Ian Luckraft Web Development

Recently at Headscape we were setting up a new server ready to launch a redesign of a site. Whilst testing we were accessing the site using the server’s IP address which works fine for checking everything is working, apart from when we needed to install the SSL certificate.

The SSL certificate is based on a domain name so going to an IP address causes the SSL certificate to warn of an insecure connection. Not very helpful when you’re checking to see if everything has been setup correctly.

This is the solution we came up with.

Say our server is on an IP address of 123.456.78.9 and the domain name is reallysecure.com

Adding an entry to the hosts file of

123.456.78.9 reallysecure.com

will cause the browser to go to the new server when we request reallysecure.com

The server will see that the incoming request is for the domain name that matches the SSL certificate and, providing everything has been installed correctly, we will be accessing the site over https.

At Headscape we use TeamCity as our Continuous Integration server and I recently came across an error when trying to build Drupal Commerce Kickstart.

The main parts of the error message were

Failed to build patch for build... due to error: 'build patch' command failed.

stderr: The repository  has a submodule in the commit '77b28273d1ebb08fd03ee254bbb20b6b476d16ec' at a path 'profiles/commerce_kickstart/libraries/jquery.bxslider', but has no .gitmodules configuration at the root directory

To fix this I needed a list of the submodules which I found using a command given in this Stack Overflow thread

$ git ls-files --stage | grep 160000

This listed the submodules as

160000 49a59494c0769c67a7ed2afe35f096e6d6fc956d 0 profiles/commerce_kickstart/libraries/jquery.bxslider
160000 9b8da2340b87e8dbbb5e7e2563a2ca4bdf09a1b4 0 profiles/commerce_kickstart/libraries/jquery_expander
160000 bd879003043b4a93b78cbd4a582b6e0650900bcb 0 profiles/commerce_kickstart/libraries/jquery_ui_spinner
160000 538237c7c5e95736fc376f4efc3e40f5b98eecc5 0 profiles/commerce_kickstart/libraries/selectnav.js

The next step is to find the remote URL for each of them. After moving into the directory

$ cd profiles/commerce_kickstart/libraries/jquery.bxslider

I then used $ git remote show origin

Which returns Fetch URL: https://github.com/stevenwanderski/bxslider-4.git

Each of these needs adding to the .gitmodules file as a submodule so we end up with the .gitmodules file looking like this

[submodule "profiles/commerce_kickstart/libraries/jquery.bxslider"]
path = profiles/commerce_kickstart/libraries/jquery.bxslider
url = https://github.com/stevenwanderski/bxslider-4.git

[submodule “profiles/commerce_kickstart/libraries/jquery_expander”]
path = profiles/commerce_kickstart/libraries/jquery_expander
url = https://github.com/kswedberg/jquery-expander.git

[submodule “profiles/commerce_kickstart/libraries/jquery_ui_spinner”]
path = profiles/commerce_kickstart/libraries/jquery_ui_spinner
url = https://github.com/btburnett3/jquery.ui.spinner.git

[submodule “profiles/commerce_kickstart/libraries/selectnav.js”]
path = profiles/commerce_kickstart/libraries/selectnav.js
url = https://github.com/lukaszfiszer/selectnav.js.git

Once this file has been committed TeamCity was able to complete the build.

I’ve been using Codeception for some acceptance testing recently. The project has a large database and using the standard Codeception database module that rebuilds the entire DB from an SQL dump was too slow.

All I needed to do was run a few queries to put some tables into a known state. I made a helper module that will run all .sql files in a directory.

I’ve put the DbHelper on Github and hopefully it will be useful for others.

At Headscape we were recently contacted by Brian Lewis from Modules Unraveled Podcast to see if we would like to appear on the show to discuss our use of Drupal.

It was really great to have a chat with Brian and there were a few questions sent in by Twitter users who were watching the live stream.

You can listen to episode 90 on the Modules Unraveled website.

I have been working for The Marine Biological Association for close to five years now but the time has come to move on. I’m very proud to say I will be working for Headscape where I’m sure I will learn lots and continue to progress as a developer.

In the five years since I started the web and my skills have progressed exponentially. It’s been fun and nostalgic to talk about the early days and see how far the sites and applications have come since I began working with the MBA.

As with all good work places it’s not only the work but the people who make it special and I made some excellent friendships that I’m sure will continue.

I’m certain that this will continue to be the case in my new endeavors with Headscape.

I recently discovered Shop Talk, a live web design and development podcast by Chris Coyier and Dave Rupert. So I’ve been listening to the old episodes and in episode 9 with Ethan Marcotte. Andy Howells from the UK asked a question ,which is 15:38 into the episode.

He asked about an eCommerce site that could have twenty four additional images of a product and rightly expressed concerns about page load speed on mobile devices over slow network connections.

As I was listening I had the idea that this could quite easily be solved by just having one main image on the product page and then a link to view more images of the product. This could then be enhanced to load the additional images in using AJAX. The user clicks a link that pulls in the extra images and then displays them on the current page.

Another step could be to load an additional six or twelve images then the customer could continue loading more images until they have seen them all. Waiting for twenty four images to load could still be very slow even if the user has consciously chosen to perform this action.

The Downsides?

From an SEO perspective the reduction of images on the page means a reduction of alt tags with the product name. I feel this is probably a very small hit but if anyone knows different please let me know. The product name should be appearing in the body copy as a description and title etc which should provide the majority of your “SEO juice”.

On larger screens only seeing one image could reduce the visual impact when a user first sees the page. This could be overcome by triggering the AJAX request to fire when the page loads and a media query over a certain size is present. Using Modernizr this would look something like

if(Modernizr.mq('all and (min-width: 768px)')) {
    loadExtraImages('/extra-images.php?product_id=1234');
}

Here is where the issues gets a little grey as we are assuming that a user on a larger screen has a better internet connection when it might actually be the case that someone has a large screen and only a dial up connection but a small screen device is connected to a high speed WiFi connection. If anyone knows of a good way to test bandwidth to replace the above media query test above please leave a comment.

This year I’m lucky enough to be attending Future of Web Apps London 2012. I’ve been to Future of Web Design before and found it hugely inspirational so I have expectations for it’s more technical sibling.

I’m looking forward to

Jeffrey Zeldman – Obviously a major influence in the web world and I’ve heard he is an amazing speaker.

Bruce Lawson – I’ve seen Bruce speak at FOWD and he is very engaging as a speaker and I admire his honesty and openness on standards.

Lorna Jane Mitchell – Not only am I interested in her API talk I also get to attend the API workshop with her. APIs are something I’ve been looking at and working with a lot more recently so the chance to pick the brains of someone as accomplished as Lorna is a fantastic opportunity.

Andrew Appleton – I’ve also been looking a lot more into the many JavaScript MV* frameworks lately so Andrew’s talk regarding Backbone.js is of interest to me.