I had a status feed displaying on a client site, which abruptly stopped working. On investigation, it turns out that facebook now require an ‘access token’ to be passed in to grab previously public information. Well ok, so where does this access token come from? That was harder to find out…

Here’s what I did. I signed into facebook as a developer (https://www.facebook.com/developers/) and created a new app. Once I saved it, I had a ‘Application ID’ and an ‘App Secret’ which I put into this url: https://graph.facebook.com/oauth/access_token?grant_type=client_credentials&client_id=APPLICATION_ID
&client_secret=APP_SECRET – et voila, it displayed my access_token.

I passed this in the query string for the feed, but no joy, still no display. Putting my feed url into a browser directly showed me the problem though. We need to use https when passing in a token. Sorted, feed working again…

I’ve been fortunate to have worked on some good websites recently. Working with Ken at webprogrammingsolutions.com in conjunction with a number of design agencies, Headset Group, StudioMouseTrap, ImagineIT Media and Silver Frog, amongst others, we have provided complete build, or programming support for sites such as; www.syncmor.com, www.tormespalmsprings.com, www.evertune.com, www.espguitars.com, and www.indidesign.com.

It has been great to work with designers again, takes some of the pressure off me. They seem pretty happy too – these sites are all based on the US west coast, but I can supply high quality programming and internet skills at a very competitive rate. Many say that finding reliable programmers locally who can deliver accurately, to budget, and on time, is proving nigh on impossible, and going overseas for cheap labour has been too much of a lottery. I should add a testimonials page as we have had some glowing praise!

Man, how did we manage before jQuery!

Yes, ok, sometimes including jQuery in a project to do some menial task is akin to carrying a large sledgehammer around in case you come across a very small nut… but increasingly I’m finding project uses for it such it seems like I’m wading knee-deep in hazelnuts.

Take this morning for instance. I had some tables with three cells per row. The first, needed to be wide enough for the longest value, the second and third right-aligned and wide enough to provide a bit of separation. Now, I could give them classes but there’s a lot of of rows and multiple stacked tables, so I wondered if I could style them using pseudo selectors in css. Well, td:first-child looked promising, but how to get 2nd and 3rd child cells? OK, try td:nth-child(2) – Chrome good, IE8 bad – that css selector is not supported by Internet Explorer – sigh…

Enter jQuery:
$(‘.menus td:nth-child(2)’).css({
‘width’ : ’40px’,
‘text-align’ : ‘right’
});

Perfecto in all my testing browsers! Thank you jQuery, you saved my weary follicles.

I’ve been using jQuery a lot, all of a sudden. For those who don’t know, jQuery is a library of javascript functions, meaning we don’t have to re-invent the wheel when it comes to writing code to do many common web tasks. Javascript runs on your browser rather than at the server, which makes it fast and responsive because the website doesn’t have to do a round trip across the internet to manipulate information. Traditionally, client-side code was pretty limited though, as you often still need to communicate with databases and suchlike on the server and connecting the two halves was tricky. Now, jQuery, with other technology such as Ajax, makes it much much easier. Add to Cart buttons, or contact form submissions can be done without having to refresh the page, they happen in the background.

Javascript was also useful for moving things around on a page, and jQuery has taken this to a new level – we can drag and drop list items, fade messages in and out, rotate images and slide menus up and down. Most of that is eye candy, but it can make for a slick user interface – the bit you interact with. Much of that animated stuff was once the preserve of Flash, produced by Macromedia and now by Adobe. Designers love the movy, slidy style you can produce with Flash, but there are significant problems with it. Generally speaking, a website that is based on flash will perform poorly in search engines, because there is no indexable content, it’s all just a closed object. Flash isn’t supported on Apple handheld devices, so the site won’t work on iPod, iPhone or iPad – whether you see that as significant is your shout, but as open source and industry standards handle animated interfaces and embedded video, you have to wonder what role flash will play in the future.

I’ve been busy working with robotransfer.com building sites for design agencies on the US west coast – and I have been enjoying building sites like indidesign.com, kicklabs.com, gloto.com and the dealer locator app for espguitars.com – working with designers again has been fun and takes some of the stress out as I’m primarily a developer, not a designer. Ken O’Neil at robotransfer is a good project manager and long may the association continue – we make a crack team!

Well, here I am writing a post in WordPress for a blog embedded in a content managed website built using my own CMS (content management system), and the subject of the post is really going to be Joomla! (their exclamation, not mine).

I have been developing a range of low cost websites – webstart by webaria – the idea of which is that from just $14.95 per month you can have a richly featured, but expandable site. In the current economic climate it’s hard for small businesses and organisations to justify ploughing thousands of dollars into a website, but if a web presence doesn’t cost much to start off with then you can dip your toe in water and see how it progresses. This is an alternative to doing it yourself, but with a web professional there in a supporting role.

So, the question was how could I produce websites with a decent design and rich functionality cheaply enough for it to be worth me doing so? The answer has been to use template design, and an open source content management system. After research, I decided to use Joomla over WordPress.

Over the next while, I will add a few posts about using Joomla, and how I’m finding it to develop websites in…

My, my… it’s December and the snow has started falling – it must have been a busy summer as I don’t remember where the time has gone! A rake of sites have been completed including a big rebuild for skye.co.uk, a shopping cart for newrailalphabet.co.uk, a redesign for rope-access-scotland.co.uk, new site for millofkellastroutfishery.co.uk and a rebuild for viewmarketing.co.uk

Just launched the new site for the Mersey Tobeatic Research Institute, www.merseytobeatic.ca which was designed in conjunction with Nova Scotia designer Jim Todd and the staff at MTRI. This site has full CMS and an extensive extranet facility.

Continuing in an academia, environmental sort of fashion, another site to go live recently was a full WordPress based site for the Outdoors Health Network, www.outdoorshealthnetwork.co.uk. This is really quite a complex site with a lot of extensions to a WordPress theme. It was a good opportunity to stretch my knowledge of what a WordPress site can be made to do.

Not, perhaps, my most extensive or complex site, but this site fits the bill for the client. All page text is content-manageable, as is the photo gallery and links. One hour after the site going live the client received his first enquiry from the contact form!