Tech Blog
Our tech blog is where we reflect on our recent projects, discuss concrete5, web development and programming. It's a craft we love - we enjoy sharing our discoveries.
Automatically resizing image blocks in Concrete5
One of concrete5's greatest strengths, if not its greatest, is that it is easy for novices to use. Developers can further configure a concrete5 site (using features such as the 'composer', page types and custom blocks), to make things even easier. This means that clients can jump in and edit content with little risk of them incorrectly formatting something or placing a page in the wrong spot.
Concrete5 Cheat Sheet (pdf)
I've always liked the idea of one or two page 'cheat sheets' when developing. Although systems like concrete5 have a healthy amount of documentation on the web (in particular their API), it can be handy to have something physically in front of you to check function and variable names.
Apps for travelling and some technologies for business
I recently gave a presentation to the Southern Alexandrina Business Association regarding technologies when travelling as well as some technologies we use to run our business.
The bare minimum you need to know about your hosting and email
The web is a great platform to share information and advertise your business or organisation. For a website owner, it can be difficult to understand what you are paying for and what the different terminology means.
The web development apps we use and recommend
Below is a list of Mac apps we use on pretty much a daily basis for web development tasks. There are lots of lists like this on the net, but we'd like to share ours. If you're in the field, or perhaps if you are starting out, the following list may be handy. I've only listed apps that we use at least once a week (or really come in handy when we need them) and that we use directly for web development.
Adding 'ajax' source pages in Concrete5 (and a video about custom page attributes)
Before I begin, I'll just mention that them term 'AJAX' is loosely used here to refer to loading in page content dynamically using Javascript. For this example there is not really any XML processing, but the term is so common place it would be silly not to use it.
There is no 'secret recipe' to Search Engine Optimisation
I would say that nearly all unsolicited email we receive at the moment (ignoring typical spam) is from businesses offering Search Engine Optimisation services. It seems to be the 'big thing' on offer.
Useful Concrete5 coding snippets
To develop websites I'm a big fan of Panic's Coda. It's a great editor, with lots of well designed built in functions. It, like many other text editors, includes a 'clips' function that stores regularly used pieces of code. I use this feature to store small snippets of code that helps me put together a specifically configured Concrete5 website quickly.
Five tips to help your website project be successful
If you are a business owner or organisation manager that is about to develop or update your website through website developers (like us!), these tips are for you.
Concrete5 has changed the way we view content management systems
Content management systems allow website owners to quickly add and change content on their site. From our development point of view, it tends to be easier for us to develop a new site with a CMS because the site then also becomes easier for us to add content ourselves. Over several years we’ve used and tried out a variety of free systems, in particular, Joomla and WordPress and have really loved the functionality they provide.
Preparing content for your website
Content management systems allow website owners to easily and quickly add and make changes to their website. Occasionally though users have a problem copying and pasting content into these systems due to a few incorrect assumptions about the process. These problems are easy to avoid with a few pieces of easy to follow advice.
Running multiple development sites on one machine
We do the majority of our website development on macs, using MAMP as an easy to run webserver with Apache, PHP and MySQL. This setup is great for local development as the environment MAMP provides is very close to what most web hosts provide and the web server is easy to manage.
How we manage our business using online systems
When the decision was made to expand the business and create the Mesuva Web Development identity, we recognised that we could use a lot of online technology to help things run smoothly. In the past the business was simply run from a personal email address and by doing invoicing and record keeping by hand. One of the goals we set was to be able to work effectively from a few laptops anywhere in the world with a reliable internet connection. We also felt that the management of the business should be not tied to any particular computer.