Web Development
Posts on the general topic of Web development and design.
Why you should never allow your web developer to modify the core or plugin code.
Imagine trying to unscramble eggs and put them back in an intact shell. If you think you can accomplish that, then skip this article. Otherwise, read on for some tips as to how a developer can leave you with an expensive mess.
Be VERY wary of the copyright trolls when using images.
Be extremely careful when using images on websites of blogs. You can get hit with insane demands for payments or sued for up to $155,000.
As I was resurrecting my blogs, the issue of the rights to images arose. There is no problem with images I took or images inherited from my parents. HOWEVER, using any other images must be done with extreme caution. Continue reading
An easy but powerful mobile emulator in chrome.
If you are using Chrome, you can easily emulate a variety of mobile devices/resolutions.
Go to the page you want to emulate. Right click and choose “Inspect” Continue reading
A neat tool to check the browser/environment.
I stumbled into https://yourbrowser.is/ . It is a tool that you can use to show the browser environment including OS, browser, resolution, viewport, JS, Java, Flash, cookies, ad blockers and some more.
This could really help especially when remotely debugging client issues with a website. It has a feature where your client can email the report to you. Continue reading
Rails – Changing the attributes of the flash notice
Some of the apps I do make a lot of use of the Rails flash notices. The default text attributes don’t make the notice stick out enough. I wanted to use a yellow background to highlight any notices.
Using the Inspect tool in chrome, I found that the controlling CSS was in assets/scaffolds.scss. In my case it happened to be around line 39
Look for #notice. The only attibute was color: green;. I changed that to add a yellow background color as follows Continue reading
Responsive pages with Artisteer / Ruby
I use Artisteer to generate the templates for my Joomla, WordPress and Rails sites. I put together a Ruby on Rails site and it was not responsive. I dusted off some memory cells and remembered that there was a line in the layouts/application.html.erb file that needed to be changed. A file comparison with the same file from an app that was responsive pointed me in the right direction. Continue reading
Changing the attributes of printed pages via CSS
If you need to change the size or other attributes of printed text, you can add the following to your style.css
@media print{ div{ backgroundcolor-color: #FFFFFF; font-size: large; }}
A Great SEO Checker for your sites
I found a good site for checking the SEO of a site. It gives a very detailed explanation of a number of factors. Click each item for a detailed explanation of the item.
Some of the factors checked in the free version are : Continue reading
Rebuilding a ‘lost’ website using the wayback machine at archive.org
I occasionally come across a need to recreate a website that was ‘lost’ with no backup. There is a way to rebuild at least part of a site if the site is small enough.
You can see a snapshot of a site from the past by going to www.archive.org. The calendar will show the available archives of the site if there are any. If you are lucky enough to find an archive of the site you can copy and paste the content.
This is not a perfect solution. For example, online stores such as Virtuemart will not have the items cataloged.
Setting up structured data for a website.
Google Webmaster Tools was showing that my site had no structured data. My consulting site www.chrismendlatech.com is a Joomla 3.x site. I tried the J4 Schema extension but could not get that working properly according to any of the tests I ran, including the google structured data test.
I did a search for “Seo Consultant” and checked out the contact page for one of the SEO companies. The HTML structured markup was easy to find.
I was able to use that as a model for my markup. Continue reading