Blog
Search engine crawler bots feeding frenzy
Posted by Paul Sturgess on February 19, 2010
One of the darker sides of web development is down time. The site owners don’t want it, the site developers don’t want it and most importantly the site users don’t want it. Unfortunately, however, it will happen. This is not a defeatist view or an excuse, it’s realistic.
An experienced software development team will know this and rather than bury their heads in the sand, they will be well prepared to deal with the consequences. It’s all about having the problem solving skills, tools and the right approach to solving the root cause of the problem.
Outside the office
Posted by Joel Richards on February 17, 2010
Recently some of us from Kyan have been heading to Craggy Island indoor climbing centre after work for a bit of social exertion.
Pictured below, Gav & Phil tackling a couple of the variety of routes of the evening.
As unfortunately there’s no pub at the top of the walls, which could provide a good incentive for completion.. we usually end up down the road at The Drummond for a pie & a pint (if they’re on the menu).
Better sanity checking in Rails
Posted by Gareth Adams on February 12, 2010
When you’re building a web application, Rails does a load of the heavy lifting for you. Many of the core philosophies of Rails are aimed around only implementing functionality in the place it makes sense.
This turns out to be a great idea for readability, and with practice – and thoughtful naming – it isn’t too difficult to keep your code clean enough that you can see at a glance what it does. You can get to the point where your controller code just gives a high-level overview of what the code does, and leaves all the details to the models and other modules.
Lots of the tools in a Rails developer’s toolbox are commonly known, but there are a couple of useful ones that are newer and haven’t been picked up on as much.
A tasty new client for Kyan
Posted by Gavin Shinfield on February 11, 2010
We are pleased to announce that we will be working with local firm Squires Group on their International Kitchen Schools website.
Squires are a forward-thinking company with a great understanding of how the Web can compliment and augment traditional marketing channels as well as streamline internal business processes. We look forward to working together on this and hopefully several other upcoming projects.
Kyan vs. HTML5, round 2
Posted by Robin Whittleton on February 04, 2010
Back in October I posted an article on our first steps with HTML5. Unfortunately, since then we’ve tripped over a rather large stumbling block.
That article dealt with the reworking of our intranet. Luckily for me as a front-end developer no-one in the company uses Internet Explorer; this isn’t the case in the wider world. IE has problems with the new HTML5 elements: it can’t style them at all. There is a a solution though (courtesy of Sjoerd Visscher): create each element once using Javascript and IE suddenly understands that they exist. On the whole this is a very good solution, undercut by one fatal flaw.
Print stylesheets
At Kyan we view a print stylesheet as a common courtesy to users. With it we can strip out headers and footers and just leave the page content. While printing though (for obvious reasons) Javascript isn’t executed. This breaks our html5shiv script and means that the new elements are unstylable in all current versions of IE.
The workaround is to wrap all the new elements in wrapper <div>s and style those instead, but then you’re increasing the amount of markup compared to current HTML4 or XHTML1, and for the time being this isn’t really a tradeoff worth making. Of course, with the gradual reduction of IE in the marketplace this tradeoff is something we should keep on evaluating.