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Hover Effects in JavaScript?

One of the things that can be annoying when looking at someone else’s code is when a more complex technology is used to solve a problem that can be handled more simply with another method.

An example of this is when you utilize JavaScript to implement a hover effect on some elements. I know of one scenario when you would need JavaScript to trigger a hover effect, and that would be when you want to trigger the hover effect with a touch event. However, in this case, the elements that would be affected by this hover effect are hidden on any mobile device, so the touch events would be unneeded for this hover effect.

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JavaScript Templating

Many times it becomes useful to be able to make an AJAX request for some data, insert it into some HTML that is already on the client, and then display it to the user. There are a few ways to implement this, each approach has its benefits and drawbacks.

String Concatenation

Possibly the simplest way to accomplish the templating in JavaScript is to use simple string concatenation with ‘+’. This is the approach that I see many newcomers to JavaScript use in their code, as it is the simplest to implement. However, it does have a major drawback in that this method has the worst performance of all, especially in older versions of Internet Explorer. This could be implemented as below:

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Login Problems with Magento and Varnish

When you have a Magento website configured to use Varnish as a caching frontend, there are certain scenarios where you may have some problems logging-in to the frontend of the website. It poses some unique problems that are not frequently seen on a typical website. This issue typically manifests itself to the end user by visiting the login page, entering the correct credential, submitting the form, and then the page reloads the login page again instead of redirecting to the My Account page or whatever page is specified in the configuration.

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301 Redirecting in Varnish

In Magento, you can set your secure and non-secure URLs explicitly. This works as expected in most cases, but can cause some issues when you have to specify full URLs or need to make any AJAX requests. When using the Nexcess Turpentine extension to enable Magento and Varnish to work together and you wish to only support traffic at www.example.com and not example.com, you would need to enable the setting in the Turpentine module to normalize the host.

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Launching a Redesign of a Website

Over the last few months, I have been working on a major redesign of an existing Magento website. One of the major goals of the redesign was to take a legacy desktop-only website and upgrade it to take full advantage of Responsive Web Design so that customers could equally utilize mobile and desktop devices to browse and purchase products.

For a site that had seen only minor updates over the last 5 years, this redesign represented a major change visually and navigationally from the previous site. Based on the history of the site, the development team was optimistic that the redesign would be well-received, but were suprised by a few things that came up in the feedback we saw.

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jQuery.hover Issues in Internet Explorer on Windows 7

When creating a new mega-dropdown menu for a site I was working on, I used jQuery’s .hover event to trigger which content the menu was displayed. This seemed to work as expected in most browsers that I tested in, except for one, Internet Explorer. Unfortunately, it wasn’t even in every instance of Internet Explorer.

Windows 7

After Windows Vista came out as one of the biggest duds that the world has ever seen, Windows 7 was a ringing success. Windows 7 is an extremely functional and useful Operating System in the vein of Windows XP, but during testing of this website, we found one troubling issue with every version of Internet Explorer we installed on it. When you hovered over the menu and triggered the jQuery.hover() event, Internet Explorer seemingly locked-up for a few seconds, making the entire browser unresponsive. In a stroke of strange luck, I was unable to reproduce this functionality in Internet Explorer on Windows 8 or 8.1, so this is something that only affects the older operating systems. The fix is to replace jQuery.hover() with jQuery(document).on(“mouseenter”) and call the appropriate function as well.

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Magento FrontName Naming and SSL/HTTPS

One of the things that has always been an issue for sites that are based on Magento is that they are slow. Well, to be fair, sites using Magento Enterprise Edition that take advantage of the built-in full-page caching functionality seem to have decent page load times. One way to take care of this slow load time issue is to utilize a third-party full-page caching solution such as what Varnish provides.

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Magento Cache with Cache Disabled

One of the things that I find quite annoying with a web platform is when you configure it to do one thing, and it does something different. Magento is an eCommerce software platform that many of the leading eCommerce websites use for their web stores.

Magento

Magento comes in two different flavors, a paid enterprise edition as well as a open-source community edition. The enterprise edition allows you to utilize the built-in full-page caching mechanism, while the community edition does not include a full-page caching solution.

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Welcome to The Geek Speaks

  • One minute - Mar 24, 2014

Way back in August, 2012, Scott Hanselman had a great post about how our keystrokes are wasted by blogging/writing for another company or any locations where you don’t control your own content.

All that time ago, that post inspired me to put more effort into writing on this blog, however, life got in the way, and I never really was able to get started blogging. Not to mention, that I really don’t like using WordPress for hosting my blog, as it seems to be quite the target hackers looking to hack into systems.

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