Tag Archives: Software Sagacity

Elements of an Enterprise-Grade Web Framework – Part 2: Existing Database Schemas

July 28, 2014 Andrew Palczewski 1 Comment

A powerful database schema is one of the key components of an enterprise application. Using the database to enforce business logic and ensure data integrity enables both flexibility and scalability in application design. By coding business logic in both the database layer and application layer, the database has the flexibility to then also be used by other applications and processes without fear of corrupting data. In addition, other systems can take advantage of stored procedures or views that make future development easier, instead of the platform lock-in created by storing all business logic in the application itself.
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WordPress Shopping Cart – How to Use Custom Meta Variables

June 30, 2014 Andrew Palczewski Leave a comment

While the WordPress Shopping Cart plugin is far from a comprehensive online store, it still provides an easy and cheap way to sell products online. Although the stock implementation might work well for a simple product catalog, many users will need to customize the product listing based on product settings. In order to accomplish this, the cart as a feature called “Custom Meta” variables; we will explore how to use these variables to change the way products are displayed.
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CSS Absolutely Relative Positioning

June 18, 2014 Andrew Palczewski 1 Comment

When web designers code a site’s HTML and CSS, the built-in methods for positioning elements on the screen are “absolute”, “fixed” and “relative” positioning. Each method provides its distinct set of advantages and drawbacks, however there are times when a layout requires the best of all worlds. In order to handle these cases, a very useful hybrid technique is available, dubbed absolutely relative positioning.
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PHP Form Sniffing – Full GET and POST Variable Simulation

June 4, 2014 Andrew Palczewski 2 Comments

When developing web applications, it is sometimes necessary to capture and replicate a particular request in order to debug and fix a problem. This is especially true when integrating with third-party applications, where it can be challenging and time-consuming to reproduce a specific scenario. If the errors are sporadic, capturing all relevant data to a file will allow the developer to review the log afterward to match the incident time with the suspect form parameters.
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PayPal IPN Integration – SSL Connection Reset By Peer

June 3, 2014 Andrew Palczewski 2 Comments

When integrating PayPal payment processing into a web application, one of the common errors is “SSL: Connection Reset By Peer.” This cryptic error message can be challenging to fix without the correct set of headers.
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Encrypting Passwords for the Web

May 23, 2014 Andrew Palczewski 1 Comment

ASP.NET, PHP, and most web platforms offer a variety of techniques for data encryption, ranging from simple hashing to fully reversible encryption algorithms. Developers will need to choose the algorithm that offers the most security possible, while sacrificing the least amount of capability.
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Highlight Table Rows using Javascript

May 20, 2014 Andrew Palczewski 1 Comment

When developing web applications with wide tables, it’s often difficult to scroll horizontally and see which row corresponds to which data. This is why most apps limit the width of any table to the width of the page. Still, at times it is necessary to show a large amount of data in a tabular format. This JavaScript scriplet will help add highlight functionality to any HTML table.
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Search Engine Challenges – Scanning the Deep Web

April 16, 2014 Andrew Palczewski Leave a comment

During undergrad at Urbana-Champaign, one of the hot topics for search engine scientists was the “Deep Web”. While most of the web was easily accessible through HTML, a large portion of the dynamically generated content, such as PHP and ASP pages, could not be indexed by search engines.
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WordPress Development Tricks – Independent Blogs per Category

April 11, 2014 Andrew Palczewski 2 Comments

With its extreme flexibility and proven prowess as a publishing platform, WordPress has become an invaluable tool in the arsenal of most web developers. However, advanced customization is often cumbersome and can be difficult to achieve.

Having spent several hours the past two days fighting against WordPress’ limited support for splitting blogs by category, I’m sharing a few of the insights gained during the arduous process.
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