HTMList.com, A Web Development Blog by Synapse Studios

Sometimes, our developers are a bit too busy to come up with blog topics on their own. They’ve requested we have the masses feed them to them directly, instead.  So in an effort to make their lives easier (and to stop us from having to beat posts out of them each week), we’ve created a new category: Ask HTMList.com.  Here, we hope to open up to our readers and answer any of your questions on anything ranging from UI/UX design concepts, complex development issues, architecture and code concepts and everything in between.  We’d also love for you to seek reviews of websites, services, books or anything else related to technology or that you happen to find interesting in the field.

So start submitting your ideas for topics you’d like us to cover, your questions, and your links for our review now!  We’ve added this handy form that shows up on the sidebar when you are in the Ask HTMList section of the site to make it easier on you.   And of course, you can email your questions to ask [at] htmlist [dot] com. Try to stump us; we’ll let you know if we had to cave to Google in our responses!

Popularity: 9% [?]

Tagged with: blogging, books, code, Design, htmlist, news, review, websites

Posted in: Announcements, Ask HTMList.com

So in my zeal to get our new theme launched, I failed to remember to update some code on the comments page that is in place to keep us spam free.  The end result of this was that Yawasp, our anti-spam plugin, was identifying every comment as spam and rejecting them outright. Anyone that tried to post a comment over the last few days, I apologize profusely and encourage you to come back and post it now.

Special thanks to Ivo Jansch for taking the time to contact us and report the problem!

Popularity: 6% [?]

Tagged with: bugs, comments, errors, web development blog, wordpress theme

Posted in: Announcements

Recently, we needed to implement a rating system for a client’s application.  The decision came after the client agreed that the results would effectively be useless due to the potential for manipulation by users but the end goal of giving warm fuzzies to visitors is what was more important.  Unfortunately, since transactions aren’t processed or recorded through the site, we can’t limit who posts the feedback to actual, relevant purchasers. (Imagine if Craigslist provided user feedback profiles.)

The unfortunate “solution” we landed on involved having registered users fire an email to their customers.  Their customers would follow a link with a unique hash that allowed them to leave feedback about their transaction with the user.  Clearly, this has plenty of room for abuse.  Savvy users would simply create several throw-away email addresses and send themselves links.  Less savvy users would email their friends and have them give glowing reviews.  Either way, it would take an honest user to send to actual clients and even then, no user is going to send a review request to someone they just pissed off. And again, since the transaction isn’t completed on our side, we can’t simply trigger a feedback request. So you’re looking at about a 0% usefulness factor, either way you slice it. We’ll get into some of the pitfalls with ratings systems and a great piece on this by Boxes and Arrows, after the jump.

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Popularity: 5% [?]

Tagged with: boxes and arrows, information architecture, innovation, interaction design, manipulation, rating systems, ratings, Reviews, savvy users, stars

Posted in: Design, Development

As you have probably noticed, we recently unveiled the new and independent look for HTMList.com.  We wanted to establish an identity separate from our web development company so I took it upon myself to get the ball rolling last weekend and decided on a layout that I felt would work well for what we are trying to do here.  We found a great free theme over at TopWPThemes and used that as a starting point. Since then, we’ve been enhancing it bit by bit.  We hope you like it and we’re interested in hearing your feedback about likes and dislikes of the new design.  You may notice the site altering slightly over the next week or so as battles continue to rage within the office on some points of contention surrounding a few design aspects. (No more “slashdot green” for instance.)

Additionally, we look forward to releasing a couple new blogs into our blog network over the course of the next month.  We have some really exciting ideas (not to mention domain names as sexy as HTMList to deliver them on).  More on that soon, so keep your eyes to the site (or feed) for further updates.

Popularity: 2% [?]

Tagged with: blogging, feeds, htmlist, news, synapse studios

Posted in: Announcements

As the guys around the office are well aware, I tend to obsess over minor details in our code. Whether it be fixing code formatting to be tabbed properly or renaming variables to better fit naming conventions of a project, the developers hate when I meddle in the codebase. Is it my fault that sometimes I miss a few when I go through and rename variables, functions, methods, etc? Clearly, no. The joys of being the boss.

But what I really want to discuss is something I don’t consider so minor, complying with web standards. Most times when I am doing web development I prefer to go with the HTML 4.01 strict doctype. We try to observe strict standards wherever we can, and they have helped us to avoid patterns of behavior that are more prone to errors. We make sure that notices and E_STRICT are enabled on the PHP side. While developing, our templating system is set to validate our markup against its doctype in a very angry way that we both love and hate. The added benefits of sticking so closely to the standards is that you can pick up errors through malformed output that browsers obfuscate, and you can achieve a greatest amount of compatibility between browsers. As any good website designer knows, creating web pages that render the same in every browser can be a royal pain (thanks Microsoft).

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Popularity: 3% [?]

Tagged with: ajax, html, standards, strict, w3c, wordpress, xhtml, xml

Posted in: Design, Rants

Previously, we discussed a WordPress bug and our temporary workaround for it. I am glad to say that we have identified the root of the problem and have been able to come up with a better solution. Apparently WordPress’ auto-save function is not a fan of a character set of anything other than UTF-8. We had changed it through the administration interface via Settings -> Reading to be ISO-8859-1. When we changed it back, it seems that posting works happily again without the truncating issue that was happening before.

This would seem like a fairly large problem and I am very surprised that it hasn’t been identified and resolved before now. After we tracked down the cause of the problem, I ran a quick search and was able to turn up this topic covering the same problem on an older version of WordPress. Seeing that this problem existed in at least version 2.3.2, I can’t fathom why it didn’t make the cut for things to fix for the 2.5 release.

At any rate, I sincerely hope that this is something that is addressed in the very near future so that we can switch back to the ISO character set.

Popularity: 2% [?]

Tagged with: bugs, wordpress

Posted in: Rants

Ever since we made the switch from hosting our own mail servers to using Google Apps for Domain, one of the Firefox extensions that I use on a daily basis is Gmail Manager. It allows me to easily view the inboxes for various email accounts that I monitor and gives me the ability to quickly launch any of those accounts into a new tab. The only problem is that the extension author hasn’t made any updates to it since 2007. While this wouldn’t normally be too big of a problem, Google in their infinite wisdom has decided to rename the username and password login inputs.

The result of the name change by Google caused the extension to stop retrieving email and auto-logging me in to the accounts. It wasn’t until I got suspicious of the fact that it didn’t appear that anyone was emailing me for a few hours that I decided to manually log in and investigate. Once I determined that the extension had broken, I went to work trying to track down an updated version or a quick fix to get it back in action. What I found was a forum for the extension with over 100 pages of messages in it.

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Popularity: 3% [?]

Tagged with: extension, firefox, gmail, gmanager, javascript, news

Posted in: Rants

Recently we upgraded our blog to WordPress 2.5.1 and have been battling a horrible bug ever since. When we save or edit a post most of our content is sometimes lost. Unfortunately, it isn’t occurring with enough frequency for us to track down the specific cause of the problem and we have enough projects lined up over here to keep us from digging through the WordPress code ourselves to solve it in any reasonable time. So we’ve opened up a ticket in WordPress’ bug tracker that outlines the problem in more detail and continue to wait for a response from someone on the dev team to let us know what might be the culprit.

In the meantime, the fear of not knowing if your post would be lost when saved forced us to saving the content to notepad before publishing. This is a less than useful solution to the problem because even doing this it seems that once a post starts truncating itself upon saving, it continues to do it every time. The only solution is to delete it and start anew. [We're noticing the problem crops up most often when another user edits an entry not their own. It truncates the post arbitrarily and then proceeds to reject contributions to that post past the truncated length. Needless to say, the frequency and creativity of expletives uttered in the office has spiked dramatically.—Ed]

So today, I took some time to hunt down remote posting solutions that allowed us to save our posts without needing to log in to WordPress directly. ScribeFire was the first solution I tried and has turned out to be an incredibly useful tool. ScribeFire is a FireFox extension that allows us to create posts directly in FireFox and saves them to our blog via the WordPress API.

There is still some functionality lacking: the ability to change post author, adding excerpts and making use of some of the plugins that modified our post entry page to name a few. But we see their release schedule to be rather efficient and hope to request some features that make it into the next release (or until WordPress identifies the problem that forced us to this solution in the first place). [It should also be noted that the extension on the whole is rather impressive considering that it's blog-engine agnostic and works for many different providers.—Ed]

Popularity: 2% [?]

Tagged with: bugs, extension, firefox, projects, wordpress

Posted in: Rants

We are pleased to announce that we have recently added a new programmer, Brandon Ching, to our company. This will be his first full week (he actually started last Thursday). He recently relocated from California to pursue his PhD at Arizona State University. I’ll leave it to Brandon to tell you more about himself in his introduction posting.

We look forward to adding Brandon’s expertise to our group and are excited for his input on our various projects. We currently have him working on a few of our e-commerce client websites that we will be migrating from various platforms onto the Magento e-commerce solution.

On behalf of everyone at Synapse Studios, welcome Brandon!

Popularity: 2% [?]

Tagged with: company news, e-commerce, magento, new hire, projects, websites

Posted in: People

My name is Bob Eagan and I am one of the owners of this little web company we call Synapse Studios. Since starting this venture back in 2003 I have seen my involvement in writing code diminish as I moved more and more into the project manager role.

My primary contributions to the blog will likely come in the form of advice about how we have overcome the problems, obstacles and hurdles that face most start-ups. We have made our share of mistakes along the way but all in all, we continue moving forward each year. This one is working on being the best yet.

Popularity: 2% [?]

Tagged with: introductions

Posted in: People