Today, I’m going to focus on the topic of custom WordPress theme development. When building a new theme I will typically start on a development space located on one of our web servers. This space allows me to build the site without fear of it being live to the public and at the same time the client has the opportunity…
We all want things to be fast. There are numerous studies that show users get frustrated when a website takes too long to load. Services like Google have set the bar high in terms of speed and response time. Google returns highly complex search results in less than a second. Depending on the complexity of your website or web application,…
Online petitions are a great way for companies and businesses to collect supporters for a particular cause. From a development standpoint it’s relatively easy to get this started. We (the developers) create the form, our client (the company) shares it on social media and bada boom bada bing, you have supporters signing up. But what if we could collect more…
Beacons are small physical devices that broadcast wireless signals to mobile apps which can then react accordingly. In short, your mobile app will know when your phone moves closer to or further away from a beacon that is stuck on a wall (or anywhere else). The term “beacon” is commonly used to refer to both the physical device itself as…
Most of the websites that we develop include some form of downloadable PDF, XLSX, or DOC. These files might contain additional product information, pricing, or other specifications. Wouldn’t it be great to have the ability to update this information on-the-fly from the original source without having to re-upload the exported file? Today, I’m going to show you a very simple…
In this post we will look at how to create a free provisioning profile that will allow us to deploy an Appcelerator Titanium App to our connected iOS device. This post assumes that your titanium and iOS sdks are set up and working correctly and that you have the titanium command line interface installed. You will also need Xcode 7,…
When developing a Ruby on Rails application, one of the best gems to start with is Devise. Devise can handle user registration, login, forgot password initiation, and much more. While Devise works great from the get-go, there are times where additional tweaks are necessary to tighten up security in order to adhere to particular company policies. If your web application…
Over the last few years technologies and frameworks built around ‘real time’ web applications have become incredibly popular. Javascript libraries and frameworks such as Angular, React, Ember, Meteor and ExtJS are some of the better known examples. In this post we will look at how to use and implement the React javascript library in Rails via the ‘react-rails’ gem. We’ll…
I love Chrome’s DevTools package. It provides me with the necessary tools to test and fix bugs within my websites and web applications. I don’t own an Android device but in some cases I find bugs directly connected to it’s browser through the use of an emulator. Wouldn’t it be great to use the same DevTools in this emulated environment?…
This post is a follow up to my original post on how you can configure your iPad (or iPhone) to lock the user into a single application. This can be extremely useful if your iPad is used in a public area of your office, or as a kiosk display at a trade show. My previous post used the “Guided Access”…