Jonathan Jeter

Director of Application Development

Home Archives for Web Development

Setting Up a WordPress Development Environment with DesktopServer and GIT for WP Engine

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One of the challenges in using WordPress with an external hosting environment and multiple developers is the creation of a local development environment with version control that will work seamlessly. Fortunately, using a combination of DesktopServer from ServerPress, an industrial-strength WordPress host like WP Engine and Git, you can have multiple development environments up and running relatively quickly. In this tutorial, I will explain how to create and set up a local WordPress development environment on a Mac, using DesktopServer by ServerPress, using a WP Engine backup point and then set up Git for version control. If you don’t use WP Engine, this tutorial probably won’t be very helpful.

I highly recommend WP Engine for reliable, secure WordPress hosting. They provide excellent customer service, daily backups and an easy restore process, a staging environment, git for version control, and much more! I like them so much that I would recommend them to anyone (even if I wasn’t part of their affiliate program, which I joined after using their service).

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How Tag Management Will Supercharge Your Testing Program – Digital Velocity Conference 2014 #dv14

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Naoshi Yamauchi - Movemver - Internet Summit (Photo credit: Thos003)

 

Here is my summary of the tag management presentation by Naoshi Yamauchi at the Digital Velocity Tealium User Conference 2014, San Diego, CA
Presenter: Naoshi Yamauchi, Chief Performance Officer, Brooks Bell
@nyamauchi

If you’re managing a testing program on your website—and every site should be testing—implementing a tag management system can take it to the next level. Through the use of these techniques, you will be able to reduce costs, increase velocity, and drive more effective testing.

Lots of work goes into testing.

Time is Money

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  • Every day that we aren’t testing we lose a day on learning

Speed

  • Reduce IT involvement
  • Quickly implement fixes & new test code
  • Adjust analytics code on the fly

Agility

  • Deploy the tools that add value to your tests… …only when you test.
    • Reduce third party costs. Makes getting approval easier.

HTML5 Texas JavaScript Workshop – Client-Side Storage

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HTML5TX JavaScript Workshop - Pamela FoxWeb technologies have taken a long time to progress.

A lot of the standards we see today are because browsers decided to implement new features.

HTML5 is now just supposed to be HTML. It is supposed to be a living standard.

Pamela needs an HTML app that helps choose her hair color.

Client-Side Storage

Cookies are used for all types of tracking, but they have issues with security, user trust (can be disabled), performance and size.

In the HTML spec, they considered the issues and came up with the following solutions.

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localStorage

  • Key / value pairs – hash table
  • Persistent on page reloads
  • Avoids HTTP overhead of cookies

HTML5 Texas Recap

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HTML5 TX Conference 2013 Logo
HTML5 TX Conference 2013

The HTML5 Texas 2013 Conference was great! Here are notes, slides and other resources I collected.

My blog posts of sessions that I attended.

JavaScript Workshop by Pamela Fox

Closing Panel at HTML5TX Conference

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Closing Panel at HTML5TX ConferenceTheme: Where has HTML5 come with the diversity of devices

Panelists: Christopher Schmitt, Ryan Joy, Burke Holland,  Estelle Weyl, Joe McCann, Mike Taylor

What is future-friendly?

Joe: being future-friendly with the web is supporting mobile, but a better strategy is a content strategy for all devices and where they are used. It’s okay to think of web browsers as end points, but your content should be able to live in all environments.

Desktop. Laptop. Smartphone. Tablet. Phablet. Xbox. PS Vita. Smart TVs.  That’s a lot of places your content can live.  Building specific experiences for each one of these simply doesn’t scale.  Let’s find out why and how to tackle such an enormous problem.

Being “”Future Friendly”” is not necessarily just a visual or interaction design decision, but an architectural decision as well.  Furthermore, being “”Future Friendly”” is not about the web or native:  it’s both and more.

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Rapid Templating: “Designing in the Browser” with Sass, Compass, and Serve

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by Nathan Smith at HTML5 Texas in Austin, TX (Deck)

Have you ever found yourself needing to build static front-end templates, either as part of a larger project or as a way to communicate the nuances of responsive design to a client? I think we can all agree that just doing flat HTML leaves us wanting for more templating power.

But, using a dynamic language (PHP, Ruby, etc) typically means that it’s tougher to hand off to a client, who may (not) have a local development environment. That’s where Serve helps bridge the gap. It lets you play with the “”V”” of Rails MVC, but also export flat HTML for easy distribution.

Responsive Web Design

Designers can’t just throw stuff over the wall to the developers anymore

The deck says it all. Great stuff!

sass is to css what jQuery is to JavaScript

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Model-View-Websockets

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by Garann Means at HTML5 Texas Conference in Austin, TX

Many front-end developers are familiar with MVC, and almost all are familiar with event-driven architectures (even if they call them something else). How do those two philosophies work together? And, more importantly, how can websockets help future applications become more responsive, more consistent, and easier to develop? We’ll reexamine the Controller concept from MVC and figure out how to combine simple browser messaging and websockets to address our application needs and improve our user experiences.

Model-View-WebsocketsJavaScript

Did well for a while without patterns and frameworks, but once we realized its potential we added everything at once, adding complexity and functionality.

#singlepageappaproblems

Single Page Applications (SPAs) today are everywhere, as well as SPA behavior on static pages, requiring 3rd-party tools and systems of dependencies. It’s easy to set up, but difficult to maintain.

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Front End Legos

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by Shay Howe at HTML5 Texas Conference in Austin, TX (Deck)

There are a million ways to write HTML and CSS, and everyone has their own, but is there a right way? Our code needs to be well structured, written in an organized manner, and performance driven. Sharing code with others should be a joyful experience, not absolute terror.

In this session, Shay will cover some best practices and performance tips for writing the highest quality HTML and CSS possible. Writing code is the easy part, finding a practice and structure that works well across the board is the hard part. Shay will outline HTML and CSS conventions that can be applied to your everyday practice.

Front End Legos - Building Modular CSSCommon Problems

  • Websites have difficulty scaling
  • code becomes brittle
  • Files and code bases begin to swell

What’s Wrong

Best practices aren’t exactly best practices

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  • avoid extra elements

10 Things You Didn’t Know a Browser Could Do

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by Estelle Weyl at HTML5 Texas Conference in Austin, TX (Deck)

It may feel like the HTML5, CSS3 and ECMAScript specifications are moving along at a snails pace, but browser capabilities are moving quickly, and it is difficult to keep up with all the new feature support. In this session we’ll cover some brand spanking new and older but unknown features that make debugging, designing and developing more fun.

10 Things You Didn't Know a Browser Could Do1. $(‘selector’) without jQuery

  • Supported since IE8
  • You can access DOM elements with standard css selectors

2. Everything is Editable

  • Everything can be updated
  • Can even paste!
  • Updates the DOM
  • Turn anything into a form element
  • Supported since IE5

3. Can store lots of data

  • LocalStorage
  • SessionStorage
  • WebSQL (deprecated but available in webkit)
  • IndexedDB (new standard, but not supported in any browser)

Cookie Limitations

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You Got your MVC into my Components: Adding Bindings to Enyo

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by Ben Combee at the HTML5 Texas Conference in Austin, TX

Enyo (http://enyojs.com) started as an web application framework, focusing on the problem of effectively building reusable UI components.  However, many app developers view problems through a Model-View-Controller (MVC) point-of-view where the UI is seen as a templating problem.  This talk looks at how the Enyo framework evolved in late 2012 to take on aspects of MVC, integrating support for Backbone models and data binding into our component & message passing architecture.  In doing so, it reveals what these two worlds can learn from each other, and how they both play into future work on the “web platform”.

Adding bindings to EnyoEnyo help build html apps with the feel of native apps.

A new way of thinking

How do you keep application state?

Templates are not enough. Interactive controls are hard to put into templates.

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