Cetrasoft Blog

Quick SEO Recap: Image, Link, Title, and Alt

Just refreshing myself on some SEO duhs this morning:

• The alt attribute can be used to describe images, not links (where it would be invalid).
• The alt attribute can be used by search engines as a source of content.
• The title attribute can be used to provide information on where a link is going.
• The title attribute can be used to provide additional information for images.
• The title attribute is not so much used by search engines as a source of content, if at all.
• You should include your main words in both of them, but beware of keyword stuffing.
• Use descriptive image filenames in combination with descriptive image alt text.

letuboy:

I’m going to go on a little rant here about something that deeply annoys me. The term “Ninja Programmer”. That term denotes a programmer who can seemingly work wonders behind his/her keyboard. Simply hitting a few keystrokes, and something functional appears quickly on the screen. It general…

Gotcha while using pjax + ClientSideValidations

If you are using pjax along with ClientSideValidations then you may have noticed that the two don’t seem to play well together. Specifically, if your CSV-enabled form is inside a section of content that gets loaded with pjax then the validations won’t function, even though they work fine if you load the page normally without pjax.

The problem and solution are documented here on the client_side_validations GitHub Issue tracker. In short, the CSV event handlers are bound to the $(document).ready() event, an event which is never called when content is loaded via pjax.

The solution is simple, and just requires hooking into the pjax:end event to manually trigger the CSV initialization. It looks something like this (in CoffeeScript):

$ ->
  $('[data-pjax-container]').live "end.pjax", ->
    $('form[data-validate]').validate();

With that you should be good to go!

Twitter Bootstrap: Comparing Options For Rails

So we’ve jumped on the Bootstrap bandwagon and I do offer my sincerest apologies: it is in fact a great front-end framework: very easy to use, good looking, and well implemented. Recently we needed to figure out what Rails gem we were going to use for TBS integration. Before I give you our notes, you’d do well to take a look at the following resources: the official Batescast (the premium episode is also good, describing SimpleForm integration with TBS, etc.) and this article on TBS gem options. Running through all of this, I wrote up these notes:

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SaaS Development & Design Process

Just wanted to share a rough diagram I made up detailing our rough development and design process for SaaS projects. Just a cute way to organize our thoughts on our own experience and research I suppose!

Cetrasoft SaaS Design & Development Cycle

Thoughtbot’s Playbook: Cliff Notes

I always feel the need to take notes on whatever I’m reading. I feel like if I do so, I can better internalize and understand content by engaging my brain by both reading and writing.

That being said, last night I couldn’t sleep, so I decided to use the early morning hours to go through Thoughtbot’s Playbook, a collection of notes on how to run a web business from a reputable Rails app development company I wish I was as cool as.

If you’re the kind of person intimidated by long reads (I am, ever since I tried to read J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Silmarillion when I was yet a pre-teen, whereupon my eyeballs perished), then you might like my Cliff Notes of Thoughtbot’s Playbook. Although, I’m told it’s really not that long a read, but I may or may not still enjoy picture books. Anyway, here it is for your viewing (dis)pleasure..

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When You Need A Designer And UX Person

Everyone Gets Down Differently

Over the years we’ve toyed with many different design & development workflows.. You know, the so-called stages of development: prototyping, storyboarding, design, development, testing, whatever! There are many similar, but different variations out there. I’m sure you’ve checked out your share of trendy design firm’s “Process” pages. But that’s not to say every design & development workflow should be the same for every team out there— it definitely shouldn’t. Some crews are going to have more of a focus on what their speciality is. For instance, Zurb is heavy on interaction, while Worry Free Labs is pretty design-y, and Thoughtbot rocks code hard. Having substantial familiarity with these shops will show you this, but it’s also pretty easy to tell from their site’s overall message. Sorry, I’m the master of tangents— this isn’t an article about marketing.

Despite these differences, there’s one thing that we think should remain constant: the realization that, in the end, everyone would probably do well to have everything (more or less) happen at around the same time, collaboratively and super iteratively. Yeah I’ve heard of the Agile thing, thanks (and I’m sure this is exactly where this is all going, but hear me out).

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Chargify’s Customer Support

Chargify is a fully-featured recurring billing management system for software-as-a-service applications that allows for easy integration with your application via API. It also has hosted pages if you want to go the less custom, but easier route. Before I go into rage mode, I will say that Chargify is a very cool product with generally excellent tools and API documentation for we developers.

This article isn’t really about Chargify and what it offers, but rather a short anecdote from my experiences with their customer support. Customer support for a service like Chargify is important, since it is the medium through which your customers get billed and through which you get paid.

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Twitter Bootstrap (and other CSS prototype frameworks): the good, the bad, and the ugly

CSS prototyping frameworks are convenient tools that can give your app cool “out-of-the-box” (and consistent) visual elements and styling (and in some cases interactivity too).

Twitter Bootstrap, one of these CSS prototyping frameworks, is all the rage now, as you probably know. It’s heavily marketed by Twitter to developers, trendy, cool, and hip. I was first introduced to it while looking for a quick way to get some styling for a prototype. Among its “competitors” are Zurb Foundation (which by the way we ended up using for that prototype). Why? Well Twitter Bootstrap seemed to be a little too invasive into our HTML— meaning that often our HTML had to have a certain structure to accommodate Bootstrap. We thought Foundation was a little bit cleaner (and less bloated) on the code end of things. But ANYWAY…

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How to order an ActiveRecord model with null values

Have you ever wanted to order an ActiveRecord model based on a column that is allowed to have null values? A typical example is a blog with a Post model that has a published_at date which is null when the Post has not been published yet. Let’s assume our goal is to sort these records such that we have all unpublished Posts first followed published ones in descending order of the published date.

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