The Web Design & Development Megathread

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PT6A: Jan 5, 2006; Public school teachers are callous dictators who won't lift a finger to stop children from peeing in my plane

Dominoes posted:

Websocket, is how you'd approach this, for ref.

Well, if you want to reinvent the wheel. Which you definitely shouldn't do without an exceptionally good reason.

# ¿ Jun 13, 2019 19:39

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# ¿ May 9, 2024 18:46

PT6A: Jan 5, 2006; Public school teachers are callous dictators who won't lift a finger to stop children from peeing in my plane

kedo posted:

Most IS/CS/devs who try to design do a terrible job at it.

To be fair, most of us know we aren't good at design, and really don't want to do it, but our clients often don't give a gently caress and can't be bothered to find someone who's actually decent, because they have absolutely no idea what makes these very vaguely related fields different from one another. It's basically, "there's some kind of words, and some kind of colours and a computer involved? Do it!"

I've literally told clients "I hate doing this, and I'm not very good it, please find someone else to do this part of the project" and I still end up tasked with everything from social media, to marketing, to print design, all of which I'm not skilled at, not trained for, and I loving hate doing all of the above, but they're willing to pay for it and for some reason would rather deal with me doing a half-assed job than finding someone competent. I don't understand it, least of all because I take forever to do things I hate doing, and also I charge a lot of money.

# ¿ Sep 9, 2019 20:59

PT6A: Jan 5, 2006; Public school teachers are callous dictators who won't lift a finger to stop children from peeing in my plane

The Fool posted:

Is this a situation where getting a half-assed job from fiverr or upwork would be useful?

I don't know. Probably?

Upon further reflection, sometimes clients have taken my advice and found designers that are inexplicably even worse than me, and also a complete pain in the rear end for me to deal with all at the same time, so I'm not saying it's a foolproof plan.

# ¿ Sep 9, 2019 21:03

PT6A: Jan 5, 2006; Public school teachers are callous dictators who won't lift a finger to stop children from peeing in my plane

Much like the GDPR regulations, requirements and enforcement should depend on the size of the business and their ability to meaningfully comply with the laws.

A company like Dominoes should be proper hosed by the law if they aren't reasonably accessible, and a small local restaurant should be given a reasonable opportunity to fix particular outstanding issues which have caused some form of damages to a customer prior to being fined, since they have fewer resources to test compliance with accessibility best practices.

This is a situation where humans can actually use their own judgement to determine what is reasonable and act based upon it, instead of wringing their hands and going "WHAT IF BILLY BOB'S FOOD HUT HAS A WEBSITE WITH NOT ENOUGH CONTRAST???"

In the case of small local franchises being hosed over by a corporate website, that's a bad situation, but I'd say the solution is a class-action suit of the franchise owners against the parent brand which is not providing them with the support to which they are entitled. A person with a disability who cannot use the website still has been damaged by the business with which they cannot interact, so I think they are still right to sue an individual location instead of the parent brand.

# ¿ Oct 10, 2019 14:24

PT6A: Jan 5, 2006; Public school teachers are callous dictators who won't lift a finger to stop children from peeing in my plane

Social engineering is always the right answer, friend.

# ¿ Oct 19, 2019 21:21

PT6A: Jan 5, 2006; Public school teachers are callous dictators who won't lift a finger to stop children from peeing in my plane

Vincent Valentine posted:

Yeah that's been my experience. If you want someone's username and password, just ask. They'll tell you.

If they don't, suggest that they have to move five feet and spend 30 seconds typing in a username and password. They'll be so frightened of work they'll write them down for you!

The number of passwords I know from not-even-intentional social engineering is immense.

# ¿ Oct 24, 2019 06:35

PT6A: Jan 5, 2006; Public school teachers are callous dictators who won't lift a finger to stop children from peeing in my plane

Shopify is actually quite easy to tweak, in my experience, and it's only more expensive the DIY if you don't value your time much at all. The only case in which I would recommend a DIY solution is if you have some sort of special case that cannot even be handled via modifying Shopify in some way (plugins, etc.).

That being said, I've been asked to quote on a project using a similar service, and they want to add a feature to it that does not seem to be well-supported by the API of the service, and I'm running out of ways to tell them the only way to accomplish what they want (and I can't even guarantee it will work) is to ruthlessly abuse the API to do things it was never intended to do. The backstory is that I've done a number of assorted plugins, apps, tweaks, etc. for another web developer who doesn't have the skillset to do them himself, and now in his mind, anything that he doesn't know how to do is likely something I both can do and know how to do. This is a filthy lie, and I do not know how to make this dime-store version of Shopify support recurring billing and a customer portal where customers can tweak subscription options and access members-only discounts, and frankly I don't believe it's possible in any kind of reliable or economical sense. Oh well.

# ¿ Nov 1, 2019 00:15

PT6A: Jan 5, 2006; Public school teachers are callous dictators who won't lift a finger to stop children from peeing in my plane

Email is hateful in essentially every aspect and really ought to be re-engineered from scratch.

# ¿ Nov 13, 2019 16:49

PT6A: Jan 5, 2006; Public school teachers are callous dictators who won't lift a finger to stop children from peeing in my plane

Text-only email would be a great start, but what would also be great is a system with guaranteed delivery and actual workable spam prevention features at the protocol level rather than a cobbled together mess of poo poo and piss and bizarre architecture that rarely works properly, is a massive pain in the rear end to set up, and still doesn�t prevent spam.

Part of the problem is that a lot of email, at least from the development side of things, is both automated and wanted, but it�s very hard to filter a legit password reset email from your brand new app from a phishing attempt without explicit whitelisting, and while that may not cause problems for you as a developer, it will mean your client whinges at you and you get to explain why there�s nothing you can do beyond saying a prayer to the dark gods of email. Bonus points if the customer has some third-party email and/or DNS provider so you can�t really set up SPF or DKIM yourself and are left with the unenviable task of walking them through that poo poo over the phone or something.

And that�s before you address the problem of people who think email ought to be the answer to the question �how can I do advertising with no budget?� Email marketing can be an excellent tool, but it relies (like most marketing) on providing people the opportunity to buy poo poo they already are motivated to buy. My local liquor store reminding me I can buy wines I like on sale is getting a solid return on investment; the shoe store I once ill-advisedly provided my email address too, much less so.

# ¿ Nov 14, 2019 05:11

PT6A: Jan 5, 2006; Public school teachers are callous dictators who won't lift a finger to stop children from peeing in my plane

Jabor posted:

If you don't care enough about your email to be willing to pay to send it, odds are way higher than normal that your email is spam.

Ultimately that�s true, but it�s still frustrating that the only thing a paid solution offers in a lot of cases is a higher trust rating.

It seems like there should be a solution. Look at what Let�s Encrypt did for SSL; used to be that you�d have to pay money for a trusted SSL certificate, and ultimately it�s not a lot of money, but it�s much nicer not having to worry about that until your project is �established.�

# ¿ Nov 15, 2019 03:58

PT6A: Jan 5, 2006; Public school teachers are callous dictators who won't lift a finger to stop children from peeing in my plane

Have any of y'all come across clients who want, specifically, "an app" for god knows what reason?

I've had a few clients now who are convinced they should have an app on the Apple App Store and Google Play, despite the entire functionality of the app being easily duplicated by 20 lines of HTML and CSS (not even Javascript, we are seriously pushing the definition of "app" here). What is their goal, and how do you convince them this is a horrid waste of money and Apple will tell them to get hosed because they don't want nonsense befouling the App Store?

EDIT: Also I'm fully aware that 90% of my posts in this thread are about handling insane clients rather than anything development related, sorry if that's a bother. I don't know how or why I attract them.

# ¿ Nov 18, 2019 06:37

PT6A: Jan 5, 2006; Public school teachers are callous dictators who won't lift a finger to stop children from peeing in my plane

The Fool posted:

Build it with phonegap and charge them x300 times more that you would normally

Apple won�t give a poo poo if your app isn�t scammy/malicious/circumventing their weird rules

No, they're literally talking about "a screen with several links on it." I've tried doing this before and it's absolutely been rejected as a waste of space.

I can try, but it's just so much work for no loving point, and whether or not I make money, I just feel depressed about doing work that has no point to it. It does not spark joy. Perhaps I need to raise my hourly rate.

Also: why do they want this? What problem do they believe it will solve for them or their users?

# ¿ Nov 18, 2019 07:01

PT6A: Jan 5, 2006; Public school teachers are callous dictators who won't lift a finger to stop children from peeing in my plane

With projects I hate the idea of doing, I need to stop thinking in terms of "it will take this many hours to complete, therefore it will cost this much" and start thinking in terms of "this is the amount of money I need before I will consider putting myself through this poo poo."

# ¿ Nov 18, 2019 16:19

PT6A: Jan 5, 2006; Public school teachers are callous dictators who won't lift a finger to stop children from peeing in my plane

CarForumPoster posted:

This seems like an ideal use case for Glide: (build apps from a Google Sheet)
https://www.glideapps.com/

It become basically no work at that point.

It's already basically no work to make this a web-app using basic HTML and CSS, the issue is that they seem to want a native app with app store installation and all that poo poo. And while that's trivially doable using any number of techniques, there's no way Apple will allow that poo poo on the store. I know this because I've dealt with this sort of request before, it's a surprising persistent irrational desire.

We're going to try and sell these guys on a progressive web app, since even the guy that wanted to subcontract me agrees an actual native app is a stupid loving idea.

# ¿ Nov 19, 2019 04:44

PT6A: Jan 5, 2006; Public school teachers are callous dictators who won't lift a finger to stop children from peeing in my plane

Inacio posted:

uh do iphones do pwas these days

Not 100%, but enough for this use case probably.

# ¿ Nov 19, 2019 15:10

PT6A: Jan 5, 2006; Public school teachers are callous dictators who won't lift a finger to stop children from peeing in my plane

kedo posted:

I'm looking to automate the process of pushing/pulling database updates to and from my local dev environment/public web server, preferably (but not necessarily) using SSH. I'm using MySQL in both places and am generally looking to do the following:

1. Dump a specific database on local/server (depending on which direction)
2. Find/replace all instances of http://localhost:port with http://webserver.address in that dump
3. Import the database on the local/server (depending on which direction)

It looks like I could accomplish steps 1 and 3 with a fairly simple command, but I'm not sure how step 2 would work. Any advice, or suggested reading, or tools to look into? I'm not picky about how this is accomplished as long as I can either type in a quick terminal command, or click a button and have the whole process run without me needing to do everything by hand each time.

If it's a straight SQL dump, try

code:

sed 's/localhost:port/newserver.address/g' sql.dump > to_import.sql

for step 2. Would that work with whatever else you're using?

EDIT: Seems like you should be able to use that as the intermediate step in the stackoverflow solution you've linked, although I'm not 100% sure about the proper syntax. Maybe something like:

code:

code_to_dump_sql | sed 's/localhost:port/newserver.address/g' | code_to_update_sql

PT6A fucked around with this message at 05:29 on Nov 21, 2019

# ¿ Nov 21, 2019 05:24

PT6A: Jan 5, 2006; Public school teachers are callous dictators who won't lift a finger to stop children from peeing in my plane

I always just assume it's because the entirety of front-end development at this point is more or less centered around a variety of technologies all cobbled together to make an ancient system designed around stateless hypertext pages behave like something its creators could've never imagined it would someday become.

If you look at it for the accomplishment it is, not unlike building a functional internal combustion engine out of popsicle sticks and white glue, it's actually quite impressive and it becomes easier to overlook the individual aggravations it causes.

I'm not sure exactly how Material-UI works, but if I had to guess a reason, it's that the target of an event has to be an HTML element and unlike many components, slider doesn't have an HTML equivalent. Or maybe they hate you and want you to suffer, I've often considered that as a possible motivation for lovely design choices I've seen.

# ¿ Dec 8, 2019 02:03

PT6A: Jan 5, 2006; Public school teachers are callous dictators who won't lift a finger to stop children from peeing in my plane

As a developer I hate dealing with those sorts of regulations, but honestly, they are necessary because a lot of people do a lot of shady poo poo that needs to be stopped.

Even as a small-time developer, I've had clients ask me to do things that are morally questionable and would be prohibited under these regulations, and I like being able to point to the regulations and say, "no, you can't do that, it's illegal" instead of "no, I won't do that, it's wrong."

# ¿ Dec 19, 2019 19:33

PT6A: Jan 5, 2006; Public school teachers are callous dictators who won't lift a finger to stop children from peeing in my plane

Grump posted:

welp I had no idea what I was getting myself into.

this is all just for fun because I wanted to learn, but Authlib does seem pretty cool. tbh, all forms of backend development makes my head spin, and reading that spec did nothing for my imposter syndrome. Sometimes I like to venture out from my front-end bubble and every single time I do, I end up getting too overwhelmed to ever accomplish anything.

Start smaller with backend stuff. If you want to try using a third-party API, start with something that's designed to be easy to use instead of a very complex system. Try something like integrated with Stripe for payments, or Twilio for SMS messages or something similar in terms of complexity.

# ¿ Jan 18, 2020 03:48

PT6A: Jan 5, 2006; Public school teachers are callous dictators who won't lift a finger to stop children from peeing in my plane

After all the poo poo that existed that had to be viewed in IE, I think choosing not to support an ancient, lovely browser is a completely justifiable decision and I don't even bring it up to my clients that supporting IE is an option at this point.

Even the least technologically savvy people I know, people who have literally phoned me to ask how to attach things to an e-mail, stopped using IE ages ago. It's awful and unless you have a compelling reason to throw money and time and sanity down a bottomless hole, there is zero reason to support it.

# ¿ May 6, 2020 13:41

PT6A: Jan 5, 2006; Public school teachers are callous dictators who won't lift a finger to stop children from peeing in my plane

I wonder how much developer time, on a percentage basis, is spent doing things that ought not be done?

# ¿ Sep 5, 2020 00:25

PT6A: Jan 5, 2006; Public school teachers are callous dictators who won't lift a finger to stop children from peeing in my plane

I have divorced myself from a Project From Hell and it's pretty much the best feeling I've ever had other than busting a nut. It was a long time coming and it was a difficult decision but I can tell you the other side of it is glorious, and as much as I'd wished I heard this from other people more often, it's now my time to let other people know.

# ¿ Oct 29, 2020 04:03

PT6A: Jan 5, 2006; Public school teachers are callous dictators who won't lift a finger to stop children from peeing in my plane

prom candy posted:

Quitting stuff is the greatest feeling in the world.

It's this. I should've quit when I first thought about quitting, instead of dragging my rear end to the point where it was making me miserable, and then quitting anyway and ultimately ending up in the same place. Hear ye, all those who read my shitposts, and learn from my mistakes.

# ¿ Oct 29, 2020 17:47

PT6A: Jan 5, 2006; Public school teachers are callous dictators who won't lift a finger to stop children from peeing in my plane

Yeah, "we need all the things perfect and also right now" is not a project management strategy, it's a wish that you give a genie.

# ¿ Nov 24, 2020 05:12

PT6A: Jan 5, 2006; Public school teachers are callous dictators who won't lift a finger to stop children from peeing in my plane

Data Graham posted:

Yeah, seriously. Like yeah I want user management out of the box. And it feels like its momentum is picking up if anything, not slacking.

Yeah, it's pretty great, and fairly trivially extensible if you can't do exactly what you want with the built-in functionality.

# ¿ Nov 25, 2020 22:21

PT6A: Jan 5, 2006; Public school teachers are callous dictators who won't lift a finger to stop children from peeing in my plane

I really did try to love Bootstrap, but I've since grown to hate it and now I've taken the concepts I like and adapted them into writing CSS from scratch, because god knows it's easier to debug CSS when you don't also have to determine what the gently caress Bootstrap is doing at any given time.

# ¿ Dec 14, 2020 04:59

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# ¿ May 9, 2024 18:46

PT6A: Jan 5, 2006; Public school teachers are callous dictators who won't lift a finger to stop children from peeing in my plane

What do you feel is the obligation is when turning over a website/domain to someone else?

Basically, one of my clients contacted me and said "we've had a new site made, here's the guys, can you give them all the info on the domain name to switch it over?"

I didn't register the domain in the first place but I did have the login info from when I switched DNS in the first place, so I said "yeah, sure, here's the info, this is all you need to change the nameservers, also here are the existing DNS records so you can maintain all services."

New web designers say "hey it's not working to switch the A record! Do you have the login info for *DNS provider for sites I manage*?"

Yeah I have it, and you aren't getting it. Get your own drat DNS provider!

I don't mind looking up the login info for free, even though it's honestly none of my loving business because I didn't register it in the first place and it just so happens that I have a record of it, and I don't mind providing the current DNS records as a professional courtesy, but I really draw the line at being bothered again because the new company doesn't know what the gently caress a nameserver is. I, personally, think I'm within my rights to write another invoice at this point, I just want to know if that seems overly petulant or, as I think, reasonable.

# ¿ Nov 19, 2021 04:10

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