it was decided that it should be a basis for pretty much anything and everything, and as such it's now accumulated years and years of damage from people trying valiantly to hammer a multitude of square pegs into round holes.
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Apr 22, 2019 23:15
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Grump posted:Is Wordpress still the go-to for freelance developers or are more minimal libs like Gatsby replacing it? I can't speak for others, but I am extremely hot for Django/Wagtail. I can do some pretty powerful things on the backend, and the editing experience is decent for the client while still restricting them from fuckups rather robustly. The time spent setting up the hosting properly is negligible in comparison to the hours I previously spent wrestling Wordpress into doing something non-obvious. It's a bit like sandblasting a soup cracker for basic stuff, but you never end up running into that One Weird Request you just can't accomplish with the tools at hand.
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Apr 24, 2019 14:32
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Ngnix is good and my friend, even though I'm probably not using it 100% properly.
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Apr 29, 2019 19:24
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Dominoes posted:Hey bros. How do you configure a production web server, like Heroku with Gunicorn/Django to support wasm mime-type? Several dev servers support it, like Python's (Either the latest 3.7 release, or old ones with a shim), Webpack 4, or a few Rust servers. Dumb question, but is the Django app returning a response with a Content-Type header?
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May 6, 2019 00:31
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Need a reality check from some other freelancers: I have a guy with an "interesting" project, but he's super concerned about budget and time to what I consider an unreasonable degree given the desired scope of the project, he's paranoid about NDAs and someone stealing his "excellent" idea, and he has yet to provide any kind of schema or sample data for the data that the website is going to handle, making it nearly impossible to come up with any estimate more detailed than a random guess. Basically, I'm seeing a lot of red flags and catching a bad vibe off this, is my current plan of saying "I don't think I'm the right developer for this project at this time," a good one, or am I being overly risk-averse here? If everything goes "well" it could be a decent project, but given how nebulous the project definition is, I have a feeling it's going to turn into a massive pain in my rear end if I take the project. Is it better to attempt to re-adjust his expectations and then take the project, or just cut bait? PT6A fucked around with this message at 16:40 on May 30, 2019 |
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May 30, 2019 16:38
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a dingus posted:I'm not a freelancer or even a good coder but from other experience, good ideas are a dime a dozen. Its the execution that counts and it sounds like this guy is going to make that a pain in the rear end. Especially if he has nothing started and no idea of how he wants to get anything done. Yeah, that's the feeling I get, having dealt with a whole host of other "idea guys." Idea guys without skills or a fuckload of money are about as useless as an rear end in a top hat on my elbow. I just, one time, want to get involved on a project that looks something like I was taught it should look like in school -- an actual spec document from which a somewhat concrete development plan can be written, and a decent estimate/schedule created. But everyone wants everything done right now, no planning, for as cheap as possible. It doesn't work that way. quote:Very newbie question: I am designing a blog in django as my first project. For static pages like "about me" do you put the content of the page directly into the HTML file? Or do you put it in the database and retrieve using a model? All my blog posts pull content from the backend using a model but this doesn't make sense to me considering I will only have one about page. It depends. If you're talking about a model with a single field for HTML content, that's going to be used for exactly one page, I doubt it makes sense to store that in a database. If there's anything on the page that's repeated, and you could store/edit semantically, use models. For example, if you're going to have a list of projects you've worked on, or a resume, you should use models and templates to separate the content and the display logic. You could then, for example, tweak the appearance of all projects or jobs you've had or whatever, without having to worry about the content of any one specific item.
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May 30, 2019 17:36
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MrMoo posted:Yup, even if the project was kept secret it would have to eventually launch and thus be public. No NDA or contract is going to prevent anyone copying it and making it better, cheaper, etc. Also, his idea is not particularly special. He has a set of data, and he would like a system where the data can be filtered, sorted and then displayed as graphs. I don't know what the data is exactly, which is why I'm pissing in the loving wind when it comes to figuring out an estimate, but god knows this ain't the next loving Facebook. It lives in an Access database for now and given the blank stares I received when I asked about schema normalization, I imagine the database structure is currently very firmly in the category of "loving dire." I foresee, based on my intuition and having dealt with people like this in the past, a situation where I get the project to 90%, and then the final 10% shifts around without end, to the point I crave the sweet release of death whether I'm getting properly paid or not. I have the luxury of another job so it's not like I have to take projects I'm likely to hate.
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May 30, 2019 19:34
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MrMoo posted:Tableau and TIBCO Spotfire spring to mind, business analytics are a saturated market with next to no real money available. It's rather tedious domain at best. I'm going to not work with that guy, and point him in these general directions, because I believe it will be much more cost-effective for him, and much more pleasant for me. I mean, hell, I'm willing to reinvent the wheel if you really want it, but not if it's going to be a pain in the rear end the entire time.
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May 31, 2019 04:52
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LifeLynx posted:I'm getting a few requests to add live chat features to sites lately. What's the preferred solution for that? Firing your client. Barring that, I think tawk.to is a decent solution that I selected last time this came up, but I think the client got bored and decided they didn't want to pay for the integration after all, so I'm not sure how it actually works.
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Jun 13, 2019 16:44
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LifeLynx posted:I don't like the idea of them either (is someone at Joe's Auto Repair going to sit there on chat all day enough to be worth it?) but I've seen them pop up on the web design trends lately and people want them, so what can I do? Give them a cost-benefit analysis of live chat and someone to reliably staff it, versus other means of generating leads, and make sure it uses assumptions that prove live chat is the wrong way to go.
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Jun 13, 2019 17:05
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LifeLynx posted:Just in case, you seem like you've done a cost-benefit analysis vs. other methods - got any references handy I can show them in the 1% chance I can convince them not to do it? I do less of a traditional CBA and more of Drake equation sort of thing. Start with the number of visitors to the site that don't bounce after the first thirty seconds or whatever, during the hours that the chat would be attended to, then estimate the percentage of those who are visiting the site for reasons other than they already want to buy a product or service. Then estimate the number of those people who would prefer an online chat-box rather than phone, SMS, social media or email contacts, all of which are better because you necessarily get their contact details in the process. Then estimate the number of people you can successfully convert from "on the fence" to "purchaser" using that chat box. Then factor in a possible lag in response time if you don't have a full-time person attending to the chat window, which is judged more harshly with a chat box than any other means of communication because people expect it to be more or less instant. You end up with such a vanishingly small number in most cases that the benefit cannot possibly justify the cost, unless you already have a dedicated support team and they can attend to chats as necessary when not busy with other work. You can also factor in the issue of paying someone to attend to the chat box who actually is knowledgeable enough to useful beyond relaying static information that should be a part of the site or a form response in the first place. The intersection of all these factors, where having a chat box makes legitimate sense, exists -- but it's quite small. The other good question to ask is, "honestly, of all the websites you've seen with a chat box, how often have you used the chat box, and of that, how often has it resulted in a benefit to the business you're chatting with?" I do this with a lot of features because, ultimately, people need to be reminded that users behave quite predictably in most cases, and not generally the way the website designers wish they would behave. PT6A fucked around with this message at 17:42 on Jun 13, 2019 |
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Jun 13, 2019 17:37
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