Developer

I was working on a web app that allowed users to submit comments anywhere in a long feed of events. After submitting a comment, the page would refresh, bringing you back to the top. I found that to be annoying because I had to scroll back down to my comment to make sure it had … Read more

I was happy to find out that Google Analytics 4 can track file downloads. However, I didn’t find any native report in the interface to display the downloaded file names, other than for the last thirty minutes. It actually requires jumping through a lot of hoops to set up a report to do this. After … Read more

A PHP web app that I created using the Zoho Analytics (formerly Zoho Reports) API suddenly stopped working one day. Digging into the Zoho documentation, I discovered that they ended support for their “authtoken” authentication method (basically a password) and switched to OAuth 2.0. Hmmm… After looking into it, upgrading my app to be compatible … Read more

I was working on a web application that required a sliding toggle switch like this one, but was also compliant with accessibility standards: Sliding Switch I had known of this HTML/CSS solution with no JavaScript at W3 Schools. But, it’s not accessible. When you tab to it using the keyboard, you can turn it on … Read more

I recently had to figure out how to generate PDFs using PHP. There are tons of solutions out there, free and paid, with pros and cons. This is a summary of what I found out during my research, however, it’s by no means comprehensive. I basically stopped when I found solutions that satisfied my requirements. … Read more

Website accessibility is getting more and more important these days. One of the key factors in web accessibility is the ability to access all of the features of the website with the keyboard. If any element is clickable with a mouse, it needs to be reachable by keyboard using the tab key and return/enter to … Read more

MAMP is my tool of choice for developing websites locally on my Mac. But, when I started using it out of the box, my local URLs were of this form: Or of this form: That was fine for most of my local sites. Occasionally, I’d have a problem when a site used root-relative links, but … Read more

Moving a domain name from one registrar to another can be tricky, especially if it’s something you don’t do often. If the domain is attached to a live site, doing it wrong could result in downtime. I wrote this guide for myself, to remind me of some of the gotchas associated with migrating a domain … Read more

I had a very common problem for which I could not find a good CSS solution.  Namely, I wanted my website footer to extend to the bottom of the browser window, regardless of how much (or little) main body content I had. What I wanted was this: What I was getting was this: There are … Read more

Let’s say you have two completely different primary domains, say, example.com, and purchase.com, and you want to track them as a single site on Google Analytics. For example, if a user goes from one site to the other, you want that visitor to show up on the same Google Analytics report and not count as … Read more

I had a client who wanted to map a domain name (different than the site’s root) directly to a WordPress Page, and not show the WordPress URL. For example, let’s say you had a WordPress blog with this Page:http://myblog.com/my-first-post/ But let’s say you want the URL of that post to be http://airplanesarecool.com. Of course, you could … Read more

I recently had a project where I wanted to stop the “Go” button on the Android and iOS popup keyboard from submitting a form on my web application. Why would anyone want to do this?  In my case, I wanted to prevent accidental form submission (or “butt-dialing”) on my app.  I had implemented a “swipe-to-save” … Read more

A client requested a “slot machine” hover effect for their social network buttons.  When you hover on the icon, it moves up, sort of like in a slot machine, and changes color.  Here’s an example of what I’m talking about: It turns out that this effect can be accomplished with some clever CSS!  No JavaScript … Read more

My “go-to” desktop browser for doing web development is the Chrome browser. However, it has one annoying problem for people like me who do responsive web development:  It won’t resize down to 320 pixels wide, the width of an iPhone.  With my Chrome browser on Windows, the minimum width is 500px. On Mac, the minimum … Read more

This is a list of items to check before launching your site. But, it is not necessarily a complete list of things to check. You might need a more exhaustive list, depending on the number of visitors you expect to have and how important your site is. 1. Check with Different Devices and Browsers, Especially … Read more

I developed a website for a client that would display different photos based on a query string in the URL.  An example of this type of URL would be “http://mysite.com/album.php?photo=ab12345”. But, that is an ugly URL. Not only that, some people claim it’s not ideal for SEO.  Much better would be “http://mysite.com/ab12345”.  Here’s how to … Read more