Category: Web Development

Any general web development topics are covered here, ranging from ecommerce web stores, search engine optimisation or store optimization to framework discussion.

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Opening (and closing) jQuery Mobile Collapsible sections programatically

We use jQuery Mobile for OrderPipe, it’s a fantastic framework and I have a lot of love for it. One thing that has bugged me about the way our settings section works though is after making a change within a collapsible section (like inviting a user for example) the section would be closed afterwards. It was surprisingly easy to fix that and this blog post will run through a quick example of allowing URL’s to map to open sections quickly and easily. It assumes Spring MVC on the server side, but you could do it with any server side technology.

Firstly on the server side, you could do this with query parameters, or URL paths (or cookies if you really wanted I guess) – we use paths, because I think it looks cleaner.
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Introduction to the Magento REST APIs with oAuth in Version 1.7

The latest version of Magento (1.7rc1 right now) has support for oAuth authenticated REST APIs, yippee! In this post I’m going to run through the technical aspects of setting up the Magento oAuth and making your first Magento REST API call.

I’m presenting on APIs during the technology track at the Magento Imagine conference on Tuesday (If you’re reading this, and you’re at the conference, I hope to see you there!). In my talk I’ll cover interesting uses and benefits of the REST API but won’t have time for a big fully worked example. This post details the finer points of actually using these APIs which is a bit too low-level to cover, so this will be extra-for-experts homework for those that want to have a play around with REST after the talk.

There are basically 3 steps to running your first REST API call in Magento.
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X.commerce DevTalk newsletter featured MageSpeedTest.com

Ok I couldn’t resist, this made my day. I was featured in the X.commerce DevTalk email newsletter talking about my Magento Speed Test site. My grinning mugshot made it in to inboxes worldwide, cool!

You can check out the actual interview wherein I blather on about MageSpeedTest.com and how great it is and how everyone should be using it and how PayPal makes subscriptions easy, etc.

Somewhat tragically feedback has been I need a new profile photo:

So I’ll scour my archives for another suitably unprofessional photo of myself, this time with glasses on, I can’t see properly anymore, apparently.

In other news, I’m presenting at Magento Imagine in April, so I’m busy preparing slides for that. Please ping me if you’re in the US, I’m going to do a trip around after the conference and would love to meet up with fellow Magento developers.

Also working on OrderPipe and a new multi-store Magento installation. I’ll have some articles to report on both over the next few weeks. Stay tuned.

PS: Promise future blog posts won’t consist almost entirely of embedded tweets

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Sending Apple iOS Notifications via Urban Airship on Google App Engine

In this post I’ll show you how to send an Apple Notification from Google App Engine via Urban Airship. I was mightily impressed how easy it was to do earlier this week. Their docs are excellent, and I love when apps use curl for their API examples – it means the API is simple, and the examples are perfectly transparent.
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New Look for Magento Speed Test, Thanks to Twitter Bootstrap.

Today I released the new look for my Magento Speed Test site – it’s a tool for running Siege tests on your Magento stores. The old version looked pretty shit, in hindsight, so this should be a significant improvement. If you’ve met me you’ll know I don’t have a designer bone in my body, so you’d be justified in feeling dubious that I actually put a modern look on Magento Speed Test. The secret was my discovering (albeit months late) the Twitter Bootstrap css framework for web applications. It’s truly brilliant, and the documentation is very helpful – also it’s only one of many open source projects Twitter has made available.

If you look at my new look site and compare it to the standard examples from Twitter you’ll notice I’m not as creative as it might outwardly appear. I do like the simple clean lines and consistent colors provided by default, so I’m sticking with them for now.

Particular Framework Highlights

Some of the best things about the bootstrap framework from my point of view were:

  • Small and easy to include – just one CSS and some optional JS.
  • Consistent buttons as both <a> and <button> markup
  • Predefined and worked examples of grid layouts that work
  • The optional JS can do cool things like emulate #anchor functionality for menus. (self referential source alert!)
  • Simple HTML for most elements made it really easy to convert the old jsp files to the new look

And no real issues to complain about, it just works! Kudos to Twitter, will trade again.

If you haven’t already, go run a test, I bet the results will surprise you!