by admin | Aug 20, 2015 | Dev, Tips & Tricks, Web |
I have to do this all the time. You’ve created a staging site for a client, you want to show it to them on a live server – but you don’t want it to get indexed by search engines, nor do you want people accidentally coming across it – you want to use htaccess and basic auth to restrict the directory. I almost always google the syntax for both: the htpasswd command. the htaccess syntax for adding auth. It’s annoying, this shouldn’t be this hard to remember (but it is). So, in a moment of free time I wrote a really simple shell script that does all of this in one command for me. I’m calling it htpassmaker. This is it, in a gist: Assumptions I’ve made: You’re using apache. You have htaccess files enabled on your server. You have shell access to your server. Things to remember: Put your htpasswd file OUTSIDE you webroot. I find the best course of action is to put htpassmaker in your unix path, then run it from the directory above where your webroot is, once complete, copy the created “.htaccess” into the webroot (or append it to the existing htaccess if you have one) I take no responsibility for this. It’s unlikely, but if you use this (or think it’s stupid) let me know in the comments, or on twitter...
by admin | Mar 18, 2015 | Design, Dev, Rants, Web |
Code and Design Are two vastly different disciplines. So I see a lot of people talking about how designers should code. How it makes sense for frontend code to be produced in the design phase. Now, to a point, I agree. I definitely agree that being able to write code will help a web designer better understand the medium they are designing for. However does that make coding a prerequisite for designing in the digital space? No. No. No. As an analogy, in photography people always talked about the need to know about the developing process to truly master taking a picture – and yet we find ourselves now I’m the digital age, where a vast number of photographers have NO concept of how a digital print is produced. Many of these photographers produce great photography. Writing code is not a pre-requisite for good design. Web is the same: you don’t actually have to write code to design great web sites or user experiences. I will grant that the understanding will probably help, but it is by no means a prerequisite. Obviously, if you don’t implement your own designs, you will need to rely on a developer to do this for you, which leaves you open to the stereotypical “it’s technically impossible” issue, where the dev just can’t be bothered to implement it. However, this is a process issue and has very little to do with your design. Compartmentalisation is sometimes necessary for creativity. As a designer and developer, I have to try very, very hard to compartmentalise when I design, so that my visual creativity is not limited...
by Alex Holt | Jul 26, 2013 | Web |
If you’re a web designer or developer and you haven’t been living under a rock this week (or on tight deadlines and trying to stay off twitter).. then you’ve probably already seen the screencast walkthrough of Macaw. Quick Links: Macaw website Sneek Peek @attasi on twitter @gesusc on twitter It’s generated a fair bit of interest from people in my twitter stream, however the under discussed, yet arguably the most impressive feature of the entire video really comes at the last second – the code. This is the first time i’ve seen a WYSIWYG style editor that is trying to deal with modern issues, like responsive design, that produces decent markup. I’m sure that in practice there is a workflow that would need to be learned in order to get Macaw to actually generate clean semantic markup – however this is a massive leap in the right direction. One might even argue that this is what Muse should have been. The other interesting tidbit is that @attasi alludes to the fact that the app is built on top of HTML/CSS technology, wrapped (assumedly in a Webview) – for a purely HTML application, the interface looks pretty...
by Alex Holt | May 21, 2013 | Dev, Web |
I’ve been working recently on getting together a responsive design solution for clients that already have a website and just want to add responsive in order to be accessible on mobiles and tablets. Major caveat: this is not a best practice, in fact it’s pretty inefficient and clunky – but it does fill a gap. Basically, the idea is to create a new CSS file that applies the necessary media queries and overrides the styling for the site to make it respond for mobile users. The client prompting this is Costhetics – as a content producer, they have existing practices in place (as well as a pretty big library of content) and needed a way to enhance the experience of consuming their content on mobile without needing to immediately reimplement their site. The results of this process are now in staging and I’ll update this post with links and notes after go...
by Alex Holt | May 10, 2013 | Dev, Projects, Web |
SimpleTweet is a class to load recent tweets for a particular twitter user. It uses the search API (which requires no authentication) to load the tweets and store them in a simple local filesystem cache file. Note: This functionality has since been removed from the twitter API – this code now needs to be updated to support Oauth in order to be compatible with the twitter API version 1.1. Links: PHP SimpleTweet on github Download...
