Frye / Wiles Blog Archive for the ‘Development’ Category
AKA: Why your image carousel pulling content from posts or pages in Wordpress is not working
We recently ran into a fairly frustrating little issue on a site we were working on. This particular site had a jQuery Cycle gallery on the home page, and it was pulling images from individual pages in Wordpress using query_posts(). Problem was, images in IE would appear and then disappear. This was happening in all versions of Internet Explorer.
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YeeHaw! We’ve been busy as web-beavers over here, and haven’t posted many portfolio updates, so here’s a few of the sites we’ve been working on recently:
DotsTV
We did the design and development of this new celebrity and entertainment news project for E! Entertainment Television founder Alan Mruvka:
Check out DotsTV today »
Lamb Energy
We always love working with innovative companies, and local Solar solutions provider Lamb Energy is just that! This project was a content-managed design and development:
Check out Lamb Energy today »
Giftcard Storybooks
This is a Shopify-based ecommerce site for a new startup in North Carolina.
Check out Giftcard Storybooks today »
G8Brand Webstore
The rest of the site is coming soon, but our friends at the gamer-focused G8 Crash the System apparel company needed their webstore revamped for Thanksgiving, and we did it (on one-week’s notice!):
Check out the G8 Brand store today »
Off Script Shooting
Did this one a while ago as a favor for some photographer friends (they promised to take especially flattering photos of us in return 
), and for some reason we forgot to post it up here. Ladies and Gentlemen, may I present local Photography cooperative Off Script Shooting:
Check out Off Script Shooting today »
Just saw this on Adobe’s website:
http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/flashcs5/appsfor_iphone/
This is potentially a game-changer, and we’re really excited! This does not mean that iPhone has started supporting Flash player, but instead that Actionscript applications will compile down to native iPhone apps.
What this means, among other things, is that Frye / Wiles will soon start offering iPhone Application Development as part of our suite of services. If you are interested, please give us a call!
Some time back I wrote a tutorial about doing proportional image scaling in full broswer flash. This post is, by far, the most popular single post on the Frye / Wiles blog, and we have gotten a lot of great feedback about it. Since that time, we have started migrating over to Actionscript 3, and after a recent comment on the original post I decided it was time to update that tutorial. Because the other post ranks really well and seems to be pretty popular, it seems like it would make more sense to update the original tutorial to cover both versions of the language.
Anyway, to see the Proportional Image Scaling tutorial, now in for both AS2 and AS3, click here!
One of the more frustrating parts of web development is waiting for DNS propagation - in other words, if you change which server a domain name points to, it takes a while for that information to filter through the interwebs (different Internet Service Providers have their own DNS caches, and it takes a while for them to reset). The result of this is that some people may be seeing the old server while others see the new one. This process can take up to 72 hours. As a developer, there is very little you can do about DNS propagation - it’s out of your hands (although try explaining that to a client….).
Propagation is only one part of the equation, however. Chances are pretty good that, beyond the DNS flushing that needs to happen on the part of your ISP, you also will have an IP cache issue going on with your local machine, at least if you develop on Mac OSX like we do. While you can’t control the length of time it takes your ISP to clear out their cache, you can at the very least make sure that when the propagation happens, you are the first to see it. In Mac OS X, the way you do this is to clear your machine’s IP cache, and clearing your browser cache. This is a pretty simple process, but it involves the big bad Terminal.
- Open the Terminal application
- Enter the following text after yourname$
- OSX 10.5 Leopard and Above, enter:
dscacheutil -flushcache
- OSX 10.4 and Below, enter:
lookupd -flushcache
- Hit Return
- Relaunch your web browser, clear your browser cache (if you’re using Firefox, I highly recommend the Cache Status plugin: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/1881)
- Reload the site you are trying to see
If propagation has happened at your ISP level, you should now be able to see the site living on the new server.
The fix for the I/O error might not be a permissions issue after all!
In honor of Halloween, I’m posting one of the most frightening things you can possibly imagine….a Cryptic Wordpress Error Message! Of Doom! Muwhahahahahah! (As an added bonus, in honor of Halloween, I have peppered this post with some scary adjectives!)
Ahem! Okay. It’s no secret that different web servers are set up horrifically different. Unfortunately for developers of large web software packages (like the ghoulish folks over at Wordpress.org, or Drupal), this can mean having to account for a lot of different possible variables, and occasionally things slip through the cracks (and fester!).
Unfortunately, one of those things has to do with uploading files using the Wordpress Flash Uploader, which is better than it used to be, but still prone to its share of wicked errors.
One of the most frustrating of all is the dreaded, mysterious, cryptic “IO Error”
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An interesting trend is going around the web design world and it has to do with single page sites. Webdesignerwall has great examples of how people are using one page sites for their portfolios. The example sites are a mix of horizontal and vertical techniques. If you are looking to design something without templates and don’t have a lot of content because you are just starting off, this could give you some inspiration.
With a modicum of fanfare, Google yesterday released its very own web browser, dubbed Chrome. Among other things, that means that we web developers now have to test on yet another browser, bringing the unofficial list to - Internet Explorer 5.5, Internet Explorer 6, Internet Explorer 7, Internet Explorer 8, Firefox 2 and 3 (for both Mac and PC), Safari for Mac and PC, Opera for Mac and PC, and now Chrome. Add in the occasional Internet Explorer 5 and mobile platform test and you have, well, a lot of testing (especially on the various IEs). Anyone wanting to know why good web development is expensive, look no further.
On the plus side, Chrome is based on Apple’s open-source WebKit architecture, which also runs Safari, and is fairly standards-compliant. Our limited experience with Chrome so far has been very good - it runs pretty much everything that runs in Safari and Firefox (and Opera). A few minor render issues, but not bad for a first beta release.
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There is an excellent article on Nettuts titled 10 principles of the CSS Masters. It covers everything from using CSS shorthand to the utilization of text transform.
The first principle dealt with keeping your CSS simple. This is more dealing with hacks and making things work in all browsers. Yeah that’s right, I’m talking to you IE 6. Anyways, the articles states As web browsers evolve, it’s much harder to keep up with the changes. This is true, and I think as designers we are all guilty of this. I spent countless hours hacking and fixing code so it will work in all browsers. I think it’s a good practice to keep your site’s simple and to know the problems before hand in laying out design, because in the end time is money.
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I believe this was on digg a few weeks ago, but a site called noupe made a big list of CSS layout tutorials and best practices. The list is freaking huge and there’s like 40 links to various sites. This is a good place for resource material, or if you ever wonder how to do a three column layout, or how to build a CSS template. I can’t guarantee if all the links are helpful, but take what you will.
