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”…
At Web Ascender, we create a slew of websites, mobile applications, design, and marketing initiatives to help promote our clients’ work. A portion of the web applications we create help our customers create solutions that satisfy the needs of their own customers or business. While there are endless lists of technologies and off-the-shelf products that are great for various web…
In this post we will briefly examine some of the current and rising technologies, trends and practices in web development. We will attempt to get a sense of the future of web development in general and what problems, tools, technologies and languages might become increasingly relevant in the future. The continuing rise of javascript and the web development stack Javascript…
Developing and testing your website in every environment ensures a consistent experience across all devices. If you’re like me, my main machine is a Mac. But I know that Windows users are an extremely important demographic for most of my websites. Browser differences are commonplace and need to be dealt with. Today, let’s look at how we can set up…
In this post we will look at the patterns and tools available to us in Ruby on Rails for organizing our code. This is important for several reasons. Good organization helps make our code easier to read and easier to maintain. It also encourages separation of concerns and a scalable codebase, making future development more efficient. The Rails framework obviously…
In an earlier post we introduced elasticsearch, the searchkick gem and how to use them in Rails. In this post we will consider more complex searches and examine the options available to us in both searchkick and elasticsearch. Elasticsearch is sort of like a very large, complex NoSQL document based database. The rough idea is that every record we want…
We’ve been using the Appcelerator Titanium mobile framework for years now (from v1.0 all the way to 5.2.0 as of this writing), and it has served us well for apps both large and small. However, we encountered a new challenge recently in one of our mobile apps: how to theme the app AND allow the user to select their preferred…
At some point in every Rails application’s life, you’ll need to perform some kind of maintenance or code update that will require taking your application offline for a short period of time. There are methods to achieve zero-downtime deployments, but sometimes it’s just easier to take your application offline for 5 minutes during a deployment. If you know that no-one…
I enjoy working with WordPress for a variety reasons and one of those reasons is it’s implementation of shortcodes. Shortcodes are nothing new to WordPress (they were introduced back in version 2.5), but I constantly find new ways to incorporate them into my sites. “Shortcodes are magical…” By default, WordPress provides 6 shortcodes out of the box that you can…
Whenever I hear someone say, “We need a search box on our site”, my heart slightly jumps out of my chest. Achieving quality search results is difficult to do, especially when dealing with different technologies from project to project. Google has set a high standard for how a search engine should work, so many expect this kind of search quality…