Blog > Web Development

Our top 10 online web developer tools

Posted 6th June 2013 | Category: Web Development |

We have compiled a list of our top 10 online web developer tools. These all come in very handy throughout the development of a web system.

Beanstalk App (version control)

Excellent online SVN repository that enables us to manage code updates whilst at the same time providing a valuable offsite backup of our core applications. The simple online user interface makes using SVN a breeze.

Pixlr (image editor)

Simple and accessible online image editor. We use it to cut, paste, crop and manipulate images for inclusion on websites when we don't have access to any other tools. It is also something we recommend to our clients for them to edit images before uploading via the CMS. Read more...

Playing around with HTML iFrames

Posted 5th November 2012 | Category: Web Development |

There has been mentions recently in the press about websites using the browser full screen mode for spoofing websites. This can help those Phishing attacks trap even more users.

With this in mind we thought it might be interesting to see how far we could go spoofing a website by simply using HTML iFrames with separate websites content.

In this example we thought it would be amusing to include a negative news story about Microsoft regarding Apple within the Microsoft website. Read more...

Improvement of Database Class & Code

Posted 27th April 2012 | Category: Web Development |

Security is of huge importance to us, which is one of the reasons we recently undertook a large upgrade of our framework to incorporate several extra security enhancements. This involved a wholesale review of the code and a lot of meetings to come up with the best way forward. We decided to move entirely to a class-based framework which has led to many varied improvements, some of which are explained below.

The class framework itself

We originally created our own code framework to afford us total control, flexibility and knowledge of every detail. As we offer bespoke website development this allows us to amend it to suit our clients’ needs easily and with no wasted effort. When it came to moving to a class-based framework there was no question of adopting a third party solution, so we decided to migrate the best bits of our old system to a pure Object Oriented framework whilst rewriting the remaining code from the ground up.

Initially this was quite a commitment for us in terms of time, but the investment has paid off and we are recouping time as bug fixing is reduced and code re-use significantly increased. This allows us to pass development savings onto our clients and to significantly cut development timescales. Essentially, our class-based code makes it a lot easier to build functionality once and then re-use it multiple times in several different scenarios with limited changes. Read more...

PHP Cookies Crumble

Posted 9th March 2012 | Category: Web Development |

We have recently updated our security and user log in code which meant updating a few pieces of cookie related PHP. In doing so, we came across a couple of minor anamolies that would have saved us a lot of time and frustration if we had been aware of them.

#1 - setcookie vs session_set_cookie_params parameter differences

The two function calls defined below on first glance appear very similar indeed. In fact if you ignore the first two parameters of the setcookie function they seem to all intents and purposes to be pretty much identical.

void session_set_cookie_params ( int $lifetime [, string $path [, string $domain [, bool $secure = false [, bool $httponly = false ]]]] ) Read more...

How to detect user scrolling behaviour with JavaScript

Posted 16th February 2012 | Category: Web Development |

Tracking user behaviour can help you tailor your website to users' needs and keep them on your site. We've developed a script to track how far down a page a user scrolls before navigating away from that page, which should be especially useful for websites with longer pages. If for example you found that hardly any users actually scrolled to the very bottom of your web page you may then decide to either condense your content or adjust it so more users are likely to view it.

What skills do I need to apply scroll detection?

• JavaScript
• MooTools framework
• PHP
• MySQL
• CSS
• HTML
• AJAX

What do I need to start tracking user scroll behaviour?

Before we start you will need to grab hold of the MooTools JavaScript framework Core and More files, the Date Picker files and the scroll tracking files which can be found here: Scroll Detection Files Read more...