Entries Tagged 'Setfire Media' ↓

We’ve just made the first release of product filtering for our client Kiki James. When filtering is done well, it can give customers, particularly those unfamiliar with your catalogue, a much better idea of what’s available and help them work out they want to buy.
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When should you ask for information from your users? I recently came across two online apps that illustrate the right and the wrong way to resolve this question.

Firstly, we have Mockflow, an online wireframe tool. Includes versioning, collaboration etc.

So, if you’re wondering what this application’s like, how do we find out? They have a pretty good video on the homepage, that’s nice enough. And if you take the tour, you can see some screen shots that outline some of the functions of the site. Very nice.

But if I want to try it out, what do I get?

Hooray, another sign up form. Those never get dull.

Contrast this with Dabbleboard, another online collaborative working tool. Here’s the homepage:

But how do you find out what it’s really like to use? Well, all you have to do is go to http://www.dabbleboard.com/draw, and you can start right away.

Simple, and in terms of engaging your visitors, it’s much more better than asking for an email and a password. Of course, you do need to sign up to dabble board if you want to save your work; but by that point users will be much more committed to the application than someone who has read a landing page and watched a video.

There’s a few tired faces around the Setfire HQ today, after an exhilarating weekend spent at Scottish Ruby Conference. We had a cracking time – we met up with some old friends, made a few new ones, and attended some great talks. Here are our favourites:

• Sam – Denormalizing Your Rails Application
• Ed, Rob and Jon – Rocket Fuelled Cucumbers
• Damien and Ian – The Joy of Painting with Ruby

Other highlights included Getting the most out of ActiveRecord 3 with Arel, Breaking things with Ruby and Distributed Architectures with Rack, and, for Rob, listening to me snore. Poor chap.

Thanks to the organisers:

• Graeme – http://bit.ly/agAsR
• Paul – http://bit.ly/cqub9u
• Alan – http://bit.ly/bUOWbH

… and see you next year!

We wanted to send via gmail for testing reasons. We develop locally, but we want to see how our emails would be formatted in a standard mail client. Which means we need a valid email to send from. The main problem we’re trying to avoid is our test emails getting canned as spam, which is more likely to happen if we’re just sending direct from a local machine.

If you’re using rails 1.8.6 or lower, you will need to use the action_mailer_optional_tls plugin or the actionmailer_tls plugin to achieve this result. We run all our apps on 1.8.7 for the time being, so happily we can use this simpler method.

Firstly, setup a test email account on gmail. This works fine for normal or apps gmail accounts. Then you need to add these lines to wherever you do your basic actionmailer config. In our case, we added this to our development.rb as we’re just using this to test email output for the time being.

config.action_mailer.smtp_settings = {
:enable_starttls_auto => true,
:address => "smtp.gmail.com",
:port => "587",
:domain => "domain.com",
:authentication => :plain,
:user_name => "test_emails@domain.com",
:password => "your_password_here"
}

Voila, our emails are sent fine, which makes testing the output a great deal easier, especially if you have to produce html emails.

What we’re doing here is bascially just using standard gmail setup for configuing a mail client. Obviously you could just replace these options for another smtp server if you’d like.

Rails has come a long way in the last few years, from the preserve of a vocal minority of maverick developers, to one of the most popular web frameworks around.

Its popularity is due to many things, but chief amongst them is the speed at which you can put together a site in Rails, as well as the intelligent and vibrant community that are involved in it.

Whilst there are some well known success stories using Ruby on Rails out there, the sheer number and diversity of Rails apps is astounding. In celebration of that, and partly to satisfy our own curiosity, we thought offer our round up of some of the best rails sites out there.
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Photo by @gablaxian

Speak the Web came to a close last night in Manchester’s NoHo bar, with a five strong band of the Setfire crew there to take part. The event were definitely a refreshing change to some of the bigger, more expensive events that Speak the Web is partly a reaction to. Four speakers covered an impressively broad range of stuff – mobile, seo, html5 apis and Css3. The informal nature of the event lent itself to questions from the crowd and a definite lack of the them and us factor sometimes present at conferences. Oh and did I mention it was in a bar?

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We’ve been making a few changes to our site over the last couple of weeks. We liked it a lot as it was, but we wanted to improve in three areas:

A Clear Offering

We wanted to make it really clear what we do, straight off the bat. We’re a software development house, and we specialise in Ruby on Rails projects, done in an agile way. What’s more, we’ve invested a lot of time in the past year or so getting really good at automated testing. We think this really marks us out from other companies in our space, so we wanted to say it loud and proud.

A Human Face

We’re proud of our people and they are the most important part of what we do. Sure, we do Rails – but that’s only because we happen to think it’s the best tool for the job. What we’re really selling is our expertise and experience – and this all comes from our great team. So, we thought it was only fair to take a couple of snaps of them and our swanky offices for your perusal.

A Portfolio

Probably the biggest omission from our site was a portfolio page detailing the projects we’ve been working on recently, and the work we did. We’re not a quick-and-dirty type of place – we take on projects for the long term and work with our clients to achieve business goals. We hope our portfolio reflects this and gives a better idea of the work we do.

As with all projects, we wanted to be sure that our changes represented a real return on investment, so we kept ourselves to just a few hours to do these changes. It’s been great to see a few new leads come through as a consequence of just a small amount of work.

We hope you like the improvements – there are plenty more to come. Let us know what you think!

The 7th and 8th of November saw BarCamp Manchester 2 descend on the Contact Theatre. Setfire were proud sponsors of the weekend, and Sam and I popped along to get involved.

The introduction, which culminated in beatboxing with freestyle rapping and an impromptu name-tag swapping session, set the scene nicely for the rest of the weekend.
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Or, when can I dump that bag of sh** ie6?

I’m a web designer, not an SEO. So it took me a while to catch on to how Analytics might be helpful in my own work.

But knowing and understanding the constraints you face is an important part of being a designer, right? And analytics gives us a useful window onto some of them.

This is where analytics can help. Specifically, a relatively new feature of Analytics called ‘Advanced Segmentation’. A vexing question facing many web designers is “when can I dump that bag of sh** ie6?”. Well, using advanced segmentation, you can work that out fairly easily. Sadly, the answer for many of us is likely to be more nuanced that just dump it or lump it.

I’m assuming here you have some basic understanding of analytics. Don’t worry, that’s all I have too. If you want to learn exactly how to make an advanced segment, you should checkout Google’s help articles on the topic.

And now, the graphs

All these stats were taken from our main ecommerce site cartridgesave. It’s a pretty busy site, so it gives us some useful data to work with.

For my purposes, I created a segment that tracks any browser with the name Internet Explorer and a version number that starts with ‘6.’ This should give us the ability to track that browser version through any Analytics report. Once you’ve created a few of these segments for ie7-8, Firefox 3 and so on, you can then generate a report like this:

Internet explorer usage on cartridgesave.co.uk

Here is the same again, but swapping Firefox 3 for IE8.

The same graph as before, but showing Firefox3 usage instead of IE8

This information won’t necessarily solve the browser support debate, but it will hopefully lead to a more intelligent decision than before.

The various reports and discussions around HTML5 in the past year have been a source of much confusion. In order to do my bit to help clear that up, I thought I’d offer a broad overview of what it is, and what it represents for the web.

Should I care and why?

Yes. But why? Well, there are a few ways to answer that, which I’ve tried to elaborate for you below.

Process

One of the biggest differences between HTML5 and previous markup specifications, indeed between HTML5 and any other web standard, is the process that is being used to put it together. Generally web specifications are created by the W3C using working groups who draft specifications in a closed process that has left some people dissatisfied.

In a break with this convention, HTML5 has been developed externally to the W3C by a group called the WHATWG. This group developed as a response to dissatisfaction with the W3C’s direction with XHTML and “…apparent disregard for the needs of real world authors.”

Although still driven in the main by browser vendors, WHATWG does use a much more open process, developing the spec for HTML5 through a mailing list that anyone can participate in. This has lead to a process that is faster and better supported by the web development community as a whole. So much so that HTML5 has now been formally adopted by the W3C to the detriment of XHTML2, their chosen successor for existing markup standards.

The other key aspect of the process is that HTML5 is being implemented incrementally by browser vendors. So although the projected completion date for the specification is 2022, there are aspects of HTML5 available right now and more will become available as time goes on.

Applications

The explicit focus of HTML5 is on applications. HTML’s origins as a document markup language are in stark contrast to the rapid developments in functionality and complexity present in many modern day web applications. HTML5 represents an attempt to go beyond documents and create a markup specification for structuring applications as opposed to documents.

We can see this in many of the new elements being created within HTML5, such as section, nav, aside. These are based on common conventions that are currently implemented by using class and id attributes on HTML elements like div, ol, code which all pertain to elements of a written document. So where we might currently have

<div class="article">
  <div class="section">
    <h2>This is a section of a larger document</h2>
    <p>Here is some text in this particular section</p>
  </div>
</div>

in html5, we would structure it something like the following;

<article>
  <section>
    <h2>This is a section of a larger document</h2>
    <p>Here is some text in this particular section</p>
  </section>
</article>

Perhaps more significant are the number of new APIs being specified, which will allow greater access to browser functions for web developers, as well as extending browser functionality to allow web applications to take on more of the advantages of desktop apps.

Best known is canvas, a 2d drawing api, which is already implemented in recent versions of Firefox, Safari, Chrome and Opera. However, just as significant are APIs that will allow offline web apps, drag and drop, video and audio controls, cross document messaging and text editing. Again, like the new elements, these are things that currently exist in web apps, but mainly through cumbersome and insecure javascript implementations that often are highly non-standard.*

Openness

HTML5 is open in two ways; firstly its open in terms of how it’s details are discussed and written. However it’s open in much broader sense; no one person owns HTML5, or indeed CSS3, or Javascript. This is important as we consider how the web is progressing today. Basically, if you wish to make a complex web application, you have a few choices; web standards technologies, Silverlight, Flash, Java Applets. Ok, that last one was a joke, but you get the picture. But really these choices are just two; open web standards that are not the property of a single company, or proprietary technology which is owned by one company. I realise there are good arguments on either side of that particular debate, which I don’t have time to elaborate here, but my personal choice is for standards, mainly as I feel more confident that more of my target audience will be able to access them.

So, there are a few reasons why you should pay attention to HTML5. To be honest, before I took the time to investigate it for myself, I wasn’t convinced, but I’m glad I did. HTML5 is not perfect, but that’s the point. It’s the first web standard that admits of its own imperfection, makes room for change and addresses the realities of modern web development, which overall seems like a good thing to me.