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…
If you’re not careful, the communication tools you use every day might be exposing sensitive information about yourself, your business, or your customers, to some nefarious characters. Hackers and identity thieves are real, and many of them use some form of “digital snooping” to collect the information they need to do their damage. Usernames, passwords, account numbers, and other kinds…
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…
Blogging is a key component of any inbound marketing strategy. It’s a driver of organic traffic, which leads to more conversions and new customers for your business. But how exactly does blogging affect your business? That’s what we’re here to answer. Blogging Drives Traffic to Your Website On average, B2B marketers that use blogs receive 67% more leads than those…
Few things bring more frustration to a web designer than creating a design in Photoshop and not being able to translate it to the web. If you’re like me, you probably find yourself using Photoshop blending modes on images and text to create stunning effects but getting those effects to apply on your websites can be impossible without using large…
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…
I love creating video training tutorials for my clients. I find them to be very effective at demonstrating features or functionality quickly and effortlessly. If you own a Mac, did you know that you too can create these video without any additional software? Enter QuickTime Player. QuickTime Player is used primarily for video playback but, hidden behind a simple menu,…
By default, the WordPress header and footer are typically the same on every page of the site. But what happens when you want to create a landing page with a simplified version of both the header and footer? Or when you want to construct a brand new header but don’t want the public to see it until you are done?…
