Ian Luckraft - Software Engineer

Curse of the Redesign: Handling Existing Content

January 23, 2018
My work, Web Development
Database, Web Development

As I spoke about in the previous post about redesigns my work generally focuses on clients who have existing sites that need to be moved to a new Content Management System and have a new design applied to them. Whilst this can have it’s advantages for design work by allowing the front end developers far more freedom with markup it has some challenges for the backend. Discovery # Every database I have received have been from a different CMS, some have been MySQL and some have been Microsoft SQL database but all have required some discovery. ...

Curse of the Redesign: Existing Content vs New Ideas

January 17, 2018
Web Development
CMS, Web Development

I can’t remember the last time I was involved in making a brand new website rather than an update or redesign. Maybe it’s just the sort of work we are suited to at Headscape and you may find differently. A redesign often brings with it different challenges to making a site from scratch, one of these is challenging the client to provide new types of content. By sharing a vision of how their site could be it encourages clients to improve their site rather than continue with the same old processes. ...

Why Your Back End Developers Should Be In The Design Kick Off

January 8, 2018
Uncategorized

Design kickoffs are great, it’s the start of the project, expectations are high, ideas are thrown around liberally and everyone is excited about what’s to come. So why should you bring along the person responsible fo database tables and code no one will ever see? Get to know the business # Invitations to tender and design briefs are very useful documents to get an initial idea of what a business does and what they offer. ...

My first day with an Arduino MKR GSM 1400

December 12, 2017
Arduino
Arduino

I have a project in mind that needs internet connectivity but I won’t have access to WiFi so when I saw the Arduino MKR GSM 1400 with it’s GSM capability I thought I could use it to send my data over 3G. Before I get to trying anything like that this is my experience using it for the first time. Where do I put the SIM Card # I already had a SIM Card from GiffGaff to use I just needed somewhere to put it. ...

Customer Service as a Service

December 5, 2017
Uncategorized

In my younger days I worked in a surf shop where the owner was very hot on customer service. He liked us to greet every customer when they entered and left. To start with this seemed quite unnatural and the odd customer even seemed confused. In general though it did open up communication and people seemed genuinely happy with the interaction even when you said thanks to them for leaving empty handed. ...

Back End Developers – Goalkeepers of the Web

November 28, 2017
Uncategorized

When I was younger I wanted to join a football team. I had visions of scoring the winning goal and being the hero. Unfortunately I turned up with a pair of goalkeeper gloves, one of the others on the team decided I must be a goalkeeper then. And that’s the position I played for many years, and I loved it. Now I’ve been a backend developer for many many yeas and I love that as well. ...

Make working from home work for you and your team

November 21, 2017
Uncategorized

When I started working for Headscape I also started working from home. Our office is a 3 hour drive form where I live so commuting isn’t an option and as a family we were not looking to relocate. In the past few years I’ve learnt a lot from home working and how to make it work for me and our team. Here are some tips that I have found smooth the process. ...

Find total rows by day created with PHP and MySQL

November 13, 2017
Uncategorized

I was recently asked by a client to produce a report of content posted by day. My first instinct was to query the database for all rows of the particular content type and handle the counting in PHP. First Idea # Query the database for all rows of content type X Create an array in PHP of days Loop through all rows Use PHP to figure out the day the row was created Increment the array element for that day This seemed pretty inefficient though and felt like something some SQL could handle far better. ...

The Power of Knowledge Sharing

November 7, 2017
Uncategorized

The web is constantly developing and growing at a fast pace. I often wonder how beginners even know where to start and marvel at their ability to not be daunted by the myriad of options available to today’s developers. I started my web developing career when there was a clear distinction between HTML, CSS and JavaScript. I remember using table based layout but quickly processed to floats for layout and some simple JavaScript for things like rollovers. ...

Drupal 7 Views Sort by Two Date Fields

October 31, 2017
Web Development
Drupal

To achieve this you will need to implement hook_views_query_alter() in a custom module. I did not do this in Views UI. A recent project at Headscape required me to build view listing two different content types that would use two different date fields to sort by. For examples I’ll use the default basic page and article content types. The Problem # Some content types need to be sorted on the node created date and others on the display date field. ...