Fiddler - Must Have for IE Development
October 9, 2007 | 3 Comments
If you do any web development for Internet Explorer, Fiddler is a must have application. Basically this is semi-equivalent to Firebug’s “Net tab”. If you have been using IE Developer Toolbar, this was a huge missing piece that can now be filled in.
Explanation of what it is from their site:
Fiddler is a Web Debugging Proxy which logs all HTTP(S) traffic between your computer and the Internet. Fiddler allows you to inspect all HTTP(S) traffic, set breakpoints, and “fiddle” with incoming or outgoing data. Fiddler includes a powerful event-based scripting subsystem, and can be extended using any .NET language.
Fiddler is freeware and can debug traffic from virtually any application, including Internet Explorer, Mozilla Firefox, Opera, and thousands more.
You should also check out the video tutorial.
Tags: fiddler, fiddler2, firebug, ie, internet explorer, web, web development
Great Color Picker
June 6, 2006 | 24 Comments
When doing web development it is often helpful to use a color wheel or some sort of color picker when coming up with color schemes. In general I’m satisfied with the desktop application Pixie in my normal web development toolkit. However, that tool does not present a color wheel or allow you to pick multiple colors from out of nowhere.
Enter 4096 Color Wheel. As far as I can tell, this is the ultimate web based application for playing with colors. It gives you colors in hex, like you’d want, but also presents “web safe” and “web smart” alternatives for any color you may pick.
Tags: 4096 color wheel, color, color picker, color wheel, pixie, web, web application, web development, web safe, web smart
My Web Development Toolkit
April 20, 2006 | 3 Comments
In addition to EditPlus as my favorite text editor, there are a few other tools I rely heavily on when doing web development.
The first is a simple tool, but one of the most valuable. Pixie is a utility for picking colors from various areas of the screen. It captures the RGB, CMYK, HSV, and most importantly HTML Hex values. With a simple shortcut key you can grab this value to your clipboard. It is extremely light and unbelievably useful.
Another common task I find myself repeating is measuring areas of the screen, primarily in pixels. For this I use JRuler. Again, this is a light utility that does exactly what it should without frills or excess.
To even my own surprise I find myself jumping regularly between Internet Explorer, Safari, and Firefox for browsers. However, if I’m doing and Ajax or general Javascript development, Firefox is the browser of choice. With that in mind, there are some must have extensions. You absolutely must get Web Developer and Firebug. These tools can strip hours off your overall development and testing time.
Tags: editplus, firefox, internet explorer, jruler, pixie, safari, web, web developer, web development
Leveraging CAS with Luminis
March 28, 2006 | 4 Comments
In SunGard Higher Education's Luminis product one of the many add-on packages you can install is CAS support. CAS is an acronym for Central Authentication Service. This WebISO solution is one of the most common in higher education. CAS was created originally by Yale, but ongoing support has been taken over by JA-SIG. When the CAS package is installed in Luminis, it makes Luminis act as a CAS authentication provider. Coupled with this built-in Luminis support, we use a CAS library called phpCAS that adds to the simplicity of deploying this within our environment.
Time and again, CAS has been proven an effective and simple way for us to quickly drop authentication ability into our homegrown PHP applications. Once a function was developed, this was easily reused across dozens of applications within a few short months. The ease of deployment made it easy to convince various developers to switch from custom authentication schemes.
In a PHP application on any of the servers in your environment you can do something like the following:
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<?php
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function casify()
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{
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// import phpCAS lib (http://esup-phpcas.sourceforge.net/)
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include_once($GLOBALS['INCLUDES'].'/cas/CAS.php');
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// initialize phpCAS
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phpCAS::client(CAS_VERSION_2_0,'luminis.institution.edu',443,'cas/');
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// check CAS authentication
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phpCAS::forceAuthentication();
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// at this step, the user has been authenticated by the CAS server
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// and the user's login name can be read with phpCAS::getUser().
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return phpCAS::getUser();
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}
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$username = casify();
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// nothing past the execution of casify() would occur without acquiring a valid CAS ticket
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?>
Note: the preceding code is an example. There is more sophisticated functionality that can be accomplished using CAS, this is merely a starting point for people interested in this WebISO technology.
Tags: cas, development, education, higher education, identity management, jasig, luminis, php, phpcas, security, sungard, sungard higher education, web development, yale, yalecas
Great Stats
March 23, 2006 | 1 Comment
It turns out I love stats. I'm sometimes amazed at how many different statistics I poke at on a regular basis.
Inside of Wordpress I use the phenomenal bsuite. Basically this keeps track of my individual story reads, incoming search terms, as well as tagging my posts and building related story references at the bottom of each post. If you run Wordpress, get bsuite, it rules.
There are more general web like stats that are often needed. For example, user browser, screen resolution, country of origin, time of day traffic, broken links, adword conversion, etc. These things are all handled superbly by Google Analytics.
Sometimes however, I want to compare my overall stance with other blogs on the net. For this I (like most) turn to Technorati. They do a great job of ranking known blogs on the internet both in general and based on certain tags or keywords. It's good to know where you stand, but even better to have others to compare against.
Finally, my favorite site of all: Alexa. Alexa is an Amazon property which ranks the top few million websites. For the top 100,000, they provide detailed traffic analysis and graphs. While working for a major internet company, I became very familiar with Alexa as a daily tool to measure our success against our competition. Especially in internet advertising, traffic is important.
Ken recently pointed me at Pub Sub as another site to check out stats on my blog, but overall I find many of the numbers here questionable. Compare some blogs you are familiar with and I think you'll see my complaints clearly.
If anyone has any other great stats packages or web services they know and follow, let me know. I'm always looking to feed this strange addiction.
Tags: advertising, adwords, alexa, blog, blogging, bsuite, google, google analytics, internet advertising, plugin, plugins, pubsub, statistics, technorati, web, web development, web statistics, wordpress
PHP 6 - The Magic is Gone
March 14, 2006 | 5 Comments
Granted PHP is only currently at 5.1.2 as the stable release, but we should always look forward to the future. The future is PHP 6. One of the big changes coming in 6 is a removal of many things that make PHP "magic".
According to ThePimp,net, register_globals, gpc_magic_quotes, and safe_mode have all been removed.
The register_globals change is an especially welcome enforcement. In PHP 4 it was discouraged, in PHP 5 it was deprecated. To be able to tell people it will be gone, not allowed, no other option in PHP 6 will give us leverage to finally eliminate the remaining stuff relying on register globals.
The removal of magic_quotes is more of a surprise to me. I previously was unaware that relying on this was discouraged, deprecated, or even bad practice. If the reasoning for removing this is just to eliminate the "voodoo" aspects of PHP, I can certainly agree with this. However, I'm still a bit uncertain as to why this is better. Although, I guess that it will simplify the need to strip_slashes all the time when repopulating fields and whatnot. Other thoughts?
Thankfully we haven't been using safe_mode, so this one is a non-issue.
Discussion of these major (much needed) changes in PHP came down from Rasmus Lerdorf himself back in August.
Tags: globals, gpc_magic_quotes, magic, php, php6, programming, rasmus lerdorf, register_globals, safe_mode, web, web development
Alexaholic
March 14, 2006 | 2 Comments
Hi. My name is Zach and I'm an Alexaholic.
Now there is a solution for me, and all the happy Alexaholics just like me. This great site has made it even easier to follow your website or your competitors. Or, maybe you just like to follow the popularity of some of your favorite (or most hated) sites.
Tags: alexa, internet, web, web development, website