As part of a Wiliam learning project, I needed to find a way to make a reusable component that could be used for the rest of our developers as a starting point on future projects.
Nobody can be expected to recall the events that occurred in a meeting six months prior to release of a project. We document so that everybody understands the scope of work in such sufficient detail as to produce outstanding work.
Some of you may look at this blog title and say “but you shouldn’t ever do that. Restful APIs are stateless, duh”. This is correct.. but let's break that rule.
I have been working on an exciting project that had to get past a rather daunting hurdle before it could start properly – we needed to upgrade the Umbraco database multiple versions whilst retaining all user content.
My current website has a simple requirement: combine regular page search results with PDF file results. Simple, right?
In the cowboy days of web development, writing code tests was the exception and not the rule.
We’ve all had to write a drag-and-drop sorting module in the past, but this combination of jQuery plugin, Bootstrap MVC theme and .NET makes short work of it.
MVC comes with plenty of helpers, but often I need them to do more.
I don't know why, but .NET defaults to US format dates for everything.
The humble WYSIWYG is an end user’s main interface to editing content on their website. As websites get more complicated, design gets more complicated, and in turn the slice gets more complicated, the WYSIWYG needs to provide more options for styling content.
Designers, eh? They just love making little flourishes on websites.
For those of us who have lived (and worked) through the early days of the World Wide Web, we will have some fond – and not so fond – memories about early websites and early applications.
I was recently tasked with researching how to use the Mandrill API for sending transactional emails.
As the trend for mobile usage continues to eclipse desktop, and the purpose of search itself is tailored to why you would be searching on a mobile in the first place.
Australia has for the longest time been behind the times in how we make film and television entertainment available to watch.
So it’s that time of year again. That time when the Internet as a whole pranks each other with fake products and non-existent technologies, all in the name of hilarity.
Facebook have noticed this rise in buy/sell/trade groups and have rolled out a new feature to accommodate – the Sell Something tab.
I needed to buy flowers. I'm a guy. I don’t know what a bouquet or arrangement is. Just sell me some flowers.
Spartan’s new rendering engine is designed to work with the way the web is written today.
Back in the cowboy days of web development, password security wasn't well considered. Thankfully things have changed for the better.
It’s been said that peer code reviews are the single biggest thing you can do to improve your code. But how do you do it?
When building an e-commerce site, the question of cart persistence will usually rear its head.
A website has many layers, all important to the overall experience. The difference between an average website and a great website can be compared to the quality of a hamburger.
There once was a time that SEO simply meant having decent meta keywords on your site. Times have well and truly moved on.
Following these suggestions took my site’s PageSpeed ranking from an average 65 up to an excellent 89.
KnockoutJS is a powerful MVVM pattern. Here are two helpful tricks I picked up.
I was recently faced with a task that required a website to validate a user IP for the purpose of opening up an extra section of the site if it fell within a certain range.
It’s Wiliamite Producer extraordinaire Kathleen Shrimpton’s 25th birthday today!
When you use AJAX on your website, be sure to give your users a visual cue that something happened when they pressed that button.
It’s unbelievable what sites from nearly 20 years ago are still around today.
Website forms are the gateway to the rich content you are making available, so make them a pleasurable experience.
It turns out that Excel has XML export and data mapping built in and is very easy to use.
What is the best way to perform a content search on a decoupled Umbraco without the support of Umbraco Examine?
How important is DR for you? The answer to this question should be simple: paramount.
Once the dust has settled on your website build, tired eyes may overlook the simpler things.
The hot topic in IT news this week is the discovery of the so-called “Heartbleed” bug in the open source implementation of SSL, OpenSSL.
Claims is a new addition to .NET 4.5's identity provider that allows you to store pieces of extra information about a user for easy access.
I’ve delved head first into the new world of Visual Studio 2013, .NET 4.5, EF6 and MVC5... OMG I’m loving it.
It seemed like a simple proposition – add a unique constraint to a single property in an Umbraco doctype.
Christmas is but days away. Have you spruced up your website for the pending festivities?
When Firebug was introduced to the Firefox browser as a plugin, the art of debugging websites changed forever
With the advent of jQuery many web developers have become so reliant on other people’s code that they try a plugin first before attempting to write something themselves.
Talking of the day that stops the nation, let's talk about load testing to prevent your website from stopping the nation.
There are a few essential plugins if you're using the Umbraco Content Management System.
Six years is a long time to work for one company. 15 years is a long time to be in the same line of work. Here is what I have learnt.
Babies and web development aren't that different... it would seem. Or at least to a new father.
With larger desktop screens and the push for more tablet usage, websites in general are appearing to be more and more image heavy.
The best part? By creating a tunnel to your machine (all done through the interface), you can test your local websites.
From looking at the already created CSS and JavaScript from a project I am now co-developing I have learned the basic techniques for creating a responsive template for tablet and mobile devices – and it really isn’t that hard.
One of the highlights for me with Umbraco 6 was the new feature of being able to access the Umbraco datastore from an external application that didn’t have direct access to an Umbraco Context.
What I found interesting was that Mozilla was still developing.
Whilst you can create entirely separate websites for this purpose, in most cases there is simply no real need.
Here is a handy list of some of the things all developers should be aware of before handing over the keys to the client
It now appears that Australia Post offers a free REST API, and have done so for at least a year.
When you create a property with one of these keywords it has a special action associated with it.
Swipe, whiz, fade, slide and pop. There are some cool technologies available to web developers these days, though they need understanding and justification… not simply inclusion because they could be cool.
When I tell new friends that I am a developer, and explain to them what that entails, I very quickly feel like Peter Gibbons from the movie Office Space.
The Wiliam development platform of choice for a content heavy site is definitely Umbraco.
Recently I've been delving into the wonderful world of MVC. MVC for the uninitiated stands for Model –View-Controller and is a modern design pattern in software design.
Microsoft MVC 3 has some really cool features.
A few months ago, TechCrunch reported on a survey undertaken with 100 developers. The topic of the survey was which external APIs were the most difficult to integrate into their projects. The winning by clear majority was Facebook. We’ve all worked with their API before and it can be a real headache. Specifically mentioned by the developers surveyed were the API’s never ending changes and poor documentation.
I’ve built dozens of commerce-enabled websites since the early days of the Internet, and in that time I have learned a few things that, in my opinion and experience, provide for a better ecommerce website that gives your customer greater confidence in your service offering – and customer confidence is the main loyalty you need to gain.
Long gone are the days where a developer would need to send bulk emails from his own website. Not only was this time consuming for the developer but it was fraught with possible points of failure – sending too many emails from the one address to the one host is an easy way to get your entire domain put on a spam blacklist.
Google Custom Search Engine (CSE) is a fantastic technology that enables any website, for the low price of $100 annually, to use the power of Google search technologies within your own website seamlessly.
By default Visual Studio’s formatting of code is not as elegant as it could be. I like to be pedantic about the layout of my code as it makes it more readable for me and other developers who have to work on the same projects that I do.
Creating a form on a website is not a difficult thing to do with modern frameworks. Ensuring that the form is designed and functions correctly under all circumstances however is not..
As part of an exciting upcoming project here at Wiliam, we have been tasked to include Google Earth integration...
A look at what is happening in the tech world over the past week. Nintendo suing people, online music sales increasing and Facebook revamping their image...again!
A customer has just called you to inform you that your website is down. Before you panic and call your developer which may incur needless support fees, find out from your customer what they mean by ‘website is down'.
Web developers and the more technical-minded of the Internet populace have long ago realised that Internet Explorer is not a good browser.
The Government will introduce legislative amendments to the Broadcasting Services Act to require all ISPs to block RC-rated material hosted on overseas servers
There are countless millions of websites on the Internet and most of them are varying degrees of bad. Many are not so bad. A few are really quite something special.
So, you have approved your specification and design concepts. The development is progressing well and is nearing completion. After giving your final feedback, at some point soon, your site will need to ‘go live’ onto the Internet for all to see.
So you have engaged your web development company to design and build you your new corporate identity but have you considered how your site will look and function on a mobile device such as the iPhone, Android or a BlackBerry?
Accessibility from a developers point of view part 1 - some elements that make up a triple A website
When considering the goals for the website you are engaging your web development company to build for you, one of the considerations, perhaps one of the biggest, is price.
How many of you still use Internet Explorer 6 as your default browser? You may simply refer to it as “The Internet” and double-click the blue ‘e’ icon on your desktop. Or perhaps it is a “custom” build in your office with your company logo on it and your intranet as your home page.
Caffeine is the most important thing to a developer. The spec can be a little unclear and the time constraints too tight. Their workstation can crash three times a day and not be able to open more than Notepad and Paint at the same time (the purest tools of a developer); but you can’t mess around with a developers desire – nay, requirement – for caffeine.