The VP Geek Speaks

Social-Buttons.Com Spams Google Analytics

Typically when you see traffic in Google Analytics, you can be sure that it is legitimate traffic to your website. However, there are a few known spammers out there that successfully spam Google Analytics tracking codes with bogus visits, hoping that the Analytics users visit the site that is supposedly “referring” traffic. One such domain that is being used for this is Social-Buttons.com.

I have just begun to see traffic in Google Analytics from Social-Buttons.com in the middle part of March 2015, and if you look at the Google Trends statistics for search terms of Social-Buttons.com, you can see that there is a spike in searches for Social-Buttons.com in March 2015 from a baseline of 0 searches prior to March 2015.

Using The Ampersand With Compass

While much of working with Compass to generate the CSS for your site is straightforward, there are a few ways to use Compass the provide great power, but are not as easy to understand at first glance. This article discusses one such way, hopefully making it easier to understand.

The operator that we will be looking at first is the & operator. The & as part of a selector in Compass allows you to take the entire selector string at a higher nesting level than the & currently resides upon, and replace the & with that selector string. Typically, when this precedes a selector with a space between the & and the selector, it would operate normally as if the & were not present. However, if you remove the space, it allows you to select elements with multiple classes assigned to them as part of a single selector token.

Compass Makes Writing CSS Fun Again

One of the things that has always annoyed me about web development is that writing CSS generally becomes a task that has a major lack of the features that you would expect in a programming language, even one as simple as JavaScript. These features that would be wonderful to have when working with CSS are the ability to use variables to define a set of basic colors that are in use across the site in one place, and then use the variable name throughout the stylesheet.

Optimize Wide To Narrow

If you consider the path that a user takes through your website from landing page to successful conversion, you can think of the number of users that make it to each point along the way to a successful conversion as similarly shaped to that of a funnel. In a typical setup, you may have a very small percentage of your users make it to a successful conversion, but there are several areas along the way that either improve the chances the user will convert or decrease those chances.

2 Ways To Find Current Directory in PHP Without Regular Expressions

There comes a time when you need to find the current directory in PHP, test to see if it is the directory that you expect it is, and take an action based on the test results. Obviously, the easiest way to get the current working directory in PHP is getcwd(). However, parsing the output of this function can provide some interesting challenges.

While it is trivial to do this sort of search with a Regular Expression, I tend to look for a solution that is easier to understand its functionality without reaching for the reference books. As a result, I would typically use one of the two methods below. One thing to note is that in each scenarion, any directory name in the path will match, not just the current directory. This can be easily updated to only match the single current directory the script is executed from.

Another Micro-Optimization Provides Useless Results

One of the things to remember about performance optimizations performed in isolation is that their results are rarely representative of real-world performance results. This article outlines the “findings” of the students at a couple of Canadian universities, and comes to the conclusion that string concatenation in memory is slower than writing the same total number of bytes to disk, one after the other.

String concatenation is a slow and CPU-heavy operation. It drastically affects Micro-Optimization testing when both algorithms do not utilize it.

#javascript #python #web-development

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Verify Magento User Access to Admin Functionality

When working with Magento, there will inevitably come a time where you need to manually check to see if the currently logged-in user has access to a specific piece of functionality as defined in the ACL settings. Personally, I have come across this situation more often when creating my own custom modules and their custom permissions, but they can be used to check the permissions of any module.

As is so often the case, Alan Storm has documented the exact solution for this scenario. Lets say that your ACL configuration is setup as it is below…

Laravel Removed The QuickStart For Version 5

To start out, I want to be clear that what follows should not be interpreted to be a criticism of the software framework that those that work on Laravel publish, nor an indictment of open-source software as a whole. Rather, it is a look at how some projects, open or closed source make it harder than it should be for new users/developers to utilize their terrific products.

It seems experts conveniently “forget” the tips and tricks and tribulations it takes to learn a new technology, covering it all with, “It’s just so easy”.

#magento #web-development #php

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Google Chrome Improves JavaScript Speeds Again

One of the old rules of optimizing website load times for all browsers was that the browser didn’t begin to parse the downloaded JavaScript until each file was downloaded. Starting with Chrome 41, Google has announced that this is no longer the case.

In this announcement, Google has said that new versions of Chrome will begin parsing JavaScript as it is downloaded to the browser, even before the particular file’s download is complete. However, in order to see this happen more quickly, you must utilize the async or deferred tags in the <script> tag. JavaScript that is loaded without async or deferred is still a completely blocking action that pauses all rendering while downloading and parsing the JavaScript files. According to Google, this can improve website load time by up to 10%.

Google To Begin Rewarding Mobile-Friendly Websites

Google recently announced that beginning April 21, 2015, they would start slightly rewarding websites that are mobile-friendly at the expense of sites that are not. There are several things that Google looks at to determine whether or not a site is easy for a user on a mobile device to view and navigate. Some of the things that Google looks for include the following:

1. Fonts that are big enough to be legible
2. Users don’t have to scroll left and right to see content
3. Links are big enough and have enough space around them to be clickable with a touch of a finger.
4. Avoids technologies that are not present on mobile devices, like Flash.

If you make sure that you follow the above guidelines, your site will be prepared for the upcoming change in Google’s search results. To find out more, check out Google’s blog post.