Ask MetaFilter questions tagged with webdev

Can I disable Firefox cache per-domain?

odinsdream — Thu, 17 Dec 2009 15:26:29 -0800

How can I set Firefox to not cache any pages from a certain domain? I have to use a crap ticketing system written in .NET which doesn't work properly in Firefox.

If I clear cache between page views everything works fine. Once the site is loaded, the URL at the top never changes no matter where you navigate or what actions you perform, so I'm guessing Firefox doesn't know the page needs to be reloaded.

Is there an extension to Firefox that will let me set one particular domain so that it does not create cache items at all?

Story problems.

SinisterPurpose — Thu, 16 Jul 2009 10:08:33 -0800

Web Designers! Tell Me Of The Dragons You Hath Slain! We all remember the fun we had with this question. As was suggested to me in that thread, I have been spending as much of my time as possible learning on my own. (Concentration has been mostly on Web Design) Unfortunately, the countless books, articles, and blogs I've read are not completely complimentary to my learning style.

Of course I'm gaining knowledge and skills with these, but I'm looking to sharpen this particular sword as quickly as humanly possible. And for me, that mean hearing anecdotes, stories, and real world challenges from people who live within this realm every day. I understand and process information most effectively when it is wrapped in a pretty little narrative. (Probably why I majored in English in the first go round.)

I'm looking for descriptions of problems you've encountered working in web design. If you found a solution, you can feel free to share it. Or not. Be as detailed as you like.

Also, I'd like to hear about your Eureka! moments as you were learning. What made a particular concept sink into that soft, mushy melon of yours? What was that first baffling problem you had that first day? What issue just keeps coming up and won't go away? Just vent if you like; I guarantee I will mine something out of it.

Inevitably, someone will ask for a clarification on what I mean by "web design". I understand that it is a broad and multi-faceted discipline. If you think you have what I'm looking for here, then you do. I am deferring to your experience here. Let's feel free to err on the side of this-is-probably-what-he-wants-even-if-he-doesn't-know-it.

Help me fix my wordpress theme for internet explorer? (YAML)

yuletide — Tue, 21 Apr 2009 15:48:30 -0800

Web design panic! Wordpress theme (YAML + sandbox) implodes on impact with internet explorer So, I made a swell website. Was all clever and used Yet Another Multicolumn Layout as a CSS/XHTML framework, smashed together with the classic sandbox theme framework for wordpress.

Great success! Until I tested it in internet explorer

I've tried perusing the various CSS bug fixes/diagnoses, even within the YAML documentation. But at this point I'm ready to throw things through windows (the glass kind). So I thought I'd try asking for help.

Site is here. Rather than posting all my source files, I think it best to let people poke around using Firebug so they can see it all in action.

Basic idea is: header, then two 50% columns with the main content. Right column then has two more 50% columns after its main content box. All of the columns go screwy in IE. And something's up with the header image too. YAML has some built-in functionality for dealing with IE bugs, but it also has two different ways of doing columns (default method, but then also subtemplates, which I've worked in as well (clearly not successfully)) not sure how to work it in, or if I've already hopelessly messed things up with my own tweaks.

Stylesheets:
YAML base stylesheet
Base content styles (somewhat modified, but not much/any layout stuff)
**The rest (including the layout styles)**

I can post more details, etc if needed...

Mission: From pretty pictures to useful pictures

ttyn — Sun, 19 Apr 2009 08:58:23 -0800

What are the best resources for me to look into if I want to create websites that support user-created information? Here's what I want: users to be able to login, upload data, be able to see newly-updated data in a chart.

Here's what I know: I know xhtml and css. I know absolutely nothing about programming, have pretty minimal knowledge of APIs.

What programming languages will serve me best for web-specific development? Where should I start (books, websites, etc)?

Drupal 6 CCK hook mysteries

soma lkzx — Wed, 11 Mar 2009 11:10:21 -0800

In Drupal's CCK, how do I add additional global settings to fields? Disclaimer: I'm a Rails developer who is plenty familiar with PHP, but Drupal's learning curve is a little steeper than one morning. Pointing me to the right hooks or a module that does the same type of thing as I'm doing should be just as good as spelling out what to do.

I'm working with Content Profile and need to add a(n integer) setting for every field that's created under the Profile content type. Let's call it Priority. It'd be like the "Maximum length" setting in terms of numerality and globalness, but I need to add it via a module. hook_field_settings looks promising, but I can't figure out how to get in there on top of an existing field type - there are plenty of articles out there that show me how to do this if I was making a whole new field type, but I'd rather attach this to all of the existing ones.

Bonus points for getting this value to appear as a column on the top level 'Manage fields' page. Even more bonus points for the go-to (e)book for Drupal development.

What's the difference between Ruby on Rails and Python?

ckohrman — Mon, 02 Mar 2009 13:22:30 -0800

What's the difference between Ruby on Rails and Python from a non-programmer's perspective? Are there advantages or disadvantages I should be aware of? I'm working on a project that needs web dev help, but I'm just a designer with no clue between the two.

I can haz developer???

spicynuts — Wed, 11 Feb 2009 09:33:30 -0800

Does this person exist, relatively cheaply: drupal, PHP, Flash, CSS developer? All rolled into one. I am tired of paying time and materials to outsource new dev/maintenance of our ecomm website. We are a start up and the costs of continued development now look to be about the same as the cost of hiring an in house resource, depending on whether my estimate of salary for this kind of person is accurate or that a single individual that can do all of this exits.

So here is what I would need this single person to be able to do:

1) implement new drupal templates for design of new pages on site
2) write new functionality that uses drupal/php to access database and manage data, users, products, etc
3) our site is an integration of Flash and CSS using a drupal engine - I want someone who can develop/optimize/fix the functionality that uses communication between the Flash customer facing stuff and the back end for transaction management, customer activity, non-transactional features, etc
4) handle day to day changes to pages on site based on promotions or testing of 'stickiness' to see how customers respond..so, like swapping out banners, areas of content, moving content around, etc
5) develop better interfaces for product and content management into drupal and the MySQL database - we use a stupid excel file now and drupal falls apart easily...I'd like to be able to develop some kind of web-based interface that uses php or something to directly into the product database and do our inventory and product management.

Is this completely unrealistic? For example, is this a team of three people rather than one person? If it is one person is this someone who should be earning 150K/annum due to the skill set or is it a lower level salary? Can anyone help me understand what's possible here better?

Document!

spicynuts — Fri, 09 Jan 2009 13:35:23 -0800

Web site source code documentation - what is crucial/acceptable/required to demand from a vendor to be comfortable that a new web team could hit the ground running? I have a vendor wrapping up development of a website with an ecommerce back end and a MySQL database. I had in the the contract that they owe us appropriate documentation with the delivery of the source code at the end of the project. They are pushing back and saying that their code commenting and existing open source documentation on the internet (Drupal, UberCart) should be sufficient for any new developer. I am not so confident but I don't know how to specify exactly what I want. Can anyone give me an idea of the absolute critical info I should demand on delivery? Database tables? Filenaming conventions? Credentials? What else??

Need to make columns in a table appear/disappear based on checkboxes

the_dude — Thu, 27 Nov 2008 10:44:35 -0800

WebDesignFilter: I am trying to create a table with columns appearing based on what checkboxes are selected. I'm trying to create table, basically like a spec-sheet. What I want to do is to make the user be able select what items to compare. Essentially, the columns would appear based on what checkboxes are selected.

I'm quite very comfortable with CSS and HTML but a JS newbie at this point so this took me a lot longer than I thought and I really didn't get anywhere. I would really appreciate a few pointers. I haven't seen any websites where they had that so maybe if anyone knows a site where they have that I can try checking out the code to see how it works. And I'd definitely appreciate if someone actually points me to a solution.

Thanks a lot.

Django hosting recomendations

phyle — Mon, 17 Nov 2008 13:39:47 -0800

Web hosting recomendations - Im very new to web development but have been slowly setting up a website with django and im starting to think about hosting. I know there are a lot of web dev people here so I thought it might be a good place to ask.
So my requirements are-
-Django friendly, perhaps with helpful support because I imagine I am going to run in to all sorts of technical problems.
-Apparently I will also need shell access so I can set up something called cron jobs? I have a python script Id like to run every hour or so that updates a database.
Thanks for any help!

vBulletin is trying to destroy my sanity

chrominance — Tue, 02 Sep 2008 07:23:33 -0800

I have recently dived into the world of styling vBulletin forums and have discovered homicidal tendencies I didn't know I had. Please send help in the forum of guides, tutorials, and reference documents. The vBulletin manual is woefully lacking in anything past the most basic information and there's a whole lot of counter-intuitive or obscure "magic" going on in the templates—how was I to know, for example, that the $navbits variable would only be accessible to the navbar template, and not anywhere else? Or that when a template calls $threadbits, it performs the inclusion of a separate template and looping through all threads on the page automagically, and doesn't really act like a variable at all? Where are the $thread and $forum variable arrays documented? I've just spent half an hour trying to find a way to get the URL for the forum a thread is in, WITH NO LUCK. This is a ridiculous state of affairs.

Either documentation is completely lacking and you have to just try things via trial and error, or else my Google-fu is supremely lacking. I hope it's the latter. Please post any and all decent vBulletin resources that will shed some light on how to handle templates and styling properly. Things like variable references (and COMPLETE ones, please, not the "complete list of variables!" lists that somehow forget to include the most basic $thread and $forum vars), template inheritance trees, and stuff like that, as well as walkthrough tutorials and basic hack guides (not for the specific hacks but to familiarize myself with the general way vBulletin works).

CSS, JQuery, PHP and Caching: Best practices?

odinsdream — Wed, 20 Aug 2008 09:29:50 -0800

CSS, JQuery, PHP and Caching: What are the best practices for creating dynamic CSS with JQuery and PHP? Examples inside. I'm using PHP to dynamically create links and their associated CSS. I'm doing it dynamically because the number and positioning of these links is dependent on the selected month.

PHP inserts these CSS declarations into the HEAD tag. This seems to work fine on Firefox, but IE apparently caches the HEAD tag. This is a problem when navigating to pages for other months since the number of days will change.

Since I'm also using JQuery for the first time in this project, I wonder if I wouldn't be better off setting the CSS with that, rather than with PHP. The problem with this would be that I'm now mixing math and functions between the PHP sections of the site and the javascript sections. Is there a better way?

An example can be seen here. Source code for the same is available here.

The hover links over each day in each graph are created with a PHP loop based on the number of days in the month. The CSS to position them properly above each day is also created with a PHP loop.

The problem arises if a user selects an old month with a different number of days. Since IE caches the head tag the user only sees 20 day hover links, rather than 30 or 31.

Online documentation, tutorials or book references are very much welcome. Also, if I'm just completely going in the wrong direction please let me know.

Where to get live NFL stats for web development?

BirdD0g — Mon, 04 Aug 2008 07:53:03 -0800

How does one go about getting access to live NFL football statistics for the purposes of web development? I want to build an application for the iPhone (specifically one that can handle the live scoring and standings of my fantasy football team). Where do all these fantasy football websites and live scoring iPhone apps pull their up-to-the-minute player statistics from?

Is it MySpace Voodoo?

vertigo25 — Sun, 06 Jul 2008 09:43:26 -0800

How can I pull the data from a MySpace profile to include in flash or other custom layouts? One of the coolest things about LoveMyFlash is that their layouts automagically pull the data a user has entered in to their "About Me," "Who I'd Like to Meet," interest lists, etc.

How do they do it?

Obviously they're isolating each "blurb" and pulling it in to the swf. I could do the "pulling it in to the swf" part... if I knew *where* to get the blurbs. That's the part I just can't seem to figure out.

Is there a way to make a database query directly? This seems like a big security hole... but then again it's MySpace we're talking about here...

Is there a way to go to each blurb or section as an individual HTML page? That seems like the most direct route.

Or are they using some regex voodoo in the Flash script to seek out the words "About Me" then include everything until the "Who I'd Like to Meet." This seems like it would be doable... but complicated... especially since regex is not my strong suit... nor are the black arts.

Anyone have any clues?

Spammers ruin everything: how do I stop them from abusing mailing list signups?

chrominance — Tue, 03 Jun 2008 09:45:12 -0800

On our website, we've got a little one-field form where people can fill in their e-mail address and sign up for our mailing list. The form seems to now be the target of spammer-hacker bastards, and random people are complaining about being signed up for a list they've never heard of. What should we do, besides take down the form altogether? The only thing that comes to mind is a captcha (but that adds another step to what should be a one-step process). The list is administered by mailman, and it sends out confirmation e-mails before it signs anyone up. There's no way to add text to the automated mails so it shouldn't be the target of spammers. Nevertheless, it seems someone's using the form as a way to pester random people with (potentially lots of) confirmation e-mails. One of the goals with the very simple form was to make it easy for people to sign up; we'd rather not have to tell people to send arcane e-mail messages to a mailman address to sign up—and in any case, would that really solve the problem? Isn't that just as open to abuse? Captchas are at least a workable permanent solution, but I'd prefer something more accessible and easier to use. Nothing comes to mind.

Spammers ruin everything.

Code-switching while coding

signal — Wed, 09 Apr 2008 12:43:54 -0800

Code-switching while coding: if you speak more than one language and are a programmer or a web-developer, do you write code in one or the other or both? I find myself using both English and Spanish for class, function and variable names, for example, as well as for comments. This is probably not a best-practice, but quite natural if you're bilingual.
Do you do this? Do you have a system or just do it randomly?

Tracking organic search and paid search referrals

superfurry — Thu, 13 Mar 2008 08:13:35 -0800

Under the hood of Google Analytics. GA does a great job of segmenting paid and organic search metrics - traffic, keywords, etc. How does it know one from the other ? I'm trying to build an organic search tracking system on my website. I want to cookie people who've come in from organic search differently to how I want to cookie people who've come in from paid search. My problem is, I don't know how to differentiate between organic and paid referrals. The referrer is always the same for both isn't it ?

I also need this to work across different search engines - Google, Yahoo, MSN, etc etc.

Anyone have any experience of doing this ? How do I tell an organic refferal from a paid one consistently across multiple search engines ?

Which developers should I add to my del.icio.us network?

bertrandom — Wed, 12 Mar 2008 02:32:32 -0800

Who should I add to my del.icio.us network if I'm interested in web development? I currently have a few of my friends and some javascript gurus, but I'd like to add some more. Is there a website that lists developers and their del.icio.us usernames?

Building the timeline

dw — Mon, 11 Feb 2008 14:17:25 -0800

I need a way for users to edit a timeline online. It doesn't have to be elaborate; it just has to allow a user to add an event to a history timeline. I'm too swamped to build my own solution. We're running IIS with classic ASP. Ideas for getting this pulled off? The idea is that there's some timeline:

1968 - MLK assassinated
1972 - Watergate

A user can then add in another event:

1968 - MLK assassinated
1969 - Apollo 11
1972 - Watergate

The timeline in question is for the 40-year history of my institution.

The main option I'm looking at is an online document editor, like Writeboard or Google Docs. The problem is that these users who know the timeline we're trying to construct aren't necessarily savvy enough to use either one.

Another option would be to throw up a wiki, but the wiki of choice here is OpenWiki, which from an editing standpoint drives me nuts.

The last option is to throw some sort of editor on top of the Simile XML. This one worries me since I'd be looking at doing direct file editing on the server.

So... is there an online timeline editor I've missed? Anyone else pulled off something similar? Any other ideas?

Retaining form data when going back and still using PHP sessions.

odinsdream — Fri, 08 Feb 2008 05:36:34 -0800

When I altered a PHP web form to take advantage of PHP Sessions, I lost the ability to go back a page while retaining data in the form. Is this the expected behaviour, or is it caused by something else? There are two pages, newentry.php and processentry.php. The first page contains an HTML form whose action is the second page.

The second page does some error checking and alerts the user to go back if something is not correct. I have attempted both javascript:history.back, history.go(-1), and direct links to newentry.php. Before I added Session support, going back to the form returned you to a page with the data still filled in.

Since I added sessions, going back takes you to a blank copy of the form. Is this normal? Is there some other cause I should investigate?

What is the best way to handle this sort of thing? Should I not rely on the first behaviour at all?

Export DIV to JPG?

puddpunk — Sun, 03 Feb 2008 23:48:21 -0800

WebDev-2.0Filter: Using client side technologies (i.e. Javascript, ActiveX, Java... JS is preferred) is it possible to generate an image file (PNG or JPG, or even PDF) from a DIV tag on the page? I have a little web page where people can choose a bunch of options, click on, click off areas on a map etc... Is it possible, using only client-side technologies, to generate an image that represents the content in the DIV (A bunch of PNG images layered on top of each other and some text/controls)?

Actually, all that is important to have in the image are a bunch of (alpha) PNG files layered on top of each other. Am I missing something simple here? Is there a magic JS library I can load? Am I not thinking about this little roadblock in the right way?

The application is written for IE7 for now so anything that works in there is good. Extra points for browser agnostic or solutions across multiple platforms.

MefiMail/Email me if you want more info... Thanks in advance!

IE7/CSS vs. Yet Another CSS Newbie. L'il Help?

Wild_Eep — Thu, 06 Sep 2007 08:35:46 -0800

CSS filter: IE7 slides my slideshow ~150 pixels to the right, what gives? I've got a slideshow installed on this page that I built from the tools available at Script.aculo.us, but the slideshow displays ~150 pixels too far to the right. Ideally it would all be contained in the light blue box.

Naturally, all is well with FireFox and Safari.

I'm still learning CSS, and I could use a little help.

The CSS file for this page is available here.

How to get rounded corners on a dropdown menu?

desjardins — Thu, 09 Aug 2007 06:59:39 -0800

Please help me modify my flyout menu navigation to have rounded corners. Currently it's an asp .net control, which (apparently) does not allow this modification. I found this web page which purports to have solved this problem, but I can't get the sample files to work, and frankly, the whole article is a bit over my head. What I do understand is this: asp .net menus are square by default, and they require a programming background to change. I'd be happy using a background gif but the menu controls do not seem to allow this (you can use images for the separators but not the background).

I am using Microsoft Expression Web (yah, don't ask) but I am not married to asp .net. I don't care if this can be done in Javascript, CSS, or with a satanic ritual. All I need is 1) rounded corners and 2) a vertical fly-out menu, similar to the picture on the website linked above.

I also have access to Adobe CS2, including GoLive, if that helps.

What good monitoring tools for JBoss are there?

gsteff — Mon, 11 Jun 2007 11:42:22 -0800

Anyone know popular/easy tools for monitoring JBoss server performance? I need to diagnose some performance problems on a webapp that runs on JBoss. Unfortunately, I have little to no knowledge about JBoss (or java webapp monitoring). Are there any tools that would help trace what parts of individual requests are hanging? Text mode, GUI or web interfaces are acceptable. We have lots of tools for testing and monitoring during development, but are getting unexpected behavior in production with real data, and thus need to monitor a production system. Anyone familiar with this?

Help a webbie out...

Webbster — Tue, 27 Mar 2007 13:33:42 -0800

CSS aid needed: I'm going to see a client tomorrow morning and I want to get this working before I see her. I have a horizontal rollover image menu, but I would like to have a different image to display when rolling over the link. [Single image demo] I've searched and tried the usual suspects, nothing that helps. Any code/suggestions/links ?