ShooFlyBuzz

Welcome to ShooFlyBuzz, the company weblog. We use this space to talk about what’s happening with ShooFly, but more generally to talk about web design, the challenges we encounter, the tools we use, websites we like, and provide some training on the care and feeding of your own website.

If you want to send in feedback, leave a comment, send an email, or tweet @shooflydesign.

I've been working on a single page app in React for the past several months, currently in alpha testing. It uses React Router to handle its routing, and is bootstrapped with Create React App, which makes getting started as easy as they tell you.

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Working for years with Drupal's command-line tool drush, and more recently with Laravel's artisan, I've had occasion to interface with Xdebug in my favorite IDE, PhpStorm. Here's how I am currently working with all of these tools together.

Incidentally, if you've never tried a real debugger in your projects, you can check out my talk from WordCamp Orange County, "Let's Debug for Real", which was recorded from the audience, or a higher-fidelity version from a JavaScript perspective, my lynda.com course Debugging the Web: JavaScript.

Here's how this will work: you'll do some initial configuration in PhpStorm and your local web stack, set a breakpoint somewhere in your code, then run your command line script from within PhpStorm. If all goes well, execution will stop at the breakpoint and you'll be off to the debugging races.

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Two of my courses on lynda.com were updated recently, and next week, with a free LinkedIn account, you'll be able to watch them, and the rest of the lynda.com training library, for free! They're running the Week of Learning promotion next week, from October 24 - 30, to promote LinkedIn Learning, which is the entire lynda.com catalog geared toward the LinkedIn audience.

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Learn how to use the command line toolkit Terminus to make deployments of Drupal, WordPress, and Backdrop sites on Pantheon faster and easier.

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I've recently needed to run a Node.js service alongside a Drupal 7 site to allow for a live-chat style of commenting. None of the current ecosystem of Drupal-integrated chat modules looked good for this particular website, but by greatly simplifying the comments UI and displaying it alongside a live video broadcast, we got something pretty good.

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A debugger is essential for helping understand how code works. In my lynda.com course Debugging The Web: JavaScript, I go over the essential parts of learning how to use one. These concepts are the same across pretty much all debuggers in common use, but there are also different helpful options available in each one that can be helpful.

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Apache .conf files only really support single-line comments, starting with the pound sign (#). I came up with a silly hack for multi-line comments that seems to work, so I'm putting it out there either to help other people, or be brutally taken down by people who are more savvy than I am.

Basically, make up a non-existent runtime variable and use it in an <IfDefine> block. Because the variable doesn't exist, nothing between the tags should be executed. So for example:

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I haven't upgraded to El Capitan, and may not for a while, but the latest version of Safari is 9.0, and is available for OS X Mavericks, aka 10.9. I upgraded to stay current with the security fixes, and have been pleasantly surprised to see a much improved Web Inspector.

The web inspector in Safari 9

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Chrome and Firefox are probably the gold standard for friendly web developer tools, but I still use Safari all the time. It's the best option for debugging sites on iOS using the remote debugging features. You open your site in Safari running in the iOS simulator, and in the Develop menu, like this:

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This was a very busy weekend. I spoke at WordCamp Orange County on how to use a debugger, and it went well. If you were there, or if you're just interested, you can view the slides here, and fork them on GitHub.

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